Monday, October 20, 2014

What are college professors (not) teaching? From FoxNews.com

We're the Danes
and we're living it up!
With two teenage daughters, I try to stay “relevant.” It’s not easy. So, I like to scout around the Internet to see what’s “trending” among teens and college students. What I find is sometimes fatuous. And mystifying.

A recent popular post “shared” on a college student’s Facebook page lamented life in the U.S. and extolled how wonderful it is in Denmark –the happiest place on earth! One person wrote, “Let’s follow Denmark! The Declaration of Independence states, ‘the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right.’”

(Actually, the Declaration’s final draft was “unalienable,” but I don’t want to quibble.)

Photographs on the post displayed happy Danish faces with captions that read, “Free Child Care, Free Health Care, Free University, $20 Minimum Wage.” My favorite photo was a grinning guy with his feet propped up on his work desk accompanied by the words, “33 Hour Work Week!”


THE REST.

9 comments:

  1. Um, I'm trying to teach physics to engineers, so bridges my students build won't fall down when people drive cars over them. My students struggle and resist all they possibly can.

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  2. The comments are highly entertaining in a "laugh to keep from crying (or screaming in outrage)" way.

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  3. Jarrett's research skills suck. He cites a facebook page of a single student, which is commented upon by a select group--certainly not a representative sample. He has no evidence that these people actually were taught or learned anything about Denmark from college instructors, yet he presumes they've been taught that everything Danish is better than the American Way. He lists his counterpoints and concludes that "I doubt any of this is taught by most college educators in America who are overwhelmingly liberal." Strawman much?

    I give this work a C at best.

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  4. I teach Liberal Arts, in order to make sure my students stop the world from falling apart.

    And I saw this article on Facebook already so I don't need it here as well. Could you please post some original material?

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    Replies
    1. If you'd like to write some original material, I'm sure the RGM would be happy to post it (though perhaps not immediately, given the sane schedule he's set himself; see recent post), and the rest of us would be happy to read it, and would perhaps be inspired to write something original ourselves, and then you could read that. That's how things work around here.

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  5. I don't do Facebook, so I didn't see this there. I like that College Misery aggregates material about academia. Could you please keep posting things like this?

    And if I see something I've already seen elsewhere, I'll just skip it here.

    Thanks! SMOOCH!

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  6. Well this should be easy to solve. Instead of offering up comments on Denmark and other Eurotopias in my classes on Intro to Hamsterology, I'll just stick to the subject at hand. Subjects like the evolution of hamsters. Or the environmental consequences of hamster-ranching. If I do that, then the folks at foxnews will be pleased as pu...

    Wait - Nope. They're still getting their knickers in a knot.

    Knevermind.

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