Tuesday, September 25, 2012

An Early Thirsty From Donna in Durham.

Q: Today we had a substitute college professor today for our lecture. The class is intro to lit. The professor should us a diagram and the diagram had to do with problem solving in stories. He then said that the problem solving relates with sex. A student then asked "How do you get sex from problem solving" and the professor responded "you dont solve your problems with sex?" I was creeped out by the professor. Was him talking about sex like that out of line?

25 comments:

  1. Perhaps; hard to determine without more context. Your editing though? Clearly out of line.

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  2. He was kidding.
    You should read more.
    And proofread.

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  3. OMG, you guys, this means people are still allowed to refer to sex in the company of other adults, even after age 30! I HAD NO IDEA!

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    1. "I am OFFENDED by the professor's use of the word s-e-x in class, and therefore I cannot be held responsible for the quality or timeliness of my work!"

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    2. I am ... by the ... of ..., and therefore I cannot be held responsible for the quality or timeliness of my work!

      A new entry for MadLibs.

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    3. I am CONFUSED by the ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIAN STANCE of CRACK-ADDICTED OTTERS, and therefore I cannot be held responsible for the quality or timeliness of my work.

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  4. Seriously, it depends on what you mean by "creeped out".

    If you felt unsafe, then he/she/it was out of line.

    If you just felt it was icky to talk about, then too bad - you are not subject to protection from things you think are disturbing, bad, or thought-provoking.

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  5. Apparently it's creepy for Le French Prof to jokingly call students hot in this space, but not for a proffie to make assumptions about his students' sex lives in public, as long as we can other the students on the basis of their writing skills. I'll bite. Yes, it was inappropriate.

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  6. The comment seems gratuitous and unprofessional, designed not to spark class interest but to elicit a leer. But that's a judgement based upon limited information. In some circumstances I think the same comment would be fine.

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  7. Was he staring at you, and only you, when he said it? Then yes, he was way out of line. You should email the president, dean, vice dean, chair, and whoever else you can think of.

    Or it could have been a joke that fell totally flat. I've had them happen, although I try to avoid making them about sex.

    Then again, it's been awhile since I've had a lit class, isn't everything about sex once you get to Freudian analysis of literature? Good luck kid!

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  8. First, I do think this is a reasonable question for the student to ask.

    Second, this is a hard question to answer. It really depends on how it was delivered. The prof may have been a dirty old man, or he may have been trying to wake the class up. I will often make random, potentially controversial statements (or just plain weird statements) to shake students out of their collective stupor.

    Regardless, I wouldn't worry too much about this. If it didn't go beyond this one statement, and he wasn't actively leering at anyone, then it was probably just a poorly timed joke that, as Bison says, fell totally flat.

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  9. Your writing is atrocious. Focus on that and stop worrying about bad professorial jokes.

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  10. It's deeply disturbing to be reminded that this is, more or less, how our students will remember what we're trying to teach them.

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  11. On the one hand, I suspect he was trying to be "the cool prof" -- and it didn't work. On the other hand, why wouldn't you expect to talk about sex in a lit class? (Daughter of a Freudian psychiatrist, here.)

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    1. I was thinking along the same lines: the prof is probably a Freudian --a bit out of date, but most likely harmless.

      Donna, you're free to feel creeped out by whatever creeps you out; in fact, that feeling can be a useful danger signal. But you also need to think about context: if you're talking to another student (or anyone) who's trying to persuade you to leave a group and go off somewhere alone -- or, for that matter, to a proffie in a one-on-one situation who's trying to persuade you to cross from professional into social territory -- then it matters that you're feeling creeped out, and you should do whatever is necessary to protect your safety. When a proffie you'll quite possibly never see again makes a joke in front of a whole class, with no sign that he's trying to take the behavior outside the classroom, the situation may still be creepy (or may just be his awkward way of getting into the story (*was* there sex involved, explicitly or implicitly? There often is in literature), but it's not exactly urgent or dire. Since he's not even your regular proffie, I'd let it go (and remember to read the names of the instructors, not just the times, when you sign up for future classes; it doesn't sound like you and he are a good fit).

      Also, if by any chance you managed to avoid freshman comp somehow and go straight to intro to lit, I'd consider circling back. You could use the comp class.

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  12. "Was him talking about sex like that out of line?" For crying out loud, what are you, in fourth grade? This unbelievable illiteracy, totally unbecoming of a university student, reminds me of student evaluations of teaching: just not credible, not even for documenting something genuinely damning.

