In 09, Play the Name Game. Stake Your Claim With Your Own RYS Moniker. Impress Your Pals. Be the Cat You Want To Be.

The experiment with "The Regulars" has been terrific. Readers seem to like the loose collection of 10-12 longtime correspondents.

One of the side benefits from it has been the added continuity these returning voices add to the enterprise. But, while we've published work from hundreds of different folks, we are lousy at keeping records. If you sent a searing note to us that we attributed to Runaway Rhonda from Roughneck, we won't remember that when your next missive reaches us.

So, in 2009, we encourage you to help us. If you've got an RYS-style moniker we've used in the past that you like, let us know in your email so we can reuse it. (And therefore save one of the poor compound-ites from having to dream up another.)

Remember. Here on RYS you can say it like you mean it, (even call it little when it's little), and now you can stake your claim under your own handle.

As always, send your pain here.

PS: We love it when readers write in when they spot typos. But, Mom, you don't have to call us assholes at the same time!

"Strangers On a Plane." Overheard Post-MLA.

This conversation was overheard on the flight home from MLA, one row behind me. The reader should know that Friendly Professor Frieda was approximately the same age as Hesitant Harriet the Harried Applicant, and that the two bore a striking resemblance: sallow complexion, dark hair, rectangular glasses... the recent RYS description of our "unfriendly tribe" comes immediately to mind.

Friendly Frieda (loudly, as she takes her seat): Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice, is that a book about Shakespeare?

Hesitant Harriet (from within her introvert's cocoon): Yes, it's a sort of a scholarly book, though.

FF: That's great. I teach Shakespeare.

HH: I wrote my dissertation on [unintelligible/unmemorable] in Shakespeare's plays.

FF: So were you in San Francisco for the MLA?

HH: Yes.

FF: Did you have interviews?

HH: No. I tried. I sent out to dozens of schools. But I didn't get a interview.

FF: That sucks. I was just on a search committee, and believe me, it's really hard to pick who to interview.

HH: Where do you teach?

FF: [Small liberal arts] College.

HH: Oh. I applied there.

FF (suddenly less boisterous): Really? What's your name?

HH: [Hesitant Harriet].

FF: You know, I think I remember your application.

Awkward Silence. The plane is now approaching the runway.

FF (laughing nervously): Our committee had one person on it that is super-traditional, a real [name dropping of obscure critic]-type, and another who's gone the way of Cultural Studies. And then there's me. So it was really hard to decide on candidates. There was lot of disagreement.

HH (with the tone of someone wishing the plane would fly off the end of the runway and into the bay to relieve her of this tremendously embarrassing seating-related misfortune): I see.

FF: And we also had to make sure that none of the candidates were too similar to anyone already on faculty. I think that might have been the problem with your CV. If I remember it right, I think your work was a little too similar to mine.
HH (with the tone of one who wishes to end the conversation): I understand.

Liftoff. Passengers as a whole go quiet.

For the 5 hour duration of the flight, at no point did these two rekindle their originally quite warm conversation. Friendly Frieda bantered with the fellow in the aisle seat beside her ("books? I used to like to read, but movies are so much quicker"), but poor Hesitant Harriet disappeared into the wall of the plane.

The moral of the story? If you're returning from MLA having not had a single interview, you should probably read the latest Twilight book or the Skymall magazine on the plane.

"Out of the Mouths..." A First Sampling of Some Job Seeker Experiences at the MLA.

We'd be happy to hear from some more job seekers at the recent MLA convention in San Francisco. Send your thoughts here.

• I have been tied up in knots for months waiting for these past 2 days. And.... It was nothing. The interviews were actually fun. People wanted to know what I had to say. They wanted to hear about my research, wanted to know what classes I wanted to teach. It was like Christmas and my birthday all at once. Three interviews and each one was friendly and just like talking to friends. I'm stoked for the future.
  


• The single worst thing was seeing my folder pulled out of a gigantic box full of my competition. I had my nerve up high and I was ready. Then I saw a big "#17" on the folder with my name on it. 17? 17th to be interviewed? 17th ranked? What the hell did it mean?!?!? Ugh. I couldn't get it out of my head.
  


• I went in with a really good attitude. I'd been prepped by my mentors; I knew my material cold. I even knew all about the school. And the 4 dullards who sat in front of me seemed to be more interested in getting the thing over with than anything else. I feel as though I've been working toward this day for years, and the people who interviewed me were just going through the motions. I'm sick to my stomach.
  


• After all of the horror stories and warnings and panic-mongering advice, my interviews were fine. The committees were sane and friendly - they'd actually read my materials and were genuinely interested in talking to me. I'm ***cautiously*** optimistic. Why am I surprised? This is what we do - we terrorize each other with worst-case scenarios and urban legend-like tales of the Interview Gone Horribly Wrong. I'm sure I'll continue the cycle of abuse after I have my very own TT job...
  


• The search committee chair didn't actually reach out to feel my breasts, but his eyes sure did their best.
  


• This is how it works? I felt like a piece of meat - and not in a good way. The first day of interviews was so disorienting that I can hardly remember a thing about the process. By day 2 I felt a little more able to process, but then for my first interview of the day I arrived an hour late. I don't know what happened. I knew the time. I had it written down. I just walked in at 11 when I was set for 10. No excuses. They didn't take me either, and they didn't offer a new time. The rest of the day got better, but this is no way to hire someone.
  


• I didn't learn anything about the search committee. You can't possibly do these things in 45 minute shots. It was like a race from when I sat down until I was being ushered out of the way. I had questions I wanted to ask, but we never got there. I know nothing about the job, really, beyond the ad. They asked some canned questions; I gave some canned answers. We're strangers still.
  


• Piss on me if you want, but I nailed the interviews. If I don't get at least three offers than there's something screwy.
  


• There are NO jobs that fit my interests. I might as well just stay in grad school if these people think I'm going to teach 4/4 until I die.
  


• I met some nice people, but woefully unambitious. One school had a committee made up of people all in their 50s or above. Nobody had taught anywhere else. It's not some garden spot either where they live. Why are they still there? I can understand someone like me going there. But do they really not want something better? Mystified.
  


• I've spent about $800 on this week, and I might as well have just thrown the money away. I did lousy at the interviews. I had been told by my advisor to prepare to talk about my research and my dissertation, but all anyone wanted to know was about teaching strategies. I'VE TAUGHT 2 CLASSES...I don't have ANY strategies yet.
  


• I had some good interviews this week, and I have no complaints about how I was treated, but the questions and the follow-ups were more suited to an experienced faculty member. I was asked about developing courses, taking part on committee work. What are my preferences? I don't have any idea! Did you not notice that I just graduated? Is there no breaking in period? I can't get a year or two to get up to speed before you want me to actually know everything? Really unreasonable.
  


• Frightful. Some of the people who interviewed me knew less about the field than I do, and I KNOW I know nothing.

Diaper Dave from Dallas Points Out Our Anti-Youth Bias - And Justifies It All At the Same Time!

I get so annoyed with the anti-youth movement on this site. I was cheering hard last year that the Gumdrop Unicorns would beat down the annoying Silverbacks last year, and now I see you've doubled up efforts to make fun of younger faculty members with the post yesterday about ten "candidates" and their mistakes. I call bullshit on the whole article, but let me show you where your clear bias reveals you:

Candidate 1: So what, the candidate prioritized teaching somewhere other than #1. I'd bet you he/she was asked to prioritize. Why wouldn't any faculty member give teaching 2nd or 3rd. The younger generation of scholars is ambitious and our own scholarship SHOULD be the priority.

Candidate 3: He's exactly right. Wasting departmental expenses - which could go to faculty for travel instead! - on a student newspaper or magazine is stupidity. You know senior faculty wouldn't have to give up something so little Susie Sophomore could have her anorexia poem in the paper.

Candidate 4: Sure, this candidate could look up the time zone, but I'd bet the question was just an intro into learning more about the area. You'd bitch if the person wasn't interested in the local scene.

Candidate 5: So what. Classes don't make sometimes. That person did have the syllabi for the classes, though, to prove that the effort was made on his part. If admissions or the registrar couldn't fill the class, it's not the faculty member's fault. And that reminds me. How many times did a senior faculty member "not have a class make"? None. That's the number. It happens to the young faculty members all the time.

Candidate 6: Asking about the chair's retirement shows a keen awareness of the professor in question and concern. I can't see how you can spin that negatively.

Candidate 8: Eating at an interview? How scandalous. That you were bothered about it tells me much about you than it does the interviewee. (And I will add that I've done similar, especially when I have as many interviews in a day as I do.)

Candidate 10: Okay, maybe it's bad form to ask for graduate courses now. Better to wait until the ink is dry on the contract. But that shows ambition, and not just sitting around taking what is given. I'd say that's a candidate who's ready to really move up. You don't seem to realize that the upcoming generation of scholars and faculty are very ambitious. We've succeeded throughout school and we want to succeed in our careers. All of what you annoyed you in your post was simple ambition by hungry and talented new members of the professoriate.

It's all perspective, of course, and I think you saw those candidates as young and unschooled (and nor worthy of your MANY years of service), and so you were persuaded to harshly judge their actions without recognizing that a new generation of faculty - the ones now REPLACING YOU - are going to have their own way of doing things.

You might as well get used to it, deadwood, because me and Candidate 10 will likely be your bosses in a couple of years. Spin on that.

Hank the History Prof Discovers Us, And Sends Along Some Advice for The Upcoming AHA Conference. "For God's Sake, Eat An Energy Bar!"

I just discovered your site this morning when a junior faculty member I mentor told me about it.

Whoever dreamed up Rate Your Students is a certifiable genius, and someone I'd take with me in any lifeboat.

I have laughed out loud more times this morning than I have in 15 years on the job...I may be exaggerating. What a cast of characters!

I am not as dumbfounded by the poor interviews my MLA colleagues seem to be having this week in San Francisco, as I've seen it all before, but it's still fun to contemplate what we'll face next week in New York when we interview young faculty for an Assistant Professor position at our research university in the northeast. I pray hope that you'll have live blogging from our conference as well!!!

