Monday, March 28, 2011

Using "Erudite" Almost Always Means You're Making Fun of Someone. Five Years Ago on RYS.

Dear erudite undergraduate,

Thank you for your thorough assessment of this website. I can't imagine how we went so long without hearing your learned sentiments. However, let me mention a few things:

  1. "Sucky" is not a word according to 3 different dictionaries that I have on my shelf as well as dictionary.com. But you, like so many undergraduates, believe that what you have to say and the way you say it is devilishly clever and important. I'm here to tell you it's not. I'm pretty sure I could make it through the rest of my life without additional commentary from you.
  2. I am posting something on this site, and I am not a "sucky" professor. I have won two different teaching awards as well as numerous research grants. My teaching evaluations consistently suggest that I am a good teacher without being an easy "A." I am also a woman. You seem genuinely surprised that of your three good professors that one is a woman. Welcome to the world, junior. There are a lot of great female professors out there. I hope to God that someday you wind up working for a female boss so that you can open your big, fat mouth at an inopportune time and tell her that you're amazed she got this far given that she's a woman. I might even pay to see her kick you in the teeth.
  3. You state that you can verify that two of your current professors don't know their material because "all they do is put Powerpoint slides up that come right out of the book." Do you honestly think that is the marker of how much your professors know about an area? Do you know that we have ridiculous publishing requirements, that we have to sit on countless college/university committees that take up valuable time, and that we often have to give up other time to things like advising, grading, etc.? Do you know that sometimes we get hammered in our student evaluations if we try to give them material that's outside the text? Oh yes, that's right; students have complained to me in the past that by using the majority of class time to cover things related to but outside of the required reading that they couldn't study it all. Plus, I've been told that any number of my students don't buy the books at all and just plan on getting by with the class notes. When they can't, they blame you, the professor, for asking too much of them.
  4. Lastly, you mention in your note that you couldn't drop your 2 sucky classes because of your scholarship, and then in the last paragraph, you state that as soon as you finish school you'll never think about college again. Let me tell you that we're all so glad they wasted money on putting you through school. Nothing like the distaste of lifelong learning to make all of us educators believe that we're fighting the good fight.

2 comments:

  1. Post that was replied to:

    http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20061102121402/http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/2006/03/someone-comes-at-us-with-more-truth.html

    The "wayback machine" at archive.org is a real lifesaver.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks SchmittyRKD. I was just on my way to try and track down the originating post, but thought "You know, Self, it's entirely possible that some intelligent considerate individual has already done this and posted it in the comments. Why don't you check there first?"
    Also, after reading the student's original post: they end with "Belch." This fascinates me. Is it a typo, meant to be "Blech," as a final expression of their distaste, or... are they burping? Why? Amazing.

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