April Fools Day, 1999

by ComputerBob

April 1, 1999

One of my Web design courses met for the very first time tonight. With a straight face and in a very solemn mood, I asked the entire class to go to this URL and read the following:

Ten days before the semester started last Fall, I was hired to teach 13 different CIS courses. In that ten days, I picked out textbooks, created syllabi, created course assignments, and lesson plans for all of my courses. Within a week after the semester had started, I had already created this Web site for my students. Last semester, I taught 13 courses - this semester, I'm teaching 15 different courses, plus I'm helping other faculty members with the design of instructional technology. In addition, I have spent hundreds of hours improving this Web site, making it more useful and fun for my students.

So, what kind of gratitude do I get from the college? None. Despite the fact that I requested it over 4 months ago, there still isn't a working server for my students to publish their FrontPage Webs onto. I cannot teach a FrontPage course without a working server, and I believe that it has always been the college's responsibility to provide that kind of service to my students.

Therefore, I am canceling the FrontPage course, in protest for the poor services the college has provided for this course. Unfortunately, the Bookstore is not willing to give you a refund for your textbooks, since they don't know when and if the FrontPage course will ever be offered again.

There's not much I can do about the situation. In order to be fair, I will give everyone in the class who has taken my other Internet courses an "A" for this course, and everyone else will get a "B".

I'm really sorry that we all had to waste our time coming to class tonight.

For those of you who have read this far, I guess the only other thing I can tell you is "this concludes the April Fools part of the course."