Letters Never Sent, The Revenge

Dear Dumbass Dinah:

You insist you are an "educated individual," but I checked your transcript and your "education," such as it is, entirely consists of transfer credits from a community college subsequently closed because the students were, and I'm quoting the accrediting board here, "too dim to find their way out of the campus parking lot." Like, seriously stupid.  How stupid?  “They put a blanket over the SGA president's head and he twisted himself into a ball and suffocated” kind of stupid.  “The math teacher used a laser pointer and everyone in the class threw themselves at the screen and died of head trauma” kind of stupid.  Seriously, seriously stupid.   It took you several years but now you have landed here, in the always dubious "education" major.

You claim you don't know why your papers are failing.  That you don't know what tools I'm using for evaluation. The tool I use for evaluation is called a BRAIN, Dumbass Dinah.  And my BRAIN has been sending you many coded messages about the criteria for evaluation.  Those messages are coded in letters and words that form themselves into a language called ENGLISH, which, believe it or not, is the language in which the syllabus is written, as well as the language in which I compose the comments on your sorry papers.  It’s not fucking Farsi.  Or Cuneiform.  You don’t need the Rosetta Stone to decipher it.  It’s all there in your native tongue. 

And though there are some people that I would allow to tell me how to do my job, you, Dumbass Dinah, are not one of them.  You insist that I should be helping students to succeed, rather than “seeing how difficult I can make things for them.”  Unfortunately for you, making things difficult for students is pretty much my raison d’etre.  If you want things to be easy for you, become an ed major.  Oh, wait…

I understand as well that you’d like information regarding my history as a professor so that you can bolster your mistaken belief that I am somehow unfair.  But I am not telling you anything about my “past record of student success,” especially when you don’t have a clue what “student success” is.  In your head it probably equates with the number of students that receive high grades, because in your addled brain you think a teacher that hands out A's like candy is a sure sign that the teacher is “successful”.  The average grade in my class is also none of your fucking business, and I don’t even know.  I can say that about half of the students that begin my classes end up finishing them.  And that those students that finish tend to do fairly well. They do well because by then I’ve weeded out all the Dumbass Dinahs.  This, Dumbass Dinah, is also my job.  I am that great, rusty, mean-looking hooked thing hanging on the garage wall, occasionally descending upon the garden to relentlessly comb through the crabgrass and ragweed, pulling them out by the roots, so that only the flowers survive.   

To the rest of my internet summer students:

Perhaps you think that because this is an internet class, and you don’t know who the fuck I am, or my level of experience, or my age, or my accomplishments, or the fact that I’ve been teaching since waaaay before every single one of you was born, that you can bully me as you probably bullied your hapless high school teachers, or the unfortunate adjuncts that you managed to terrify in your former lives as community college students. Perhaps because we have not breathed the same air, or stood in the same space, you have not recognized me for the creature that I am.  That creature is a bulletproof full professor with tenure, who isn’t scared of you, or your cohort, or frankly much of anything else except old age, the death of loved ones, and another Bush presidency.   

Fuck you.