In Defense of Unicorn Girl

After reading some of the responses to my original post on Unicorn Girl, I did a wee bit of undergrad-style research (that is, I typed my topic into google). I found that there is, in reality, a cave painting that is referred to as a unicorn--even though in the photo that I saw of it, it clearly has two horns. There is also an extinct species of rhinoceros that has "Unicorn" in its Latin name; it apparently had a single horn (although the horn is not preserved in the fossil record), and it's believed that myths about unicorns may be based on this animal. Finally, there was a scientist in the 1700's who believed that he had found physical evidence of extinct unicorns. So the student in question is still seriously confused, but not quite as badly as I thought she was. I can see how she found much-diluted and corrupted accounts of these facts, perhaps on some sort of message board for people who believe that unicorns are real, and conflated them into recent scientific evidence of real unicorns. It's possible she is not crazy, just not very good at telling reliable sources from unreliable ones.

On the other hand, apparently the draft she brought to peer review was about different kinds of magic and how dragons only speak mind-to-mind with people who are pure of heart. Her classmates apparently convinced her to dial down the crazy a bit. I remain slightly boggled by the idea of a college student who things unicorns and telepathic dragons are an appropriate paper topic, but I'm guardedly optimistic that she's not completely off her rocker.

In other news, I have a student in the Lit. class who, upon having her single response paper (she should have written two by now) returned with a low grade for being late, and a comment that she was one response paper behind, told me that she had, in fact, done the first one. You see, she left it on her desk in the classroom when the class ended. She assumed I had it, even though when I returned her classmates' work, she didn't get it back. Is there anyone in the world who thinks that leaving work on a student desk in the classroom constitutes "turning in" said work? Is she really that dumb, or does she just think I am? She produced a "second copy" of the paper, which I didn't accept because my firm policy is that response papers have to be turned in on the day we discuss the text that it's responding to--the whole point of them is to ensure that students show up to class with things to say about the reading assignment, so if students go home and write them after the discussion, their purpose isn't being served. The student just said, "Oh, okay," and left, but I forsee further difficulties once she's had a chance to come up with what she thinks is a compelling counterargument. I mean, she did have it on the day! It's not her fault I didn't inspect every random piece of paper left in my classroom, on the off chance that it might be somebody's homework!

I plan to stand firm--they're supposed to do seven response papers; missing one is not going to torpedo her grade, as long as she writes the rest of them on time.