Right now, his strategy seems to be to use his absolutely shocking lack of awareness to his advantage.

In my last email response, I told him that I didn't think his situation warranted a grade change but that he was free to discuss an appeal with his academic advisor and school administration and that I would happily abide by their decision.

He seems to have taken that as an indication that I absolutely wanted to change his grade but didn't know how. So, he responded with instructions on how to fill out the grade change form. I replied to clarify my position:

a)I don't believe that you deserve a grade change based on the evidence you sent

b)I have bosses. If you think "a" is unfair, take it up with them because I'm not going to change my mind based on your arguments.

For those of you who chimed in and said nice things about being a community college professor and rightfully scorned this doofus - thanks. As most of you (and I have too, explicitly) identified, I'm a huge softy in how I run my class. Until now, I've literally never regretted that. The real world is absolutely brutal, but a community college religion class isn't the real world - and I only get paid to teach people about religion. Life lessons are almost always more work for me.

I can see this spiraling into anti-climax where I just exchange a bunch of emails restating my position and he eventually gives up. It's like playing ping pong with my dad when I was a kid - he knew that I was an uncoordinated little idiot so he just tried to blandly return all of my shots until I screwed something up. Always worked.

I guess the good news is that he seems to have abandoned the tactic of pretending that my email somehow malfunctioned. Hilariously, that doesn't mean fully copping to the sent-an-email-to-myself mistake, but instead he's characterizing it as some sort of mystery. Just not a mystery that's my fault any longer.

So, at the moment this will play out in one of the following ways:

a)He just gives up. He's been incredibly tenacious about emailing me, but not about actually doing anything effective. I can re-state my position over and over again, but I'm not going to fill out grade change paperwork until somebody above me (which is a lot of people as I'm desperately unimportant) tells me that I have to.

b)He gets his shit together to appeal to the correct people and the appeal is either accepted or rejected. I'm actually more indifferent to this than you'd think. The principle that I'm protecting isn't some sense of grade integrity - it's my right to close the book on a class once the semester is completed and not have constantly moving deadlines on grades being due. Grading is the absolute worst, and finishing it each semester feels amazing. Whether he gets a "C" or a "D" is way less important to me than the ability each semester to look at a date and say "that's it. that's the day I'll be done."