You also claimed that students typically don't come to your office until the end of the school year to beg for a better grade. But the new school year just started, presumably, so again how did the issue of ACORN come up with your students if you weren't talking about the issue during your Spanish class?
Does begging you typically result in you providing the student with a better grade?
My SPANISH students did not hear about jobs, such as ACORN and others offered in class. The students that tended to appear were foreign students and others, and they came to the Foreign Student Advisor's Office, where I filled in while she was elsewhere. On maybe two occasions, a student in my class asked about getting them a job, and I told them to come see me at the foreign student office, where I did my office hours twice a week.
I treated each and every student exactly the same. Grades were the average of tests, homework, class participation and the final exam. I figured it out with a program called Gradebook. I gave out grades every other Friday, then posted them, listed by student number, on my office door. A 79.5 was rounded to an 80 and got a B-. A 79.4 rounded to a 79 and got a C+. Anyone who came to my office got tutored in whatever they were missing.
In thirty-two years, no one ever complained to the Grade Dispute Committee, on which I served for the last ten years, because that way it avoided complaints of impropriety, and since the other members were chosen because they also had no disputes, none of us ever had to recuse ourselves from the hearings.
When begged, I would smile and say, "no, it doesn't work that way. I am not judging you. I know you could do better just like you do, but I am limiting myself to my opinion of your knowledge of Spanish". Very occasionally, they would continue begging and I spoke to them only en español. That worked pretty well.
