If you could be a Proffie Snowflake for a day what would you do? Throw responsibility and professionalism to the wind and let 'er rip!
I would:
1. Call in sick and say I could not grade midterms. If my boss didn't do them for me I would kick and scream and yell all the way to HR and any other governing body until I got my way. I have a COLD damn it I cannot work when I have a cold!
2. I would grade essays Bad Teacher style. R U Fu$ing Kiddin Me?
3. My voicemail would greet students with "Was up b4&$/s?"
4. I would wear VS Pink sweatpants and a bra top to class. One size too small like my students.
Not a chance. "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." I like being a responsible adult, particularly since so many professors when I was an undergraduate were abusing their tenure, inactive in research and with nothing to teach us that wasn't 20 years out of date. And no, I'm not a Christian: but I don't like being an =empty headed= atheist.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Froderick, I don't feel any desire to just be a dickhead, even for revenge at dickheads. But I have occasionally wondered what I would do if I won the lottery and could afford to tell the dickheads to take the job and shove it. The answer is that I would self-fund the research I really want to do, teach the classes I want to teach the way I think they should be taught (and no, they wouldn't all be graduate seminars for three people).
ReplyDeleteAnd of course, I'd do a lot of traveling and eating in fine restaurants.
I daydream about just not showing up to class, but as the others mentioned above, I've grown up too much for my sense of responsibility to let me do that.
ReplyDeleteIt's proper and good that we all have superegos, but I'm tickled to imagine the ensuing confusion should I text my friends in class or weep when anyone/thing thwarted my personal desires.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't mind taking, say, a month to work on the article that I'm enjoying writing, but is going pretty slowly. Then I'd email my students and say "sorry I couldn't make it to class last week. What did I miss?"
ReplyDeleteThe only downside to that is that I'm also enjoying seeing how some new approaches to my classes this semester work out.
Ah, well. Back to juggling.
I think I'd just respond to every e-mail from students and committees with, "That sounds like a pretty serious problem. Good luck!"
ReplyDeleteEarlier this term a student emailed me and said they wouldn't be in class because it was rainy and crappy out.
ReplyDeleteI mentioned this to another class, without identifying info, and asked what they'd do if I said something like that. "Yeah class is canceled cause it's raining and I just don't feel good enough mentally to come in."
"We'd throw a fricking party."
And there is the problem--my being a lazy ass wouldn't make them realize how annoying it is, they would think it's AWESOME>
Heck, when I teach computer skills I point them to the "lazy" way (read: the quick and dirty way that nearly always works) because I know that by using that language they'll probably do it my way.
However, I am very tempted to use my Win and Fail stamps on student papers for real...
I would do the elementary school "stop and trade papers" quiz grading.
ReplyDelete