    By the way, my Intro-to-Comp-Lit prof wouldn't stop talking about sex. She had good reason to, since the books we read are absolutely loaded with it. I still grin at way she ripped into the sex and sexism in Homer, The Old Testament, Ovid, and especially Milton.

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  13. OK, I understand that snark is the default position here, but I don't think this student deserves the response she's gotten. The writing is certainly bad, but come on. Don't we encourage students to ask questions when they don't know something? She had a genuine concern, and, instead of jumping to conclusions, she sought help from an anonymous group of professors who she thought might have some info for her. That is the exact opposite of snowflake behavior. Instead of genuine responses, she gets mocked.

    Let me also point out that she didn't assume that her professor was out of line. She ASKED if he was out of line. She did so so that she could learn the appropriate response.

    I could see this kind of response if her question was more along the lines of, "ohmygawd my mean perfesser faled me for my righting my righting is fine" or "my professor said the word sex and I think old people are gross," but that's not what she did.

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    1. Another way to look at it is that we proffies have become so timid, shell-shocked, and paranoid of lawsuits about pointing out students' errors, they make errors we knew not to make in 4th grade. I think a strong response is warranted for this, one I hope this student will not soon forget.

      I do -not- think that there is no such thing as a dumb question. A question that shows flagrant illiteracy or lack of ability at critical thought, which is phrased so imprecisely that all one can tell is that it has something to do with sex, is a dumb question. As no less than Abraham Lincoln noted (although he may not have been the first to do so): "Better to remain silent and thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."

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    2. If the same comment had come from a fellow student, the class very well might have laughed. (Heck, even coming from the prof, there may have been other students who laughed, but that doesn't enter into Donna's report.) This is where the ageist slant comes in.

      As Surly says below, the kid came for advice and got some, along with the usual irreverence for which CM is known and beloved. No one is blaming her for asking, after all.

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    3. Since I am not allowed to openly mock the swill that comes to me in the guise of student writing, I reserve the right to do so here.

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  14. This ain't office hours, it's the faculty lounge. She received some blunt, unfiltered good advice: 1. Don't ignore your spidey-sense. 2. Professors sometimes joke about sex. 3. Get to a writing lab, stat! 4. Provide more context if you want better feedback.

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  15. Dear Susie Snowflake.

    In a lit class, long ago, we read D. H. Lawrence's short story titled "The Rocking-Horse Winner," which was originally published in a 1926 edition of Harper's Bazaar magazine (think of it as the Cosmopolitan magazine of its time). That story features a seminal (whee!) scene that features a young, male child getting an erection after riding his beloved hobby-horse.

    We read that story (and discussed it -- at length!) IN THE 11TH GRADE!

    Welcome to the wonderful world of adult literature, with its attendant sexual themes, metaphors, and innuendos. Enjoy your stay.

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  16. English proffies always talk about sex. We have to take a special class to learn how to do incorporate sex into every literary discussion, and we are indoctrinated by our own proffies during undergrad in this time-honored tradition. I would say, not jokingly, that about 60% of the English proffies I had managed to find sex in pretty much everything we read. My personal favorite was the creative writing class I took where we had to locate "found poems." My proffie found instructions for repairing a leaky toilet and made it into one long innuendo.

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  17. All literature is about sex, and all students are freaked out about this.

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  18. @WhatLadder: Holla that. I'm walking my HS seniors through Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts" ("And rapidly backwards and forwards/The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:/They call it easing the Spring.") and "Judging Distances" ("There may be dead ground in between, and I may not have got/The knack of judging distance; I will only venture/A guess that perhaps between me and the apparent lovers,/(who, incidentally, appear by now to have finished,)/At seven o'clock from the houses, is roughly a distance/Of about one year and a half.") from Lessons of the War in order to ground them in the reality that, like all living thingies, our focus is ever on eating, pooping, and reproducing...and thus our art is clogged with sex, bot gettin' some and ain't gettin' none references. Makes it ever so much easier for them to actually *get* "Anecdote of the Jar" (Stevens) and Chaucer's "Complaint to His Purse (ooo, SO dirty!), and Ishmael Reed's ".05" and Arnold's "Dover Beach". THEN they realize that the work they'd already done in Oedipus and the Bible and The Metamorphoses is dirtier than they had first thought. And THEN we hit Lysistrata. After that, they are seeing sex every-effing-where. Sometimes in places *I* never saw it before...

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