But, seriously, folks, maybe you'd consider getting better prepared. (At the very least read the AHA guidelines to the job seeking process.) And, take advantage of schools that have "open" interviews, like ours. We have a number of folks set, but we've thrown our hat in the "open" field because the last time we hired someone she came from this group. (The Job Center has a bulletin board that is usually full of late-breaking opportunities.)

Too late for you job seekers this year, probably, but I've lent my copy of the Vick and Furlong guide for academic job seekers a number of times already this year. It's a must-have for anyone who doesn't want to look like a doofus.

And then, make sure you travel to conferences with a good travel alarm. Unable to operate the same freaking alarm clock that is in every hotel in the US and Canada? Maybe we don't want to hire you after all. But I travel with this Zelco model all the time. It's a little time keeping marvel, and it wakes you UP at the right time, LOCAL time...good gravy!

Then for those of you who are run ragged with all those interviews - nobody puts a gun to your head do they? - I recommend anything from the Clif Bar family. My faves though, are the Chocolate Brownies. They come 12 to a pack, so even the busiest of you will have fuel for the whole conference.

Oh, and if you don't get that all-so-hard-to-nail-down tenure track spot, read Steve Lambert's book on jobs for History majors. It's full of terrific careers for folks who choose to work outside the stuffy and sometimes nutty halls of academe.

But most of all, come to the conference with an open mind. It really can be a fun event, and too many job-seeking-missiles just see that end of it. It's a great time to commune (and eat with) friends past and present. You'd be amazed at how many times our committee members have dinner or drinks with interviewees after that arduous trial is over. We're really hiring the whole person, you know? We want you in our faculty building, but also across the table from us in the cafeteria.

Do well, but be yourself.

Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to "power up" with another brownie and continue reading the page...you guys "effing" rock.

Seeking Stuff from the Seekers - MLA Edition.

As the MLA wraps up today, we're actively seeking some quickie submissions from MLA job seekers. Most of the mail that has been coming in has arrived from the "dark side" of the table, those nasty and capricious search committee goons!

Can't we hear a little bit from someone who's seeking a job, too? You don't have to be as sour as Sour Sarah, but we'd love to be able to post some of the view from your perspectives.

Single line entries full of obscenities are fine - that's what we love - but send your experiences here.

Schenectady Skeptinautika Comes Across With Update #2 from the MLA: The Smoker.

Ah, the smoker. (Where, incidentally, there hasn't been smoke for years, much to the chagrin of many.) It's like one big gigantic junior high dance, only everyone's (only slightly) better dressed... and more awkward. And more drunk. Whose idea was it to reserve tables for tipsy interviewers to waylay unsuspecting interviewees, whose placement advisors all told them that they *had* to cash in on the informal "second interview"? Shittiest. Idea. Ever.

The good news? I got to hang with the other job market homeys from my institution at our little reception table, and hear some happily-ever-after interview stories ("They liked me! They really liked me!"). The bad news? We'd been instructed not to drink... at an event with free beer? WTF?!?!? Yes, I want a job... but FREE FUCKING BEER!!! Bitter, I am. And it wasn't just me feeling the pain of restraint; lots of job candidates were standing around with their arms painfully crossed, alternately grimacing and looking longingly at the cash bar. (BTW, what the hell, random underdressed bald dude? CREEPY.) Martini for the hurt, anyone?

Finally, I have no idea how anyone with more than three interviews can manage to keep everyone's names straight. As far as I'm concerned, if you're an onanistic thinker that falls into one of these three categories, I have no chance of matching your name to your face:

1. You are a short, slightly pudgy, balding, glasses-sporting man with a tie that doesn't *quite* get to your belt; think a fatty little Woody Allen.


2. You are a white-haired, crotchety, houndstooth-jacket-with-leather-elbow-patches-sporting man; think Walter Matthau with a stick up his ass.


3. You are a tall, skinny, overeager young buck trying desperately to prove your worth to (1) or (2); think "oh yeah, that little bastard we just hired last year."
   
   
   *Possible exception: if you fit (3) and have a nice ass, I *might* remember your name. If your ring fingers are clear.

Here's hoping for at least one female interviewer on every committee tomorrow. (Please, Santa, please? Okay, I was naughty this year -- and yes, I got the coal. Thanks. But goddammit, Santa, I need a fucking job!) Wish me special SLAC-y SLAC luck!

Hot, wet kisses,
Skepti

Layla from Lounsberry Sends Her Second San Fran Missive From the MLA.

Another day at MLA passed with the usual assortment of confusion, frustration and -- occasionally -- elation. After breakfast with an old pal, I had to run up Nob Hill to the interview hotel, conveniently forgetting the dangers of SF topography. I arrived breathless and red, but only my colleague saw it because I had actually planned to arrive early, so we could coordinate before the interviews began.

If you must interview at MLA, pray that it's with a like-minded colleague. When I had considered withdrawing from the conference (why? let me count the reasons, beginning with preservation of sanity), said colleague bribed me with promised drinks to avoid being paired with a less amenable colleague who would have made the arduous process even more painful. I will continue to hold this over her head for as long as I can. That's the definition of collegiality.

We had joked about handling the interviews as a "good cop, bad cop" scenario, but the truth is, we just wanted to tag team to avoid exhaustion. The last time I had to run this particular gauntlet, I was part of a team of four but we had an ungodly number of interviewees (plus I was sneaking out to interview elsewhere, including for my current [much better] job) and it all became a confused mess by the end of the third day of interviews. At least this time we have a manageable number, but there's still the fear of fatigue and exhaustion blinding you to a wonderful candidate or causing you to believe a mediocre candidate is terrific just to have it all done with.

Day one of interviews and we already have one candidate who made us want to link arms with the person, drag them back to campus and then call the others and tell them forget it. But we can't do that, so we go through the interviews and find it easy to see how others fall short of this star's magnitude. We have to remember that that superstar will have the same effect on many interviewers and we may not be the galaxy that star chooses to shine a light upon. Those folks who seem less appealing in that light may well prove to be very good candidates -- and the ones we might actually hire. Perspective is hard to keep, however.

Sometimes it's just the answers to questions don't add up to satisfaction -- candidates don't seem to understand the situation of our college (then again, our website paints an awfully rosy picture that we're embarrassed to admit doesn't quite reflect the reality we see daily), or don't seem to be able to bring complex research topics down to an undergraduate level. Maybe your interests seem too narrow -- we're not a R1 uni, we're a liberal arts college. You have to be able to do more than one thing.

Then again, there are the fatal and near-fatal errors. Don't give me a syllabus instead of explaining the classes you want to teach. The syllabus should just be a reminder of your brilliant ideas. Don't break my fingers when you shake my hand, especially if I'm wearing rings. It doesn't convey character -- it just tells me you don't care who you hurt. If you look younger than our students, you will make your potential colleagues feel really old and they won't believe you can do the job despite what your CV says. Wear clothes in which you feel comfortable -- YSL said something about style being when you forget what you're wearing. We should notice your outfit only enough to think you look professional, so don't dress like a supermodel -- or like an insurance salesman. Then again, this comes from the woman who received spectacular kudos from a drag queen this morning, so take that with a grain of salt.

The rest of the conference -- including a wild walk back down Nob Hill and a shuttle bus ride back up it -- included a lunch meeting that never came off, making me curse because I had so little time in the day as it was and had to get back up that hill. Hint: know how to find the people you're meeting beyond the location. Googling the person did no good, as I came up with an odd assortment of images including Marlene Dietrich, one of Lovecraft's Elder Gods and a woman reclining 'seductively' on a radiator (oh, Pat Benatar, what have you wrought?). Once again the generation gap inconveniences lazy me.

On the plus side, when all was done for the day there were drinks at a cool restaurant with friends and colleagues past and present -- always an awkward thing, like meeting an ex with the current lover and trying to offend neither and set off no jealousy bells. I did have to run off to attend a panel, however, because the day wasn't really done. It was the usual set piece that I always seem to encounter in my area: a smart paper from a grad student, a lazy survey of literature paper from a senior scholar and then a bizarre paper by someone outside the area who inevitably summarizes a text well known by everybody in the room (usually because they ran out of argument in the second paragraph). Then there's the voting on the new member of the executive committee, which means the one candidate the current committee puts forward for a vote. Ah, democracy! At least in evening panels people don't tend to go overboard on questions. Everyone's thinking about the cold drinks waiting in the bar (or maybe it was just me).

More interviews tomorrow and maybe one panel. Talks? Seldom. A few years back I did actually see Bill Irwin performing Beckett -- it doesn't get much better than that, but there's almost never any time to see fabulous presentations like that. Someone must go to them, but it's seldom me.

Does Anyone Know How to Interview? Ten Mistakes from Yesterday's MLA.

We had ten interviews yesterday for our asst. prof position in English/Creative Writing. The job ad says the teaching duties are 2 comps, one 400-level seminar in the candidate's field of specialty, and one intro CW class. We had more than 150 applications, from which we've set 20 interviews for MLA (although two opted for phone interviews instead because of costs.)

This is my second time on a search committee, and I was baffled by some of the things that happened. Back when I was in grad school (in the wayback of 2002!) my grad mentors gave me some hints and tips about the interview process, something our group apparently never got.

I could do pages of mistakes, but here are my favorites:

Candidate 1: Admitted that teaching was relatively low on his priorities. "I really don't want to lose the momentum I have in my own work." Also apologized for arriving late becaue he assumed the time we set for the interview was his local time, not the time in San Francisco.

Candidate 2: Said he didn't read much contemporary fiction because the major presses only published "populist fops." Our search chair (and MFA chair) has published 12 novels with major presses.

Candidate 3: When asked about working on our magazine (which is nationally distributed and mentioned as a duty in our ad), said, "I think there are too many literary magazines already."

Candidate 4: When asked if she had any questions for us, asked, "What time zone are you in?"

Candidate 5: Admitted that although his vita lists CW teaching over the past year, neither class actually made, but he did have syllabi if we wanted them.

Candidate 6: Asked the chair how close he was to retirement.

Candidate 7: When asked about his most current writings, said, "I have an idea for a new sort of short fiction, but I'm waiting to find out about patenting the forms before sharing it with anyone."

Candidate 8: Brought out a banana and a yogurt (with metal spoon!) mid-interview, and said, "I have an interview right after this and no time to eat. Do you mind?"

