Q: Stupid or dumb? Dumb or stupid?

She is a poor, earnestly troubled soul asking me for help. The correct answer to one homework problem eludes her. Ah, the best part of my job - presenting the mysteries of the material world to curious minds! Half way through working out the

You know what? Screw the storytelling. She’s a senior in physical chemistry who can’t do freshman calculus. Sure, that means that she’s brighter than 99% of the world’s population but I don’t grade on that curve. She can’t do a simple calculation. (Here’s the equation. Solve it.) She "just doesn't get this math stuff." For a p-chem student, she’s pretty dumb.

How could she ever learn, she asks. She routinely gets C’s and some D’s in her major classes so this isn’t her first academic challenge. Well, you study, of course. The discussion devolves into me spouting all the advice that I give freshmen. Practice. Take notes. Do your homework. She gets a look on her face as if I’m revealing great secrets, like the season finale of Glee or something. Her epiphanic expression dissolves when she realizes that studying takes a lot of work.

“All I need is a D.” she says.

If you think that’s what you need, then you’re stupid too.


A: All of the above.

Luther from Louisiana on How It Could Have Been.

I was really moved by My Little Proffie's recent posting, and wanted to reply more fully than a comment would allow.

I've had a long, stumbling career, moving often, and count 7 institutions on my vita. I've let fear control a lot of what I did in the classroom, always trying to hang on to a job, get better classes, get better times, please my students or my bosses, or simply work my way toward tenure without upsetting the apple cart.

It meant that I ate shit a lot of the time, and did it so well and for so long I completely forgot that I was doing it. (To be fair I had a large family to raise, ailing parents, troubled siblings who had legal problems for years, so I was often so busy in my regular life that my career rested on auto-pilot.)

I had a similar realization to MLP's many years ago when I, too, decided to leave a college and head elsewhere. I did what I thought was right that last semester, and it made a world of difference. I treated my students as if they were adults - the first time. And for the most part they became adults in my class. I was fair but strict in all of my actions; I tried to teach like the great proffies of my own undergrad career had taught me. (By great, I don't mean the ones I liked the most, but the ones who I still remember to this day as having made me a better student and human.)

I felt good about my career, something that had been missing ever since the glow of that first t-t job had worn off. Instead of tiptoeing through the department, I took great strides. When a bully tried to push a new textbook everybody hated into the curriculum, I tossed my copy into a bin and said, "That book is bullshit. I don't know why you don't see it, or why nobody else will speak up about it."

I felt as if I was being true to what I believed and what I knew mattered to the students of my college.

It changed my life.

Temporarily.

When I ended up in my next position, the superkeen department head ended up being a tyrannical mess who needed tiptoeing and kowtowing on a daily basis. I received endless warnings about fragile and precious students, my "harsh" grading, my brusque manner.

And within a semester all of the good feeling I had by trying to do what I believed to be right was gone. I stumbled that way until tenure, and by then I had become what I am now, an aging and rather doddering old proffie on the very tail end of a career that I don't care to look back on much.

I've saved some money. My wife has done the same. We're looking forward to getting out of our careers and onto a sort of quasi-retirement. But reading this page (and also RYS) over the past few years has made me think about our profession, how we do it, what we must do to survive in it. I think we are often asked to give too much.

I also think of that one grand semester when I had no fear, and I wish I had not squandered so much time.

Control

It's been one of those weeks.

The details aren't especially important—fill in your own, we've all been there—but increasingly, the idea that we might be in control of something, anything, in our own life . . . it seems a tad more silly.  The Powers That Be have wills of their own, and we, Aethelfrith, are somehow at their mercy.

Yes, we know, "it's good to be the king" and all that, but . . . some days, it really kinda isn't.  We're as much of a good stoic as anyone else, but it's pretty obvious that Aurelius was no academic—he'd be pretty quickly disabused of the notion that everything acts for a reason, much less a good one.  Lucretius?  Well, everything's random, all right, but the provost is likely to point to Himself if anyone says there is no God.  And the only thing we have to say about Pascal is that he forgot a few infinites—the infinitely stupid, the infinitely vapid, the infinitely pointless.

And all those people who go to show that even the most depressed of philosophers didn't know the half of it are in charge.

When do we get our life back?  You know, the thing we handed over when we first caught sight of this supposed ivory tower?