Two years ago at about this time, some FSP readers submitted entries to the Statement of Purpose (SoP) contest. Last year, we did a Letter of Reference (LoR) contest. What shall it be this year?
I have contemplated various archetypal academic texts as the theme of the 2010 contest, but I eventually settled on this:
Write an e-mail message from a student to a professor explaining why you (the student) missed the final exam.
Although we all love and respect our students and appreciate the complexity of their lives, feel free to go a little crazy, make this a cathartic experience (if you need one), and convince me that there is or was no way you could make it to the final exam (but you need to pass this class and maybe even get an A).
It might be interesting if contest submissions are a mix of real e-mails and fabricated e-mails. I wonder if we will be able to tell the difference?
Send your submission to femalescienceprofessor@gmail.com, or leave it as a comment to this post and I will save it for when I post some or all of the results.
I am going to go on a blog-break next week, starting maybe Wednesday, but if you send me your submissions by Monday or Tuesday (12/21), I will try to get them compiled before I go off the grid.