Candidate 9: Told us that one of the reasons he was so interested in our job was because of how close we are to [Big City], which I later Googled and found was only 490 miles away from our city.

Candidate 10: Came one hour early, explaining that he'd never been out of "NYC," and couldn't find a clock in the hotel showing local time. Also asked if he could substitute his comp teaching for graduate courses in fiction.

Can't wait for tomorrow!! To be fair, candidates 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 had pretty good interviews, otherwise.

Getting Along with People. MLA Update from Overhearing Olive.

I'm on a search committee this year, my very first year on the tenure track. I'm happy to do the duty and love seeing the world from other side of those insane interview tables at the MLA convention.

I begged my colleagues to let me quietly overhear at the interviews, saving one small question for the end. I'm just too green to really engage with the interviewees AND get all the notes down, which it turns out is my favorite part of the job. (I type stuff up so that our search colleagues back home can have as accurate a record of our 15 interviews as possible.)

Anyway, we had a remarkably nice morning with interviews and then started the afternoon session with a real mood-killer.

One of our committee members is the grand dame of our department, an absolutely stunning professor of many years, a kind, grandmotherly, and very vital force in all that we do as a department. (The rest of us were all hired by her over the past 1-10 years.)

Our 12:45 interviewee showed up in the standard MLA garb, heavy framed but TINY black glasses, black suit that would look great in a 1972 Italian movie, etc. No smile. Weak handshake.

After a dismal 30 minutes with condescending answers that sort of made us feel the interviewee had no desire to come to our collegial and chummy school, we had the following exchange.

Grand dame: Would you be at all interested in working with our undergrad society? They meet once a month to study relevant new ideas in the field, but really, it's more of an event to keep everyone in touch with each other.

Sour Sarah: Would it be a part of my tenure review?

Grand dame: Well, not officially, perhaps, but everything we do as a department and as colleagues is part of the life of the department.

Sour Sarah: I can't imagine I'd have the time. It seems that you people are the only school I'm interviewing with who still require scholars to teach a 4/4 load.

Grand dame: Well, yes, that's in the ad, in fact. I've been at [BLANK] College for 38 years and I still teach 4/4. I love the classroom. How else, then might you be a force in the lives of our undergrads?

Sour Sarah: I'd teach them rigorously, but they need to be left alone to fend for themselves. You're not doing any good organizing events for them.

Me: I think what Dr. [Grand Dame] is asking about is how might you play a role in helping develop our majors. I've only been at the school a year, and it's been a duty that I've come to understand is a challenge but also a reward.

Sour Sarah: I believe I've answered that. I'd teach my classes rigorously. The truth is my research agenda is full, and anything that takes me away from it is hurting my career. I am rather ambitious.

There was quiet at the table. My colleagues sort of looked back and forth. We had other questions, but nobody seemed interested in going on anymore.

Finally the grand dame said, "Well, we've enjoyed meeting you. You have a really wonderful background, and we will do our best to get back with you after the new year."

Sour Sarah stood up quickly, no proffer of handshakes and began stuffing her materials in her bag.

Grand dame: Well, we hope you have a nice time here for the rest of the conference. We were saying earlier that the timing of this is such a shame as a lot of us got pulled away from time with our families over Christmas.

Sour Sarah: It's okay for me because I don't believe in fairy tales anyway.

And then she was gone. After about ten seconds, the whole table just sort of started breaking up. We watched her disappear out of the hall and the grand dame said: "How does she get around with that stick up her butt?"

Harry From Hartford LiveBlogs From the MLA.

9:14 AM:

We are a tribe of gray suits, designer eyewear, and patterned hose. We are not polite. We hide our insecurities in a brusqueness that we hope will be taken for cool, but usually comes off as either haughty or pretentious. Contrary to popular assumptions, we are not a cuddly bunch, and we convey this with our stiff suits and even stiffer mannerism, both of which slide to the floor after one cheap cocktail. We love our cheap cocktails.

10:13 AM:

The crowds are swelling, and the unkempt and unshaven have been replaced by a sea of gray wool, also known as the academic cloaking device. I'm now trying to decide if going tieless will sufficiently distinguish me in the committees' minds, or if I'll need to resort to more drastic tactics, like, say, a beret. Unfortunately, I don't think I could pull off the beret, though that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone from making fashion decisions this morning.

1:31 PM:

MLA needs a soundtrack. Something other than piped-in muzak that sounds more like a ringtone than consciously produced art.

2:41 PM:

I don't know what jobseekers did to get themselves through the day before icanhascheesburger.com.

3:19 PM:

Patterned hose are not the same as a tie, and should not be used as such.--Given the choice of MLA without coffee or MLA without alcohol, I'd become an historian.

4:01 pm:

Food cannot be replaced with caffeine.

5:28 PM:
Is there anyone here whose feet don't hurt? I mean, other than the guy rockin' the suit-n-chucks, and that dude's arches are going to fall on him soon, and then we'll see who's all hip. And stuff.

11:01 PM:

I'm going to bed.

How Can We Slink Away if You Won't Leave Us Alone?

We stopped doing press early in 2007, and a slew of new inquiries has encouraged us to reiterate that. We're not interested in talking to pimply sophomore journos, or to their older (and almost as pimply) senior colleagues on those quaint dying institutions called newspapers.

RYS is run by a rotating handful of drunks (also academics). We spend hours every day trying to dream up new features that will stop people from reading the site so we can delete the whole thing and focus on our long irons.

We don't know anything, or give a shit about anything. This is a forum where folks can say it like they mean it. We've always encouraged our readers to send their pain to us. We choose a couple of pieces every day, separating the wheat from the whatever, and post items along with our "poorly imagined" and "amateurishly realized" graphics. We don't have a system. We keep no records. We anonymize things. We have poor taste. We're misogynists, we're heteronormative, we favor senior faculty, sometimes we favor junior faculty, we're hate-mongers, but sometimes saviors. We have terrible taste in music, and are probably all "fat and satisfied fucks, out of touch with the new bright generation of academics." We provide light entertainment, or are simply the bellwether of the end of civilization. We bring courage to the weak, but sometimes also eat them.

Anything you need to know about the site is on the site. If you hear it anywhere else, it's bullshit.

Gently,
RYS
Compound Calico
Compound Christina
Compound Cricket

Anaheim April Tries to Reason with RYS, a Page That Is Engineered to Run on Blather, Idiocy, Absinthe, and Ennui. "Moo U Is Not For Everyone."

Over the last month at RYS, job searchers have taken a real beating. It doesn't help that the searchers seem pretty tactless or unrealistic. But it's gotten predictable. Every time a Katie or a 1-38 pop up, we can just sit back and watch while senior faculty turn some kid's decision about his career into some implied condemnation of their careers. "Moo U is good enough for me, and so it's good enough for ANYBODY," the old guard huff in unison, before they go back to ordering generic Viagra online.

Only MOO U is not good enough for anybody, and those of us who have done our time at Moo U know this full well. Moo U's could avoid dealing with spoiled grads from top tier programs in big cities by hiring grads from other Moo U's in crap locations. But Moo U's don't seem to do that. So their own grads aren't good enough to hire. And what fun I had listening to my senior faculty colleagues brag about their children, who were students at Ivies and Top-Tiers. Their hands clasped, their eyes alight with pride and happiness, they'd gush that their little rosebuds were moving about among the elite. It seems quite clear what "good" is when it comes to little Johnny, and it's not Moo U or a lifetime in Crap Locale.

Thus by being obvious about their ambition, junior faculty fart out loud in the collective hush of mutually assured hypocrisy within their departments. They forget to pretend they'd be a fool to leave such a wonderful place because such wonderful senior faculty would never be anywhere that isn't wonderful, now would they? To admit otherwise salts the slug of the senior faculty ego, and there is only one way that can go, and it ain't your way, young grasshopper.

Senior faculty fall into five groups with regard to searching, and all except a tiny few are likely to resent junior faculty searching.

Group 1. Secretly aspiring settlers
The first group are those who secretly think they are top tier material but have never really tested their market value because they are really attached to Moo U for whatever reasons, few if any of which actually pertain to the loyalty they expect you to feign. They have to believe that Moo U is grand because they have sacrificed their ambitions for it, so it must be, simply has to be, so darn wunnerful that it's all been worth it. If you reject the Speshul Location, you reject a big part of their identity. That's just bad senior faculty ego-tending there, sport.

Group 2: Unsuccessful seekers
The second group are those who secretly think they are top tier material but have tested their market value and come up empty. This group is especially dangerous. They resent you for looking because there is a chance you may succeed. If you do not succeed, they will glory in it, but they will also put you at their level, which in their innermost selves they call "loser."

Group 3: People who never/seldom look because they generally have what they want
This is the group that everybody pretends to be in. Of the 20 people pretending to belong to this group, one actually does. This person, chances are, is nice, secure, and well-adjusted. He will be sad that you are looking, or possibly annoyed because searches are expensive and time-consuming, but he doesn't over-identify with either the location or the department and won't think much about you regardless of what happens next.

Group 4: People who look and dangle external offers constantly or near constantly
This group doesn't think about you enough to care what you do; in theory, they get what you are doing. For Group 4, academic free agency put money in their pockets, reduced their course loads, and got them fancy dancy titles. At Moo U, our star senior faculty (the guy my chair told me to model myself on) posted to the discipline's ENTIRE NATIONAL EMAIL LISTSERV saying that he was leaving and that other departments could feel free to court him. He did at least stop short of listing himself on Ebay. Senior snowflake had only been in the department for five years, had spent that time using external offers to wring everything but the piss out of the dean and the provost while teaching at most 14 students a year. But failure to land an external offer in front of Group 4 is bad news because they will put you in Group 2, and openly think 'loser' when they look at you. They think nothing of turning on the weak like a rabid wolverine when it suits them, and no offers makes you look even weaker than you are as a junior in the first place.

Group 5: Chairs, the poor suckers
This is a group of one, but he or she has a real problem with your looking. If his buddies at other universities call him, he has to say nice things about you, otherwise it reflects poorly on his department and him. But if you get an external offer, then there are even more problems. If you leave, he's stuck searching. If he tries to retain you, you become at least a temporary if not permanent member of Group 4, and members of Group 4 are a PITA. With an external offer, you contribute to salary compression--the minefield of senior faculty egos that Poor Hapless Chair must now cross because of little you. Yea verily, nothing pulls the phoney baloney "this is a calling, not a job" fake Santa beard off the senior faculty faster than compression, and from Groups 1 through 3 there will arise a whinge of apocalyptic proportions when they find out junior is "only making X less" than they are. That's in addition to the snark that will accompany you if you stay with a higher salary. Headaches, headaches, headaches, headaches galore for the poor hapless chair and you.

