dog ate my homework. A lame excuse.

Personally, I have never heard this excuse from a student who is unprepared, despite almost twenty years of teaching. Perhaps it's because I deal primarily with adult college students, what do you think? Once someone did claim that his puppy had pulled the plug on his computer, causing their hard disk to crash, which, in turn, destroyed his paper. However, it was told well, so I decided to accept it. I have had several variations on the equally clichéd dead grandmother excuse, though perhaps they really did die. In any case, this desire to blame our stalwart canine friends for our own failings seems to me to be going a bit too far.

This is not to say that dogs never eat homework, just as grandparents do actually die. My wife tells the story of having put together a massive chart of the history of Western Thought, carefully piecing together dot matrix print-outs and then hand writing in connecting lines and text. Red Hen, one of the dogs to whom this set of texts is dedicated, chewed the piece beyond recovery.