Dear Student: Your average is B+ but I have found a way to inflate it to A-. It is entirely clear to me that had you not been having post-Iraq nightmares you would have made a clean A. It is inverisimil to me that the Dean of Students will order me to excuse the absences of a student who has had appendicitis and yet not yours. If I must inflate other grades so as to justify the inflation of yours I do not care.
I do not support what you did to cause you these nightmares and I disagree heartily with your political views but if anyone has a valid excuse for having missed some classes and turned in late homework, you do. My decision is not motivated by anything David Horowitz has said or done but by my academic integrity, putas!
You have to have to fall into the A category because you are one of the few who understood what the course goals were and had the maturity and intellectual independence one would expect of a college student. There are people who will get B’s and who are in fact not quite prepared to graduate from primary school. There are people who will get C’s and whose behavior, attitude, and achievement level would be insufficient for admission to kindergarten. “Keep him in nursery school another year until he settles down and can do a few more things for himself,” the principal would advise.
Those making D and F have insisted to me on more and one occasion that they are mentally deficient: “I am simply unable to grasp this subject, I am unable to learn new words and terminology, I cannot understand why every sentence must contain a conjugated verb, I am a visual learner so I cannot understand what is said in class, I am not a reader so I can only understand things if you say them to me.”
Because that is what D and F students are like, slightly better students must fall into the C and B categories. Although your average is B+ you resemble the A students the most and this is why I am inflating your grade.
Dear Barbara Christian: When I was a T.A. I sent a freshman student to see you about bibliography on Zora Neale Hurston and her contexts. This student did not think a big professor would speak to her. I had never met you but I assured her you would. You did and she was amazed, but pleased. Being a first generation college student she learned as a freshman that she could speak to a big professor and this was very important.
In my current university, far inferior to the one at which you taught, most “big professors,” such as we are, would not speak to a freshman about bibliography, and especially not if a mere T.A. they did not know had sent this freshman to see them. I hope you realize that by acting as you did in this instance you contributed to the education and training of a graduate student you did not even know. I wish I had written this to you before you passed but I am writing it here and now.
Dear Leon Litwack: The freshman course I took from you was the best course I took in college and it required more than I can now require of my graduate students – although it was also the most forgiving course I took in college. I feel I should write you in greater detail on this matter while you are still alive. If you are who you say you are, you will not consider it an odd impulse.
Querido Paulo. Nunca lhe conheci, mas mesmo assim as saudades que tenho são fortes. Muito. Trago muitas saudades. Mesmo. Axé, Paulo.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
ah…….my skins are shedding…
my motives are becoming strange.
I see no better solution than shedding all skins and becoming, or reverting to pure Z.
haha. Good luck with that. Seriously…something is coming not quite “over” me.
“Seriously…something is coming not quite ‘over’ me.”
What/why?
P.S. Should I actually write my ex-history professor? I regret not writing that English professor I never even met, and who is now dead. But I cannot find a non-hokey way to do it. Yet. But: someone who has some sort of grace … unlike my colleagues, my dissertation director, and numerous other callow persons … my feeling is that the non-abusive, non-fake people deserve unexpected recognition from unexpected quarters.
You should never leave anything that you might regret. Write to him.
As for me, I’m formulating new strategies to deal with the next part of my life. The change of government casts a new mood, making this possible.
Good for the new government then!!! 🙂
[And so I’ll write the prof. I really wish I’d written Barbara Christian when she was living.]
I say write as well. One night in a moment of thought I wanted to write a doctor, an intern, I worked with long ago, when I was a mere child (20ish) and he was too. Fresh out of medical school. He was beautiful. Adonis beautiful. Women wanted him, desired him. He was not the man’s man kind of man that women sometimes want, he was a woman’s man (whatever the hell any of that means)! But for some reason he did not have that appeal on me. I saw it and understood where the women were coming from, but I for some reason did not want that from him. Actually, I did not want anything from him. But in the midst of all of this we form a relationship, perhaps it professional. Something weird in a professional environment, believe it or not, and especially weird since he was so obviously my superior in postion. Nevertheless he was always kind, extremely kind, more than kind. He was human. After I thought about it for awhile and thought about everything he would think or could think if I sent a letter to him after all these years thanking him for simply being human, I decided against it. There is something there though, a reflection of the world, my interactions, something, that acting human is such an isolated event that it feels as if I should reward it. I hope his practice is doing well in East Tennessee.
When she was a graduate student in comparative literature at U of Washington, my daughter organized a conference at which Barbara Christian spoke. I had a chance to talk to her afterwards at a get-together at my daughter’s place. I really don’t remember what she said, exactly, but she certainly impressed me. I’m sorry her life was cut short.
One thing I am grateful for was that I was mature enough to appreciate the many wonderful professors I had in graduate school and that they knew I appreciated them.
OK, I wrote him. I said:
Dear Professor X,
I took your [Course Y] in 19xx, one member of a large class. We only spoke once, very briefly, but I enjoyed the course. I am from [your town], I have
three degrees in [my field] from [your university], and I have been a professor of A and B in Louisiana since 19xx.
Your name came up in conversation here last week in the following way: I car pooled with a colleague from History to a Regents meeting, and we discussed our travails with teaching on the way. I heard myself say, “Well, in [your] class, the best course I took in college…” and thus realized that
this is in fact how I now remember it: as the best course I took in college, and also as one of my main reference points on how to approach teaching
undergraduates.
I thought I should tell you this now because there was another professor at your university, one I also barely knew, but from whom I also learned a great deal about how to teach. I always thought I would eventually run into her and let her know this, but she died suddenly in her fifties. I learned from this that one should say things when one thinks of them. So: know that in a roundabout
way, you are helping us teach in fields not your own, 2000+ miles [away from where you are]!
I see you’ve retired this year. Enjoy it!
Cheers,
PZ
What do you think? I think he must get a lot of fan mail, so I was self conscious and did not want to come off as sophomoric.
You should put kisses in it.
Just kidding.
I feel like it, actually, because I am consumed with nostalgia.
Well I would do so if I felt like it.
Just kidding! 😉 But it is true that I am consumed with nostalgia.
Even if it isn’t what it used to be!
LOL! 🙂