So here's the protip, gang. When you search, do not--repeat, do not--use departmental letterhead. Do not confide in your "mentor." Do not confide in anybody in the department, ever, actually. Keep your cards next to your chest; these people are not your friends no matter how decent they may be.

Conference Report from Schenectady Skeptinautika.

Skeptinautika here, reporting from The Onanistic Thinkers Association's annual flesh fest... um, job market conference? Well, *I* plan on making extensive use of the hot tub, anyway ;-) Can we say last-minute bikini purchase to combat the pre-interview jitters? I wonder if alcohol's allowed in the pool area...

Yep, three interviews. Count 'em: uno, dos, TRES, fuckers, all on the same day. I have friends with nine and twelve, so I'm under no illusions that I am *not* Elle Superstar this year, but I'm pretty pleased with the yield. And here's the deal, bitches: I ACTUALLY love teaching. I would be perfectly blissful at a reasonably liberal SLAC in any major metropolitan area (or any SLAC, really, were it not for El Partner). So how do I convey that effectively in an interview without sounding like I'm trying to plant my lips on the committee's collective hind parts?

Enough navel-gazing; I know what you came for. Backstabbing! Angst! Bitchiness! Skin skin skin! Well, the registration line was (as usual) out the door. People, is it REALLY that hard to register online ahead of time? You can figure out Turnitin.com, but not the professional organization's website? Asswipes. And similarly for the placement line. Dudes, if you read the conference program, you already know everything that the nice lady in the front of the line is going to tell you. Promise. She will not be impressed if you throw a tantrum because of the "inefficiency" of the system, and you *really* don't want to get on her bad side. Promise. Rushed a Greek house in college? You already know how this works, then, so don't be a dumbass.

And yes, I'm going to play the on-site interview game. I already submitted two requests, in fact, though I'll wet myself if I actually get one. I got all kinds of hairy eyeballs from the other people in the placement line for making small talk with the (shockingly friendly) guys next to me in line. People, I know that we have a reputation for being arrogant bastards, but can we at least pretend like we don't hate each others' guts? Cuz that would be AWESOME. This goddamn conference is about the only place where even *I* feel like a Pollyanna. Just because some of us will walk away and never get a call for a flyout does NOT mean that we have to treat each other like assholes.

And now for the obligatory hating on the hotel: I have to *pay* for wifi?!? SERIOUSLY?!? (I'm stealing a signal now.) You mean my $400 wasn't enough to get me access to a weak-ass Internet signal? Lame, Marriott. LAME, forcing me to go off in search of unprotected signals to poach. Fuckers.

Off in search of sustenance...

Layla from Lounsberry Reports from the MLA in San Francisco.

When you get a job, often the first sigh of relief comes with the realization, "I don't have to go to MLA any more!" Regardless of the location, it's always the same: thousands of anxious job seekers poison the host city with an adrenaline surge more potent than Pat Robertson's followers experienced on November 4th. It's bad enough to have to seek out the creepy hotel rooms where many interviews happen, candidates buzzing upstairs to be admitted like nervous call girls; worse, many interview at the Job Center -- usually a vast ballroom filled wall-to-wall with tables where a lone candidate may face another interrogator or even a whole range of them along with hundreds of other candidates simultaneously. My very first job interview was one of these.

My visions of hell, consequently, generally involve the MLA interview pit.

Of course once you experience that momentary euphoria, the thought will come -- perhaps not for months -- that you are going to end up back at MLA and on the other side of that table. It's horrifying. Worse yet, if you're stupid like me, you got on an executive committee (well, it looked good on the CV when you were job hunting) so you have to go even if you're not interviewing folks for your department. Best of all, if your first job isn't the one you want to keep, you may have to juggle both positions at once, finding some excuse to run off in the midst of interviewing far too many candidates to do your own interview while seeming relaxed and at ease and the perfect colleague.

Piece of cake, right?

The worst of the process is to be the job seeker. No doubt about it: too many candidates and to few jobs and the lingering suspicion that it's all arbitrary in the end. It is. Sorry -- there are so many applications for any job in the humanities, that the first rule of thumb is throw out anyone you can. Rule two is toss anyone who pisses you off for ANY reason. Anything to cut it down to a manageable number for MLA interviews. At my previous job, there wasn't much cutting, so we interviewed such a broad swath of candidates that we couldn't keep them straight. I'm not advocating wearing a neon tie or polka dot stockings, but make sure there's something that fixes you firmly in the memories of the interviewers. Because all the candidates have brilliant dissertations, excellent teaching records and glowing letters of rec. We remembered the guy who picked coconuts for a summer job in college. I wore Doc Martens to my current job's interview. Did it help? Did it hurt? Did anyone even notice? I don't really know.

Of course there are all kinds of ways NOT to be remembered: there was the hopeless candidate locked in the stairwell with no exit because she was nervous about elevators or the one whose bag fell over spilling a veritable pharmacy of drugs across the floor. Watch for that nervous tic: you don't want the interviewers to be thinking, "If he touches his hair one more time I'm going to scream," when they should be thinking about how terrific you'll be in the classroom.

I avoided all the MLA hotels today -- I wanted to enjoy the city and see my old friends. Tomorrow, it begins. I have interviews to conduct, a lunch meeting, a cash bar and a panel to attend. My fellow interviewer spent the evening going over the candidates' files. I went out for a nice meal, caught a movie and had some wine. So it goes. Whose colleague do you want to be? Will you be able to tell which of us is the slacker? Would it make a difference?

Nobody Gets Tired Of the Old School Smackdown. Well, Some Do. But Lots of Folks Like To Tell Us That This Is What We're SUPPOSED to Post. Every Day.

Cuddly Carla: You're cute and you're stupid. You've gone a long way on a quarter tank of gas. Be grateful for what you've accomplished and now leave the university. I hear Starbucks is hiring.

Addled Angela: You are an overly anxious student. Get some pills - fast.

Kenny Keener: Yes, you passed. You have an A. You always get A's. I checked your transcript. You have straight A's. Maybe I should give you a B so you know what it feels like.

Busty Bertha: No, you're not cute. No, you're not funny. You are annoying. And please put on a shirt that fits you. I'm tired of looking at your cleavage. Everybody is tired of looking at your cleavage.

Teasing Trixie: I know you like me. I read your review of me on ratemyprofessor.com. I knew you wrote it. You're the only student this semester who has had the balls to call me by my first name. It still won't work. You have a B! Deal with it.

Itchy Ian: I will have dreams well into the next decade with you in them pulling at your dick. Take a shower and use powder afterwards. Scratching and pulling at your crotch every twenty seconds is annoying to everyone around you.

Annoying Anthony: Get a fucking life and somewhere far from me. Your cute little comments before and after class were the verbal equivalent of water boarding.

Patty Pal: Oh, my little snowflake, I'm sorry but have you mistaken me for a friend? I'm not interested in seeing pictures of your boyfriend, your parents, your sisters and your kitty cat. I'm really not interested in you. You have mistaken me for someone other than a professor who is paid crap to teach you a subject you really don't like. Go away, little girl.

A Morality Tale - In Three Movements.

To: Professor X
From: Trusty TA

Soooo sorry about the message from Snivelling Sick Snowflake that I just sent on to you. What a brat! She seems to have no respect for authority! I have no idea why she felt the need to write all of that to me. It made me sooo mad, especially the part about discrimination! Let me know if there's anything I can do to help you with this situation!!

+++++++++++++++++

To: Trusty TA
From: Sniveling Sick Snowflake (aka Bratty McBratty)

Hi Trusy TA, I went to e-learning and that should be where the grades are supposed to be, but lately the My Grades tab isn't showing.I've attached a photo showing what the screen looks like on my side. Secondly, I've already spoken to [evil instructor] before I wrote to you or dropped the report off in your mailbox. Although she said to you that she'll give me half credit, I will emphasize that she did write in her own syllabus that she'll give full credit to those who have a valid doctor's note and turn the assignment in at least within a week. Unless she has plagiarized that syllabus and made it her own and does not know what her own syllabus is, I suggest she look over it and realize that that is what she wrote as a policy. I can continue taking this argument up with her and the chair and any other [school] policy maker and continue to shorten her vacation or she will fairly grade my report with full credit. I've made it convenient for her to e-mail her about my last missed exam and walked to her office and dropped doctor's notes off in her office. So she takes extra work upon herself to check if the notes are real and continue to accuse me by e-mailing and interrogating why and how I got sick. People get sick. There's no motive behind that. Once again I've given her a valid doctor's note and she can check up on it's validity once more. Unless she wants a written letter from the Pope, I've gotten enough validity to receive full credit. She cannot make up some bullshit about her syllabus or policies or attendance last minute especially if it is an attack singularly on a student like me. I again can take this up with a higher authority due to discrimination. I have a doctor's note, the doctor exists, he did write the note, I was sick, I was present in the doctor's offices, I did call-in sick, and I turned the report in within a week. Therefore there should be no problem in giving me my full credit. She cannot judge me for my illness or absences due to my illnesses. That is unfair treatment and again this can be taken up by a higher authority. I really do hope you give her a copy of this letter since she wants me to go to a T.A. first and she doesn't want to fairly talk to me personally.

+++++++++++++

To: Bratty

From: Professor X

Brat, Trusty TA just forwarded me your message. You don't think I'm willing to talk to you? An interesting criticism, coming from someone who doesn't have the guts to e-mail her threats to me directly.

And you ought to thank your stars that I 've been letting Trusty TA deal with you so far—if I had been getting your crap in my in-box every day, I would have ripped you a new one by now. Please allow me to explain why.

