I will help anyone, but I will not join an illusion.
Illusion: The course Madame is taking with me, she failed with someone else, who discovered late in the semester, as I have just done, that the reason she needs so much tutoring and seems so incapable is that she has refused to take the prerequisites for the course, and yet has been allowed by minions of the Dean to be in it.
The reason she will not take the prerequisites is that she wishes to graduate at a certain time and must therefore start at the sophomore, not the freshman level. The reason she needs a C and not a D in this course, which she is now about to fail for the second time running, is that she wishes to certify to teach this subject at the secondary level.
That is what I mean by an illusion. I do not appreciate having been lied to about her preparation. I strongly suggested this student repeat the freshman courses I had been told she passed, and I have strongly suggested tutoring beyond what I can do since the beginning of the semester. All the while, she was trying to hijack me into an illusion.
And she must know that even if we hand out free C’s in all the courses she needs to certify, she will still have to take the PRAXIS examination and be interviewed for jobs. I will help anyone, but I will not join an illusion.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Amazing how well those sorts of people can get by, though. They can often emotionally blackmail their way through all sorts of systems. That is why we need a society based less on feeling and based more on rationality. Let us return to this gold standard. Here is something I wrote on the secular party list:
—
> The major block to society becoming more rational (and in a sense more
> secular) is, to my mind, the idea that we have already achieved the social
> basis for individualistic freedom, and that (reasoning backwards from this
> conclusion) whatever anybody is doing, they must be doing because they
> “chose” to. To my mind, we are a very, very long way away being able to
> draw such conclusions in a valid way.
>
> My own experience tells me that powerful people (parents and employers)
> have powerful means for almost annihilating one’s individual freedom. If
> for instance the boss is disappointed that the person he hired, being
> female, nonetheless lacks many of the ideal feminine attributes that his
> myth-infested mind suggested would be automatically a part of any female’s
> mindset, he can start to take revenge. He uses various tactics such as
> micro-management, threats, the use of other employees and spies, as well
> as feeding the rumour mill with various ideas in order to put pressure on
> that employee to conform with greater and greater degrees of subservience
> to his ideals.
>
> Bosses are powerful people in this way, and especially because in a
> bourgeois society so much depends on ‘image’ rather than reality. So, the
> boss creates a negative image of a particular employee, and because he
> still has so much authority in everybody’s minds, there are few who won’t
> believe it henceforth.
>
> This kind of thing relates to, of course, issues of individual freedom —
> character assassination and the like. But the point is that whilst the
> values of most of society are led along a kind of mythopoetic drift –the
> idea that authorities are always right, and that males are in general more
> rational than females, and so on — one cannot fight back on the basis of
> character assassination. The problem is this: If, for the majority, the
> nature of females (and employees) is relatively hysterical or irrational
> anyway, then such a person suffers no great loss in being treated in this
> way (in having their character assassinated). After all, women and
> employees generally — it is considered — don’t have much of a
> personality that you could assassinate anyways. They are there for the
> taking — broken fodder for the mills of industry!
>
> So the base levels of society’s values are a problem for being able to
> fight for individual freedom.
Good for you. I’m know there is a saying, but I cannot think of one now. Something I’m sure that means something like “you will thank me later”……..
When I was teaching at a community college a few years ago, I wound up having a number of students at one point or another who took a gateway course to get into their field under me after already failing or doing poorly in the same course with someone else. I was unsuccessful in getting any of them to do more than sit in the class taking notes and then take the exams.
None of them seemed to grasp the nature of their situation. None of them were willing to engage in a real conversation about what it would take to change the outcome. All of them seemed convinced that they could eventually succeed if they just kept going through the process over and over. And none of them got the necessary A. I hated it.
Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever had a student re-taking that class for an A who actually got one. They were in la-la land, while I spent the whole semester trying to ignore the awkwardness of the situation.
Yes, emotional blackmail is the word. She may or may not thank me later, but it is what I am saying.
“None of them seemed to grasp the nature of their situation. None of them were willing to engage in a real conversation about what it would take to change the outcome. All of them seemed convinced that they could eventually succeed if they just kept going through the process over and over.”
This is what I find so surrealistic about it.
You know, too many students are not educated to the ways of the academy. They do not realize that the minute they get into trouble they need to go to their professors and advisors and get the information they need to correct their negative situation.
I went from being a flop as a student to a star, once I figured that little thing out. I was wondering: Are you teaching Spanish language courses to underqualified students? Do you have prerequisites? Or is this comp lit where they don’t need to know the language?
I’m teaching both. There are prerequisites but all you need is a D in them, and many took the prerequisites five years ago or so, so that they have forgotten what little they learned in them but are officially qualified to be in these courses.
These people do come for help – constantly. It is just that they do not want academic help. They want to be excused from work or have requirements made eaiser. One just came to say that on the final she would not be able to write 150 words in 30 minutes on a prepared topic, it would be too much, five words per minute.