Part 3

Progress report on the course:

The good news: the professor has agreed to give me an incomplete grade and write the final exam when I am able to. He is being a bit pissy about me giving him an exact day and time I will write it, which at the moment is a bit impossible. But at least that takes care of one issue.

The semi-good news: he is "considering" marking my late assignments for grades. Which is huge step forward from where he was last week. He is still screwing around with me by not coming to a final decision about it. Which I don't really understand but I am going to chalk up to the fact that he and I seem to be engaged in some weird power struggle. I have already decided that if he refuses, I will follow up with the ombudsman for the student's association and look into filing an official complaint. Because even though our agreement on the extensions was verbal, we did have one.

The nasty part: in order to protect myself should I need to file an official complaint (which I really really don't want to do), I am not going to write my final exam until I know what he has decided about the assignments. Once I write the final exam, I will lose any chance to appeal to the Registrar for a late withdrawal. So progress on the exam front, but we are still stuck on different plains of understanding when it comes to the assignments.

About the disability coordinator, I will say that she did finally step up and talk to the professor on Monday. Her reading of the situation is that it was a big miscommunication. And while I agree to a certain extent that might be the case, I am not really comfortable with that. She is now claiming she never got what turns out to be the key email where I told her I wasn't getting the accomodations I had been approved for. And while that would explain a great deal, it doesn't really explain why she never bothered to answer the 5 or so subsequent emails I sent. Sigh. Although the reality is that what happened isn't really the issue of concern right now. More important is the course grade itself. However I may come back and follow up with what happened because I think I fell through a very large crack here. And I shouldn't have. The school has very clear policies about accomodation for disability. And the fact remains I provided my documentation as required and my needs, which all were very reasonable, were not met. Saying it was merely a miscommuncation seems a cop out.

But all that aside, the disability coordinator did initially agree to set up a meeting for this week between herself, the professor, and me. Which I think would have been a good thing. If for no other reason than to educate them both a bit on why these accomodations are needed if I am going to get through my courses. But with -30 temperatures, I couldn't leave my house. So she phoned him on Monday and at least now we are moving forward with some way to get me through the course. Although he is still being more difficult about it than he really needs to be.

Appealing to the Registrar to give me a late withdrawal is still a possibility. I think I have more than enough email proof that I tried to get myself through the course with virtually no support. And in the end, my spinal cord injury just made it impossible to do on my own. Which just sucks but is reality.

In other news I am still undecided on a Christmas tree. And have done no shopping. Or mailing. I suck.