First, it's interesting you just happened to be terribly, tragically sick at precisely the times when the midterm and a major research paper were due. Yeah, this would be possible. No reason why I should be suspicious about a doctor's note from a city 400 miles away from campus, where you somehow managed to be in the middle of the term, nowhere near any long weekends or other academic holidays. Oh yeah, you said you had to go there because you don't have insurance, so you mom had to come to campus and drive you home to see a doctor there. The free student health clinic here on campus, affiliated with a respected medical school, is apparently not good enough for you.

Well, I was intrigued enough to call the doctor's office to check out your excuse. Weird how the teenybopper who answered the phone knew your name immediately when I mentioned it, but froze up when I asked what dates you were there. She said your charts had been lost. Isn't that convenient?

I've never been to a doctor's office where the schedule book wasn't right by the phone in the front office. Either you travelled 400 miles to visit the world's worst-run doctor's office, or you need to prep your friends a little better when they're covering for you.

Still, I gave you the benefit of a doubt and let you take the midterm three weeks after everyone else, and you surprised me by actuallty passing it, albeit by a narrow margin.

I thought that after this, you might actually get your act together, and in your own special way, you did. Your next series of doctor's notes—which you barged into my office unannounced to give me—were from the student health clinic on campus, whose existence you must have just discovered. You were there two days before the final paper was due, and got a note from them three days after the paper was due.

Trusty TA points out that the student health clinic is within walking distance of our department—if you were well enough to get there on Wednesday (even in subpar condition) you were certainly well enough to drop your paper by our offices on Friday when it was due. Or at the very least, well enough to e-mail one of us to let us know what your situation was. But no. Instead you come waltzing into my office a week later with your Leona Helmsley-level of entitlement, telling (not asking) me that I had to give your unexcused late paper full credit. And of course you're doing ME a huge favor and doing ALL THIS EXTRA WORK by blowing into my office and telling me how to do my job!

And I love how you're threatening to take away my vacation time (I don't get any, honey) if I don't give you full credit. And how you're going to complain to my chair and anyone else in authority that I'm discriminating against you. I'm sure the three other students from your put-upon minority group who are pulling straight-As in my other classes—and who are planning on taking classes with me next term too—would find this claim highly entertaining.

Oh yes, I've talked to my department chair about this. I actually mentioned you to him a few months ago, just after the midtern incident, so he knows your story. And would be delighted to talk to you.

And just so you know, the last student who was brought before out chair for academic misconduct was arrested and expelled for making threats and disturbing the peace. The chair didn't tell me if the arrest was related to the meeting or not. I'm just saying.

So bring it on, Brat. We're waiting for you.

"It's Got To Be Longer." (That's What She Said!)

So we got back to the compound after Christmas and found nothing but coal for us in our stockings. Sure, there was a new blender from "Santa Claus," but we think Compound Calico just bought it for himself and put a big bow on it, because that's how that motherfucker rolls.

It's a weird time of the year. Everyone understands the summer break. Three months minimum. Recharge those batteries. Go to Spain and drink or go to Ireland and drink or go to the 7-Eleven and drink. It's wondrous.

But the short break between Fall and Spring has always made us uncomfortable. Those of us with year-end conferences in the gap are fucked even more. What holiday? We went to work in the Spring once and found that our plants were still alive in our offices, the coffee pot's amber light still on and waiting for our return.

It sucks. And if you live in the north, you get all the cold and the snow. You can't even go outside in your capris and flip flops. Well, you can, but you shouldn't.

It sounds so nice, Christmas break. Winter break. But it's just a bitch. We know from experience that we're just getting into our groove when we're called back.

We wish it were longer.

Anyway, mail replies will be spotty from now until mid-January. We've got a number of posts (including some more convention updates) in the queue that will appear in the interim, but, seriously, just don't worry about the fucking job, okay? Those goons in administration. The asshole colleagues. The insane, inane, and oh-so-precious snowflakes.

Make some "me" time for yourself. Smoke 'em if you've got 'em.

We Often Get Fan Letters Like This, And We Feel Badly If We Don't Post One Every Now and Again. Tina From Topeka: PWD.

File under "wish I could say this to my prof" but I can't. :P

It's like...I know her. We chat in her office all the time. (I work up there, so I see her beyond class.) I know that she left a mostly research job because she is really interested in teaching. I'm in a pre-medical field. Most profs are like ---) this, this, and this. Here's my awesome point-by-point PowerPoint. It's so black or white. It's more of a quantity over quality, rote memorization.

So when this Very Smart Lady kind of wings her lectures...it's not what is expected. (Most of my peers: "she's too smart to be teaching this, we don't understand what she says!") She doesn't tell you what to write down in your notes. Maybe that's why I got an A in the class. You have to listen, parse, write it down in your own words. I love it.

I know that ya'all know about the good students but really. I love this prof. Not in a weird super-keener sort of way. Her teaching made me want to change my major. I want to emulate this incredibly smart woman. I want to know what she knows.

I may or may not being PWD (posting while drunk) but still. The best profs make you want to know more. But I love to read, love to learn. My: "so what else should I read?" are not the sucking-up stuffs. Some of us want to learn. Some of us even own library cards.

So yeah. THERE!

111 :D :O

Alicorn Al from Altoona Ratchets Up the Holiday Spirit And Wins 2008's Last "Prick of the Week."

Archie from Allentown is an Azzhole.

For all the indignation he has for his "grad-flakes," one must wonder if he's just a Gumdrop Unicorn Gone Gray. He's no better than the jerks he's criticizing.

Who created the Gumdrop Unicorns of Academe? They didn't spontaneously emerge from some disembodied womb out by the quad. They're the spitting image of people like Angry Archie, whose little diatribe against people desperate to find work went beyond exploring the fallacies of wikiphilia. Oh no, Archie said all sorts of smack about grad-flakes who should KNOW BETTER than to actually expect their supervisors DO THEIR FUCKING JOBS and mentor their advisees into their prospective disciplines.

Oh no, Archie thinks everyone off the tenure-track is just jealous of his glorious specialness. Except, well, Archie, sweetness... MOST OF US WORK AT THE SAME FUCKING PLACE YOU DO FOR A FRACTION OF THE SALARY. Oh, that's right...IT'S ALL OUR FAULT. Yeah, you (and those like you) can lie about job prospects, can encourage us to do crap research nobody fucking cares about, can make us do your menial bidding while you get paid more than we'll ever make, or, even worse, do the same exact fucking job as you do ...for peanuts. Yes, much like the woman wearing a short skirt is just ASKING FOR IT, all grad students should just sit back and bask in your glory as we endure your self-congratulatory bukkake as you deal out the smackdown. Thanks, Archie...you're such an inspiration!

Yeah, so... FUCK YOU, ARCHIE! Someone's dissertation isn't up to your standard? Well, goll-lee... I sure do guess there must be some idiot out there somewhere whose standards are lower than yours. There's a shocker.

How much does YOUR school pay grad students to do your grading for you? To do your research? To teach your classes when you're out of town? Are you kind to your grad-flakes? Are you a good mentor?

The whole Gumdrop Unicorn phenomenon goes beyond Katie from Kalamazoo and new tenure-stream faculty. I think Archie and a whole bunch of RYS readers [including you buttmuching "editors"] need to take a big, long look in the mirror.

Your alicorn is showing.

Flabbergasted Fred From Farnham Suspects Some Subterfuge.

"Flabbergasted" is a word that I don't often have occasion to use, and I'll willingly retract it given a suitable alternative to describe my state of drooling disbelief when, driven by the usual sordid motives, I took a peek at the site that shall not be named this morning.

There was the customary blend of half-hearted cocksucking and indignant bitchery, and I have no problem with that. To be honest, I'm pretty chuffed to see my students actually taking the trouble to formulate and express an opinion, which is more than most of them contributed to the intellectual tundra that was my class this semester.

No, what really gasted my flabber was one rating in particular: a bare-knuckle critique of my teaching competence and general personal demeanor, purportedly penned by one of my darling sophomores. You'll perhaps forgive me the theatricality of playing Holmes to your Watson, omitting to elaborate a chain of elementary deductions and jumping straight to the spectacular conclusion; in short, I'm fairly certain that this particular puddle of vitriol was actually spewed by one of my "colleagues."

Fuck.

I mean, pardon me, but that's not cricket. That's not even major-league baseball.

I readily acknowledge the competitive nature of today's society, in particular as it finds expression in the hair-pulling, name-calling, back-stabbing shit-fight that is modern academia. The hordes long ago sacked the ivory tower here at BAs-R-Us, and I've come to accept as a blessing any day where I'm buggered only in the figurative sense.

But please, anything but this.

Scoring cheap points in front of the big-wigs during faculty meetings? Par for the course! Filling my classroom with that cheap, eraser-retardant chalk on the day of my peer observation? I dig! Anonymous tip-off to the dean re: my nascent cheerleader fetish? Hey, I'd have done the same! But---for the love of Godot---narking me out to the herd?? What were you thinking??

Alright, I confess: I spent the whole semester ranting about my pea-brained students...and then feverishly fired up the http immediately upon sending out my grades, just to watch those same students take a collective, IP-obfuscated dump on everything that I tried to accomplish over the past 14 weeks. It's a sickness of mine, and I'm ashamed to own up to it.

But in my book, there's still a wide margin between the people who watch the scat films, and the people who make them. And I'm now going to spend the next 14 weeks wondering which of my fellow cubicle-dwellers has gone over to the dark side.

Bewildered Belinda With Some Boxing Day Smackdown.

Present Patty, an online student who never participated in one discussion, never did one assignment, and didn't take a single exam. When I dropped her at midterm, she wanted to know why, so I responded that she was not participating in the course. She responded, "But I've logged in each week and pressed the 'click here for attendance' button." I've apparently been teaching finger aerobics and didn't know it.

Hard to Remember Rodney, who claimed that he was failing my course due to a "short term memory" disability that made it difficult for him to remember and recall things on an exam, especially since mine were so hard. If I really cared about my students, I would make my questions easier and not require so much "memory skill." Well, howdy doody buddy. I support accommodations for learning disabilities, but this is ridiculous. I hate to break it to you, Einstein, but years ago, your problem wasn't called a "short term memory disability," it was called STUPID.

