I Now we have discovered that the people who normally teach the multisection course I and one other colleague suffered through this semester have secretly rewritten the textbook, to make things more tolerable. They do not teach from it but from their rewritings. These are secret so that we can preserve the illusion of having … More On Impracticality
1. We went to a mandatory meeting to watch a video in preparation for the flu pandemic the University foresees as a distinct possibility. We learned that in a pandemic, supplies and services will be hard to come by. We should always keep two weeks’ worth of food and clean water in our houses. The … More In Ideology
Academia was interesting and pleasant when I was a student. That is how I became a professor. Since then I have wondered why academia is actually so unpleasant and I have come up with several observations and theories. I stand by these theories and by others, including the theory that professors are in a way … More On Academic Misery
Read the call to action from the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and WoC PhD‘s useful post on the latest planned demolitions of public housing in New Orleans. Be there December 10 if you can, donate if you can, but also call your legislators. The call list includes many not from Louisiana. This means that people … More December 10
I I am making grades. I had planned to support a Troop with PTSD by faking him up to a 90 because he really would be in the A- range if it were not for the debilitating effects of PTSD and because he is one of the few people in that class who have an … More Canción en la noche
I am still in shock over the antics of the woman I have been tutoring every morning so she could perhaps pass my course, and who, as I only discovered last week, was having the problems she was having because she had never taken the prerequisites. She was covering this fact up in hopes of … More On Progress to Degree
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 … More Finals
History usually defies measurement and exactitude and a unifying theme or “organizing principle,” and hence it is difficult to define “the biggest themes” in my course. I want to bring into the historical consciousness of my students men and women ordinarily left outside the framework of the American experience, mostly “ordinary” working-class people who did … More Leon Litwack
This evening I have been told two things, to wit: 1. Our students are a disaster area and we should cave to this situation. I disagree. They are a disaster area because they have not been required not to be, or more importantly, because they have not been shown, rather than just told how not … More Five Things
One of my students has written me a two page letter in which he recognizes that he is failing my course and requests a D because he is graduating and needs it. He is unable to earn a D, he says, because the subject is beyond his grasp. This is why he has not prepared … More A Letter
coldhearted scientist وداد 