For nine days I have been under arrest for alleged teaching crimes but now charges have been dropped. Let us see:
1. Holding a review session in which I told a student that in college classes, rote learning was not be sufficient; the examination would ask students to use certain skills and work with certain concepts and facts, not simply to repeat memorized answers. This implied the student was not ready for college which was unkind.
2. Rephrasing a question. It had not been understood the first time so I had rephrased. Thus was it alleged I had unfairly changed the question. My insistence that the same question could be asked in two ways was confusing. My fallback position, that if the student saw the two phrasings as two different questions then he could go ahead and choose to answer just one, compounded the confusion.
3. Adjusting readings and assignments to better fit actual skill level of students, thereby reducing the total amount of work for them. This was a change so it was “confusing.”
4. Without my knowledge (this is legal here), a fragmentary recording of me talking in class was made. It was decided that a secondary or tertiary point I had made in answer to a question was the main answer. The main answer had been given several times and also written down, but the fact that it had been commented upon and contextualized was confusing.
5. I do not only want the students to know facts, I want them to know why these facts matter, or why any particular fact has been emphasized in the context of our topic. This, again, is confusing.
How was this complaint lodged? Well, the student had his father write the President of the University.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I should write a post on academic freedom, once I can understand it well enough to articulate it. The reason we were oppressed all those years was the lack of it and the whole thing is hard to define. I should become active in AAUP national and learn to specialize in this topic.
The fact that we were under suspicion all those years due to being modern (for instance). There is academic freedom and there is discrimination and they are hard to identify except when utterly unsubtle — just like sexual harrassment. I have to think about these things.
It’s very interesting how these complaints all follow the same ideology of pedagogy in which the teacher must present unambiguous facts and demand that the student know those and nothing else. That is the only “fair” thing.
The worst of it is that this student’s father, who wrote the complaint letter, is a professor.
We’ve got some pretty entitled students out there. Do you dare give them bad grades?
Only in the most extreme cases.
Oh, dear.
I’d give bad grades to entitled students if they are not high up to the task.
They do not understand what is expected of them, so they only experience the bad grade as a senseless punishment. They can only hear and understand what is really expected if you give them a medium grade. Otherwise all they hear is the punishment.