Gail with the Gall, who missed the final exam because she didn't pay attention to the syllabus or the gazillion announcements in class as to when it was. When she came begging to make it up, I reminded her that the syllabus indicates YOU CANNOT MISS THE FINAL EXAM. The little snot filed a grade complaint, which was later denied and her grade kept the same as I had given it. But here's the kicker---a few weeks later she came to me because she couldn't get into one of my higher-level classes since she had not passed my introductory course....would I be willing to waive the prerequisite for her? Um, I would rather stick a fork in my eye. In my other one too.

Bitsy Bladder, who came into class 15 minutes late every day, only to get up to "use the restroom" 15 minutes after that, and then leave 10 minutes early. I'd like to think that her skin-tight-camel-toe-creating jeans were pressing on her bladder and thus causing her to have bathroom issues, but it's more likely they were just cutting off oxygen to her already atrophied brain.

Gordon-Needs-A-Guide, who called me in my office 10 minutes after the final exam ended to leave a loud and rude message on my voicemail that said, "Your study guide was bogus. You had stuff on there that wasn't on the exam, and stuff on the exam that wasn't on the study guide. That's not fair! That's not how study guides are supposed to work!!!" Thanks to you dipshit, I will no longer be giving out study guides. Hope your friends kick your ass when I mention this in class.

Heartbroken Hattie, who found a way to relate every single topic covered in class to her loser ex-boyfriend. The sheer number of eyes rolling every time she opened her mouth almost made me motion sick.

Ralphing Rita, who missed the last 3 weeks of the semester due to "drinking too much" and then called the day before the final exam, asking if I would reserve a classroom and teach her everything she missed. Rita, if I did that, I would be the one with the drinking problem.

And finally, Ludditic Lisa, an online student who emailed me 3 weeks into the semester and said, "I'm not sure I'm getting this online class thing. I'm not very good with computers. I don't even have one."

Yulest. College. Student. Ever.

Nicholas of Myra (Saint Nicholas)

Monastery of Holy Zion

3rd Century AD

What We Think When You Go On the Market And Then Come Back. (Continued.)

While we've already posted some replies for "Dr. 1-38," we saved this one so it'd have a little more space. Enjoy:

Oh, you precious, beautiful, bone-headed dumb bunny.

You may not have interpreted your non-stop prattle about the intricacies of your job search as arrogant, or dismissive of your current position, but I can guaran-damn-tee that they were interpreted as such. Dismissive? You made it clear that you were applying to thirty-eight other places -- some not even technically in your specialty -- just to get away from the festering Hell-hole that your colleagues call home and are fairly happy toiling in. Oh, it's good enough for THEM, but your Majesty deserves a place more befitting Majesty's research goals, or Majesty's image of where s/he SHOULD be...or Majesty's fucked-up job competition with friends.

You took a 4/4, and now you're whining about the teaching? Teaching is an integral part of the job, and you're going to be teaching at any institution you manage to sleaze in to. In fact, the lower you are on the tenure totem, the more you teach. No one gives a damn about your research goals when there are scads of freshmen to be herded through the veal pens of core curriculum and 100-level intro courses.

Did you screw your tenure and promotion process? I don't know -- you've demonstrated that you're willing to jump ship as soon as a viable opportunity offers itself. Why would that lack of loyalty and discernment damage your chances at tenure? Why should they even bother, if you're going to scurry off like a rat looking for another, more odoriferous dumpster -- one more befitting your lofty research goals?

Will your colleagues have long memories? Hell, yes they will. You've already condemned yourself as unreliable and untrustworthy -- why should they offer any positions of longevity or trust? Word has a way of spreading -- your colleagues have their own network of friends at other institutions and cronies on other hiring committees, and (depending on your field) the world is small and round -- and this is likely to come back to bite you in the ass.

Welcome to the self-imposed academic doldrums!

Angry Archie from Allentown Dusts Off the Wiki Generation.

Archie, one of this year's convention correspondents, is off to a big convention in a frozen solid city somewhere. But on his way he's filed this wacky wiki post that we'd like to share with you. We think we're in love with him.

Raise your hand if you know about the Job Wiki. If you don’t, check it out: it is an unguided tour through the rocky shoals of upper-division snowflakiness. I discovered the thing because some of my grad-flakes mentioned it to me. Big mistake that was. Don't they know never to let their flake-flag fly in public?

Anyway, I’m on a search committee this year, so I went to see what the world of wiki-flakes was saying about our search. Afterwards I felt dirty and soiled, kind of like when you slow down to rubberneck at the scene of an accident and what you see is an 86 Camaro that rear-ended an 86 Mazda pickup, and two dudes with mulletts who just escaped from the trailer park and clearly have no insurance are duking it out because they both wanted to play real-life Grand Turismo 5 on the freeway at rush hour. So to spare you the pain, or perhaps to get you to go rubber-neck too, I am offering the following guide to the job wiki. Caveat Emptor: I looked at the wiki in my discipline, but it looks like there is one for every discipline. So just choose your particular poison and enjoy snowflakery at its finest.

The putative purpose of the wiki is to disseminate information that those evil search committees refuse to share with the precious and sensitive little applicants. People post when they get solicited for additional material, or when they are called for a conference interview or campus visit. Some people post really useless queries like “so who has heard what they are looking for?” as if any of the other grad-flakes on the wiki would know, and as if this information would actually be helpful given that the committee members won't really know until they actually dive into the giant pile of raw sewage otherwise known as the search files. Then other wiki-flakes respond with totally inaccurate information—at least in the case of the search I’m on—but they state it with such conviction that all the other wiki-flakes believe them.

Going back through the search files, I can now see exactly who the ten credulous knuckleheads who like to check the wiki are, because rather than respond to the ad we posted, they applied for the job the other shifty snowflake who was talking out his ass described. So here’s a hint to get you through the day fucknuts: when you write your letter, respond to the ad, not to what some shitneck who very probably wants you to fail posted on the wiki. Haven't you ever heard of sample size? We got just south of 200 applicants for our job, while there are probably fifty people engaging in a non-stop circle jerk on the wiki, only five of whom were applicants to our job. They can't know anything of any use and neither can you, so stop pretending you can. You are like conspiracy theory whackos who only talk to other likeminded idiots.

Job searches are not linear. That is to say, writing samples turn out to be insanely bad, conference interviewees wet their pants in the interview room in ways you never thought possible, and campus finalists turn out to be raving alcoholics who can’t hold it together for the entire q&a session without self-medicating in front of the whole room. You cannot conclude anything from the fact that we solicited circle-jerker number two for writing on November the 4th . You just can’t. And if you do, you are laboring under a serious misapprehension about how the whole process works. We might still call you, and we might be willing to take you seriously, but now you’ve done gone and fucked the dog, by convincing yourself that you are second or third string because you read it from one of the other onanistic conspiracy theorists on the wiki. Then you show up and act all sullen because you've decided we suck, when we were probably desperate to find even one candidate who is able to answer the simplest and most direct questions about his or her work without drooling on the floor, going off on idiotic tangents, or lapsing into a convulsive fit of uhms and aahs while stalling for time. See how that works? Everybody loses unless you just say no to the wiki-crack.

But to witness the real grad-flakiness in action, go to the discussion section of the wiki. This is where the little weasels go to cry about how they have sand in their panties and the search committees are all a bunch of big nasty unfeeling bullies. Among the things these little wiki-flakes would like are personalized rejection letters in which the committee explains the specific, individualized reasons for their rejection. I have never seen so many pussies sitting around complaining about not getting a rejection letter before.

Here's another hint to get you through tomorrow, schlongmeier: if a couple of years go by and you haven't heard from us, you can pretty much stop daydreaming about what it would be like to have the office next to the men's room in our building. You really don't need a piece of letterhead to tell you that. How does that soften the blow anyway? Do you really want me to tell you that you could be Edward Fucking Gibbon reincarnated and it wouldn’t matter because the dissertation topic you chose is so fucking lame that I couldn’t get through the first paragraph of your job letter without choking on my bagel? Or do you really want to know that your writing sample sucked worse than Greg the Grade-Grubber’s undergraduate thesis, and I don't give a fuck that it got accepted at the southern states quarterly newsletter for retarded librarians, and that at this point I'm mostly curious to know exactly what kind of heroin your dissertation committee was mainlining before your defense? Or do you really want to know exactly how you wet your pants in the interview room and how big the stain was?

If you stop and think about it for a minute, you probably already know, so hearing it from me on letterhead would just serve to further humiliate you. Or would it help to know that you seemed pretty competent, but there was this other person who was just a little more competent, or whose research we liked just a little better, or who filled a bigger hole in the department than the one you would have filled, or who had a book out and another in press, and that I actually think you will get a job sooner or later? Maybe it would, but you would just reject that as bullshit boilerplate, so why should I fucking bother? You either don’t want to know, or you wouldn’t believe me anyway.

Hey man, the job market sucks. I tell every under-flake who comes into my office wanting to become a grad-flake that they are in for seven or eight years of poverty and humiliation in grad school, plus another two or three post-doc years of job searching before they will be able to dream of a regular paycheck that might cover their expenses; that they will likely fail at some stage; and that their grad school won't give crap, because by grading papers and running sections/labs they will have fulfilled their function as the academic equivalents of the Guatemalan dishwasher over at Wendy's.

If no one told you all that, well shame on them. If you didn’t figure it out on your own by the end of your first year of grad school, then you are a fucking sub-moron or you weren’t paying attention while Big-Name-U was reaming you without even offering you a courtesy reach-around. The truth is that you all knew what you were getting into, but you just figured you would be the one to beat the odds. Now the odds are giving you the beat-down of a lifetime, so you are blaming me for the fact that you spent most of a decade in deep denial about the viability of your shitty dissertation about the cultural semiotics of Joe Namath, and are now entering the phase of deep denial about the fact that you got a pity-pass from your heroin-addled dissertation committee, none of whom had the heart to give you a little reality-check. Perhaps it is a testament to the bitterness of the readership of RYS that one of the whiners in the discussion section of the wiki posted a link to it as an illustration of what a shitty profession this is and what assholes we, the people with jobs are.

