I was looking at the university web page that displays a list of the students registered for a course that I am teaching. Thinking that there might be something to find out about how to download or print this list, I clicked where it said "Help". A little box opened, and here is what it said:
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Summary Class List
This list provides instructors with a detailed list of students who are registered for a specified course and term. The students can be ordered by registration sequence number (the order by which they registered for the course) or alphabetical order, depending on whether or not a registration process has been run by your Registrar's Office. If a student is deceased, the word Deceased will display next to the name. Choose CRN Selection to view information about a different course. Select Term Selection to view information about a different term. Choose a link to navigate to other pages.
Exit Help
A Salt Hygrometer
19 hours ago
17 comments:
It's odd that the student is still listed at all, though "deceased". That suggests that other useful status information could reasonably be expected, for instance "dropped out", "expects fair treatment", "is under suspicion of maintaining terrorist connections", "has proved that ZFC is inconsistent".
Maybe the point is that this could be useful explanatory information regarding a student who seems particularly unattentative or unresponsive in the classroom.
What is the advised procedure for dealing with such a situation ? It might not be a good idea to check for yourself, thus risking a charge of sexual harassment or Leichenfledderei.
Mind you, it goes both ways. The other day I dozed off for a moment while (as I later expressed it my wife) watching a graduate student think.
Gosh, what a risky occupation you have ! Students should be accompanied by a package leaflet, with a warning not to teach while watching them think. Otherwise you might fall off your Lehrstuhl.
I was not precisely teaching. I was in my office, slouching in a swivel chair. We were both staring at the chalkboard and he was trying to salvage an unsuccessful plan for proving something.
I thought the word Leichenfledderei would be to your liking. Did you find out what it means ? I can't think of one or two words in English to render it, only a long explanation.
Thank you for the word. No, I can't quite make out what it means. Stealing from the dead? Stealing dead bodies? Desecration of corpses? Figuratively, treating the dead with disrespect?
There seem to be other kinds of Fledderei, too. Was Leichen- the first to be so called?
Stealing from the dead whatever valuables, reusable clothes etc. they may have on their persons. Duden says it's a legal term. The word fleddern is older, but extremely rare.
It says here that it's a 20th-century word, and it also says (in a quote) that Paracelsus was "einer der vehementesten Verfechter der Leichenfledderei".
A student fell asleep in my undergraduate topology class today, but she regained consciousness before the end of the period.
It would surprise me that it's a 20th century word, but I have to admit that I can't find Leichenfledderei in Grimm, and not even fleddern.
The WiPe link in the Wiktionary is spurious, since the WiPe currently contains nothing about Leichenfledderei.
The sentence about Paracelsus comes from an interesting Spiegel article last year about various traditions, in Europe for one up until the 17th century, of treating and preventing ailments with various preparations from dead people - liquified brain etc. Leichenfledderei in the article is used to refer to the removal of body parts, not of possessions on a body.
It wouldn't surprise me to find the word also used in the 17th century in Germany to describe what doctors did to acquire material for anatomical studies. That is assuming that there was the same general outcry about such activites as there was in England. The word may at least have appeared in reports on the English phenomena.
Masybe I'll be better at math after I'm dead.
...Oh, yes, they give exit help too. It's a very progressive school, isn't it?
This conversation reminds me a little of the scene in Douglas Adams's The Restaurant at the end of the Universe where Ford Prefect meets an acquaintance who, according to his bodyguard, is "spending the year dead for tax reasons".
Death & taxes.
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