Has emailing your instructor letting them know you're dropping their class become the norm? Granted, when I was in school we didn't have email but...we'd just drop the class and not show up the next time. In retrospect, that was kind of a weasely thing to do. LOL.

Stacy-
It's actually too late to drio so the student needs to withdraw and, of course, I need to sign the withdrawal slip. Otherwise, no, I usually don't hear from them!

From what I recall of being an undergraduate, dropping a course often felt sort of odd at first -- something like breaking up with the professor. I always wanted to go talk to them and explain that, no, it wasn't them it was me -- and it wasn't their class, it was just my schedule and I didn't hold any bad feelings and hoped we could still be friends in some other class later on.

I got over that after the first or second drop, of course, but that might be what's going on here.

i've been thinking about writing that same letter for my online class. :)

That's actually a pretty classy drop. No attack of you, no criticism of the class, and she/he puts the responsibility and blame on her/himself, with a clear understanding that he/she is choosing to focus on an activity instead of on a class. Not a bad way to go about writing a drop letter. Much better than "I can't believe how much work you expect, like you don't know that we have other classes and sports, and this isn't even for my major, it's just for fun, and you gave me bad grades, and I'm paying a lot of money to go here, so I need to drop." :) I'll take the first e-mail any day. :)

you know all this time I've never dropped a class...... some of us just suck it up and act adult like... I do agree, it's a classy drop. Heck I'd print that out and file it for the days you need a reprieve from the insulting ones.

I love when they drop - less to grade! :)

As a student, I love when they drop too. Less people to prattle incessantly about their drinking binges while I'm trying to take notes. Less complaining I have to listen. "OMG, like, she expects us to do like homework and doesn't give us credit for it and can you believe how hard her tests are she's such a bitch for thinking we should be doing stupid homework on our free time and I studied for like three hours for that test how could i not get better than a 40 she's so mean."

And I should point out that that three hours was to go over 10 hours of lecture. Yeah, drives me batty too.

I agree with terminaldegree - that IS a classy drop. Then again, maybe I'm just saying that because last week, my department head informed me that one of my students said that he wanted to switch to another instructor's section because "[my] teaching style was not compatible with [his] learning style."

This is the student who, four weeks prior, had boasted to me that he never (never!) does homework. Yeah, that's a learning style that's incompatible with my teaching style.

Ironically, I spent much of last week trying to convince some of my students to drop. I'd much rather a student write me the above email than have them go truant for the rest of the semester after receiving a bad grade or getting overwhelmed by the assignments.

I told my students today that if they had given up regularly attending the class, I'm fine with giving up on them.

I'm always relieved when students drop. I hate giving out low grades.