Then there’s this guy who decided to put his wiki-generated disillusionment to work in a righteously indignant blog. I was with him right up until the point when he pulled the “white men can’t get academic jobs anymore” line out of his pants and started spraying the walls, just like my Camaro-driving cousin does to his trailer after a couple of six packs of Busch lite. But that’s another story. He also lost me when he petered out after five pathetic days and four posts. Five days? That’s all you’ve got bitch? If that’s all the concentrated rage and indignation you could muster after eight years of getting bent over the desk, then I can pretty much tell you why you ain’t getting a job this year ... or ever. You lack stamina son. If you don’t believe me, ask your girlfriend, if you have one after eight years in grad school. Or did you stop posting your rage because you got called for an interview at Southern Ozarks Mining College (school motto: where students go for reading knowledge), and now the sun is shining on your ass again? Either way, you suck donkey ass and so does the job wiki.

Bite me,

Archie

What To Do When You Go (LOUDLY) On the Job Market And Come Up Short. Some Quenching - if Bitter - Replies.

We thought we might get a mixed bag of mail for yesterday's "Dr. 1-For-38," but we've been overly optimistic before. The flava is below, and tomorrow we've saved a couple of longer pieces Please to enjoy:

• You're an ass-clown who deserves what you get. If you hadn't said anything, they might have sucked up to you out of fear that you would try to go elsewhere. Now they know you've tried and failed. Good luck negotiating merit raises in the future, chum-p. They've got you by the short hairs, and thanks to your big mouth, they know it.


• I'd like to cut you a break because I've occasionally gone on the job market while in a position. What I didn't do, however, was "bore" my current colleagues with my dreamy search. That sounds like such arrogance and plain ignorance that I can't even come up with an analogy that might fit. You surely know the one that goes: "So I get married, but I tell my wife I'm only going to stay with her as long as a prettier girl doesn't happen to come by." (Oh, and I'm not even 1-38 in THAT game.)


• Forget about how little teaching and how much research is expected, it's the personal interactions that make the biggest difference. It sounds like you work with some A+ faculty. Appreciate that. Take your colleagues out to lunch, tell them how thankful you are for their support, say that you now see what a great place this is to work and admit that you were foolish not to see that before.


• Straight, no chaser: You've been blackballed. And you owe your colleagues NOTHING.


• I'm dying to know what happened when you returned the extra letterhead to the chair. I hope he/she said, "Uh, darling? Keep it. You're going to need it next year anyway."


• Perhaps your colleagues were cordial and friendly about your desire to move on because they don't want you around if you don't want to be there. No bait and switch, friend. They want you gone because you clearly don't see yourself in the role of a solid-to-excellent professor who does the daily (and often very meaningful) labor of teaching, mentoring students, etc. If you worked at my school, I would try to help you find another job because I don't need any more complainers who whine about how hard it is to teach 3 or 4 classes a semester. It is what it is, and as paid labor goes, teaching 3 or 4 classes a term is great labor.


• You screwed the pooch. You've absolutely done damage to your tenure-track plans there. They will ALWAYS think of you as a caster-about. They're going to imagine - whether it's true or not - that you're in your office scouring the job ads every single year from now on. Get used to that.


• I've been caught in the same trap. And it's not pretty when you can't escape. I was treated differently at my institution. I can't prove it, but the semester after it happened to me I was replaced on the plum committee, the long term curriculum reform. I understood. If I wasn't planning on being here, what good would it do to get my ideas for the future of a school I wanted to get out of? Your mistake was blabbing about your search. Many people do it on the down-low, and now you know.


• Just tell them thanks for their support, that they’re great colleagues. They sound like great colleagues.


• You may not have interpreted your non-stop prattle about the intricacies of your job search as arrogant, or dismissive of your current position, but I can guaran-damn-tee that they were interpreted as such. Dismissive? You made it clear that you were applying to thirty-eight other places just to get away from the festering Hell-hole that your colleagues call home and are fairly happy toiling in. Oh, it's good enough for THEM, but your Majesty deserves a place more befitting Majesty's goals. [See the rest of this post tomorrow!]

Shloyme from Sacramento Blogging from the Association for Jewish Studies Conference

This isn’t really the blog I intended because the f***g hotel (Grand Hyatt indeed!) didn’t have internet service unless you were a registered guest and I was staying with grad school friends in Georgetown. Charging extra for using the internet at an academic conference is about as obnoxious as the fee I had to pay to check my FIRST bag at the airport.

On the morning of the conference I woke up at four to double-check the time for my interview and realized that I had screwed it up by several hours—confused a coffee date with the interview time. Got up and spent the next two hours on the web reading up on the department that is doing the hire. My first thought is: I'm fucked. I forgot that someone in the field whose work is utter shit—outdated exceptionalist triumphalist shit—is a bigwig in the department. Luckily he wasn’t at the interview.

The position is a really big step up from my current one and I want this job. I’ve been at my current one for 2 years now—a 3-4 teaching load at a college that thinks it’s a serious research institute but does nothing actually to support research other than to tell us we’re not doing enough research (while yanking our research funds). Happily, the interview went really well. But like every search that I’ve heard about, they weren’t confident that there will be any money to make a hire—even if they are allowed to do flybacks. Friends with interviews at other schools were told the same thing. I learned that some schools skipped the conference stage altogether so as to lock in their pick before the well runs dry. They actually held campus visits during finals week.

Like everywhere, the buzz at the AJS was all about the economic crisis. Surprising, however, was the extent to which people were really freaking out about it. Besides that, there were very few jobs available—the whole Madoff affair means that Jewish philanthropists are cutting way back on their annual donations to programs. Worse still is that endowments for Jewish Studies programs are in freefall. Yeshiva University—as was announced in today’s NYTimes—is out 110 million bucks. One of the serious bigwigs who has supported dozens of academic programs around the US is reportedly out 1/3 of his money because of Madoff. We’re fucked. People who are on the market for the first time are doubly-fucked, because postdocs (which were once in abundance and were a reliable backup plan) are going to dry up even faster. Judaic Studies had been a great field (job-wise at least) for many years. Since the early 1990s, it was expanding and as a student I watched my more advanced classmates get positions and move onward and upward. There were lots of donors who sought to make their name by endowing chairs and departments in Jewish Studies.

The problem is that Jewish Studies programs are so often overly-dependent on private sponsorship. Universities have looked upon them as potential cash cows, and often launched them recklessly—even before serious money was in the bank. I have a colleague who, when on the market a couple of years ago, was told outright at the job interview that they weren’t interested in her field of study, but that they were looking to hire a Jewish Studies prof. in the hope that it would bring money to the department. The gripe was always that these donors used to dictate what we taught. More Holocaust! More Israel! Now we are waking up to the fact that not only have we created entire programs to satisfy the whims of donors, but the programs are also fully dependent on the whims of the marketplace. We could probably weather a mild recession ok, a serious one like now makes it harder. Something like the Madoff affair has got people using apocalyptic language.

Fitting highlight of the AJS: at 6:30 on Monday night, people began to gather in the hotel’s Starbucks to light Hanukkah menorahs. Candles apparently were forbidden in the rooms. About a dozen small groups gathered around their respective menorahs, lit the candles, and began to sing the prayers. Then somebody opened a side door bringing in a huge blast of arctic wind—blowing every candle out. Legal discussions ensued about whether it was kosher to relight them.

Early Thirsty. How Do You Spin 1 For 38, and Put Your Desire to Leave Back in the Bottle?

Dear Moderators,

Handle me with care, okay? I've learned my lesson and I sense I'm not alone.

I'm in the 3rd year of my first tenure-track job. I'm in an MLA field, and 3 months ago I started an onslaught of job applications. I wasn't shy about it; I even borrowed huge amounts of letterhead from our department chair and told her what it was for.

I'm not really unhappy here, but I'm a little unhappy. It's one of those 4/4 jobs that I swore I wouldn't take out of college, and while my friends took 3/3 and 2/2 jobs, I felt like they'd all left me behind.

So, with my first book under contract, and with 3 pretty good years of service and evaluations, I applied for 38 positions (mostly) in my field.

And to make things worse, I talked about my options, the schools I'd applied to, and bored my colleagues silly with my plans to move along the road. And much to my surprise, people were nice about it. They acted as if they understood. A couple even offered to write letters. They'd check in from time to time for updates, and that's when it started to get weird.

No word from anyone. Then three of my top ten jobs got bounced for lack of funding. October. November. I spent Thanksgiving at my mom's house calling my voicemail every 5 minutes in case I missed a search committee call.

Then December came and HOLY SHIT FIRE IT'S ALMOST DONE.

I have one phone interview set up for January 5th, at a school - I must admit - I probably wouldn't go to anyway.

When I last saw many of my colleagues they were still supportive. "Lots of people get calls in that last week; hang in there."

But nothing.

Q: What I want to know is, do I owe my colleagues something, besides thanks for being so supportive. I can't recall a single moment where I was terrifically arrogant or dismissive. But I know I said that I didn't think of myself as a full time "teacher," that I wanted to go some place where my research was more needed. Could this whole incident have hampered my tenure and promotion process? Will my colleagues have long memories?

A: Send replies here.

Edna from Evansville Stands Up But Falls Down. Big Fuckup Redux.

There’s one moment that stand out so clearly that, looking back now, I can’t believe I did it. It’s a two hour class. One hour in a classroom, one hour in computer lab. My goal? Make ‘em write good. At the beginning of this particular classroom hour, I’m dragging stuff out of my carry bag. At the back of the room is Annoying Annaminsky, the international student who was a thorn in my side from the first moment she said ‘I’m international, what this mean?’ and her sidekick.

Having been absent due to a school sponsored function the previous meeting, AAsky has had a scowl on her face from the get go because it has become evident we have veered from the syllabus into an area the rest of the students found more interesting so I can, in a desperate attempt, get ‘em to write gooder. As I pull my precious white board marker from my bag, Annoying Annaminsky says “there is homework.” I look around the class and see blank stares. I hadn’t given the assignment embossed on the syllabus. Annoying Annaminsky and her sidekick glare at me because, obviously, they have done said homework. As I try to explain that the points we’ll be getting for this will be based on the paragraph we’ll be writing in just a few minutes, and AAsky and SK are not pleased. They glare throughout the hour.

At the end of the hour, Annaminsky makes her demand. “I should get points for homework.” I’m already packing up for the move to the writing lab, and I say…and here’s the Big FU…I’ll look at it and see what I can do. I can probably give you some points.

Fast forward. The semester has ended. Annoying Annaminsky has received, you guessed it, a B. She appears in my division chair’s office. I assume it has to do with her good but not excellent final exam essay which kept her from the A she told me she wanted all semester. I am summoned. As the discussion progresses, I’m accused of: forgetting 5 extra credit points I said I’d give; being prejudiced against second language writers because I wrote ‘these are common ESL errors – keep working with the tutor’ on one of her papers; not staying with the original syllabus and not calling each student personally when the syllabus changed; and, you guessed it, she should have gotten 20 points for homework because I told her I’d give them to her.

I’ve forgotten all about this. No matter what, she isn’t producing A material, so I won’t budge. I hold my ground, she got a B, not an A, because I’m in a great place where admin actually backs faculty, but there are hours and hours I’ll never get back tied up in listening to her apply the three years of law classes she took before she came to the US. I’ve been cross-examined before, so I knew how to hang on, but I kept thinking…what if I’d just said “No.” My division chair only says “it’s okay. Just try to be clearer about points, okay?”

Who knew that a side comment, meant only to shut someone up, would result in this kind of shakedown. On some level, she was probably right. I, however, wasn’t going there for no reason other than I really didn’t like this girl, her pushy attitude and the way she continued to come at me as if I owed her something. A slightly different attitude, and I would have folded, admitted my mistake, and given her the grade she had probably earned. She remains at the college, as far as I know, so I’ll run into her again, even if I try not to. Our biggest mistakes don’t go away.

Still Seeking MLA Blogger for San Fran Meeting Next Week.

Unthinkably, Hungover Horst has backed out a return performance as RYS's liveblogger at the MLA. His exact reply was: "Uh, I have a job, you knuckleheads. I wouldn't go to the MLA now if they roomed me with Hannah Montana."

So, any takers? We've got three other folks set for other conferences at year-end, but there's nothing quite like the geekademics that one gets to skewer at the MLA.

It's a bonus if you can send a few photos that we can mangle with Photoshop.

Send your queries to us here and we'll make space available to you.

"The Regulars." Where ya been, Beaker Ben?

Brothers and sisters and all you cool types somewhere in between: I bring good tidings and the answer to your question, “How the hell am I going to get through another semester?” Worry no longer. Behold and rejoice!

Concocted deep within the Beaker Ben laboratory and with patent pending, I submit for your enjoyment: Proffie Porn(TM).

No, not THAT type of porn. Get your mind out of the gutter. You want to nail the new adjunct in the psych department? Fine (nice choice, BTW). Fantasize about that on your own time. I’ve got something that is more high-minded and also stirs our deepest passions. Here’s how it’ll work.

[RYS moderators: insert wavy lines to begin dream sequence. Thanks, BB]

While visiting RYS one evening, I notice the new ad on the sidebar – the one with the hottie reading a book with a phone number below it. What’s that for? “Listen to students do the most unbelievable things!” it says. “Let them fulfill your fantasies! Just call 1-900- ...”

I’ve called these numbers, back before I got dial-up. This should be fun. I know what I’d tell them to do. Dial ‘er up!

Ring ... Ring.

Computer voice: In what field do you hold a Ph.D.? Press 1 for humanities; press 2 for science; press 3 for business; press 4 for engineering.

BB: Huh? Um, ok. [presses 2]

The sultry voice of a Proffie Porn(TM) customer associate comes on the line. “Hello, professor. My name’s Tasha.”

BB: Hi Tasha. What sort of things are you into?

Tasha: [sighs] It’s Saturday and I’ve got to study.

BB: Oh, that’s so hot – wait. Did you say “study”?

Tasha: Yeah, I’ve got a big intro chem test on Monday. I’ve been studying this stuff all week but there’s still a few of the advanced problems that I can’t work out.

BB: [gulps] You started studying early? Now you are working out the questions that probably won’t even be on the test?

Tasha: Well, sure. I want to stay on the honor roll. [Pause] Professor, are you still there?

BB: Yeah, sorry. I dropped the phone. I’ve never heard of a college girl doing that sort of thing on a Saturday night, and I’ve been around a while.

Tasha: Oh, professor [giggles], we do this sort of stuff all the time at Proffie Porn(TM). Wanna help a bright, hard-working student excel in her classes?

BB: [breathing heavy] Hold on a second. I need to unbuckle, er, get more comfortable.

Tasha: I’m studying on chapter 5, ideal gases.

BB: Oh, God, yes. I love teaching that stuff. What problem are you working on? Read it to me and take it nice and slow.

Tasha: I need help deriving the van der Waals equation. After we do that together, you can tell me all about your research.

BB: Oh, oh, oh! Wait! [pauses] Dammit. [pauses] Hi, Tasha? Thanks for talking to me. I feel a lot better now. Can I call you back next week?

[OK, RYS moderators, I’ll need some wavy lines so readers know we’re back to reality. I want to make sure that everybody knows that it was all fake, especially the ending. OK? Thanks again. You guys are awesome. BB]

Show’s over. Yeah, it still needs some fine tuning. The girls always ask about the prof’s research too soon. Don’t they know anything about foreplay? I guess romance really is dead. Anyway, once this gets up off the ground, I’ll be raking in the money from credit card payments. We’ll also accept deposits from academic department accounts and federal research funds.

Don’t try to cash in on this idea before I take it to market. I put that little “TM” after the name, so it’s all mine.

The 2008 Ring of DistinKtion!

We're nearing a brief holiday hiatus, and we present below the 2008 Ring of DistinKtion, all of those posts from the past year that brought much pleasure (and mail) through their liveliness and energy. The 2005-2007 list is here, for those of you just catching up.

The 2008 List:

• Perfect Campus Visit.
• Kalamazoo Katie.
• Wayne's Tips to Kills the Website.
• Parent Pinata
• T-T Position in Ennui.
• The RYS Effect.
• Darren Deadwood.
• Anniversary.
• Cat Crazy Carla.
• Nothaughty.
• Ike the Insider.
• The Stapler.
• WW5.
• Anti-Cookies.
• Search Committee Tips.
• Be About the Students.
• Password.
• Prick of the Week.
• Part-Time Pete.
• Students Open Up.
• Students to Hate Freely.
• You're Not the Cool Proffie.
• Wallflower Wally.
• Rub My Belly.
• Grading Confession.
• Students for Ejection.
• WW4.
• Copier Dad.
• Metacritical Mess.
• Polly Wants the Paddle.
• Wonderful Me!
• Trashy Tim.
• Northbound Newt.

"Yo, Proffie. You're Disturbing My Meal."

I have a strict "no cell phones in class" policy that reflects the University's policy. My class meets once weekly and the second half of class is a feature-length film screening. What really galls me is when students use their phones during screenings, thinking somehow how those bright lights are not visible and therefore not distracting. But that is beside the point; it's NOT ALLOWED.

One night a student repeatedly kept using his phone even when I asked him to put it away three times! His excuse that night when I spoke to him after class? His dog was having health issues and his mother was texting him updates. I said it didn't matter--if he felt he had an emergency he was to leave the room. And he brought the phone out again later in the semester and got yelled at again. This nimrod also failed the mid-term by failing to properly read the instructions.

He wasn't the only one to violate this rule. But humiliating them in front of their classmates and interrupting the film screening didn't seem to faze anyone. My mistake, and the one which led tot he ruination of my authority in the classroom? Not asking these inconsiderate assholes to leave the room and not bother coming back.

Students also took advantage of my relaxing the "no food in the classrooms" rule by taking extra long breaks (they are normally given ten minutes) and taking twenty or thirty minute to get food and saunter in late. I repeatedly commented that this was not acceptable. The behavior continued. At the last class, which consisted of only one screening, two students came in thirty minutes late toting free burritos given away a local eatery. When asked if they had a reason for being so late, one of them said "No."

This same kid also mocked the cell phone rule by turning it on every class just as he was leaving and playing some loud piece of video and holding it up in the doorway. Nice, That would be a ZERO for your class participation portion of the grade, moron.

Next semester is my last semester. I plan to implement these rules more strictly. Any violation of the cell phone rule will be met with a request to leave the class for the rest of the night. Anyone coming in late from the break will be marked absent. My failure to be more strict during this past semester with a particularly rowdy group resulted in my authority becoming a joke among the yahoos, and a source of irritation for the engaged students.

Raquel from Raleigh Has a Hard Candy Christmas.

I've just finished grading all my students' final exams (80+ students) and final portfolios (40+ students with 20 pages or more, department mandated). I hand over the final consensus––who failed, who passed, and who probably shouldn't have been registered for these courses in the first place––then ask, please, for my student evaluations so I can add some to my CV.

I won't go into detail on all of them, but here's some of what Santa left in my stocking:

1. "The material was too easy. I felt like I was in a high school class. I know it says in the course description that we didn't need to know anything to register for it, but still..."
   This from a student who was earning a D. Maybe I should have been asking different kinds of questions on the exam, like Have you failed this class before? or Why didn't you take an AP exam or night class to pass out of this supposedly remedial course already? or If it's so easy, why aren't you passing it now?
   


2. "Wasted too much time at the beginning of the semester. I had to have my picture taken and listen through a bunch of bull about the basics."
   B student, same course as above. Just for measure, I took pictures so I could remember all of their names. I ask for their participation a lot and feel it's important to acknowledge them by name. Most of them seemed flattered when they'd raise their hands and I actually knew who they were. But I guess not this one. I'll be sure to forget her in the future.
   


3. "This teacher is never available for help."
   A- student. This is the kind of comment that surprises me the most, yet I get at least one per semester. The thing is, the student who's commenting usually has a passing grade (without my help, apparently, but never mind those twice-weekly lectures) or has never visited my office, let alone requested a conference. On average, two students might visit my office hours of their own free will each semester, and this is an improvement over previous years. But I still don't understand. If you never approached me with a problem in the first place, then how does that qualify me as unavailable?
   


4. "Not bad on the eyes" or any synonym for "cute."
   A+ student. Granted, students are more likely to learn when there's something worth paying attention to. But this kind of comment makes me feel dirty. Or phony, like Sarah Palin. But I consider myself more articulate and couldn't shoot a moose even if it handed me the gun.
   


5. "I don't know if it's his/her first year of teaching, but [insert passive-aggressive complaint here]."
   B student. To this, I usually want to reply: It's not, dear. And if you had been paying attention the first week of classes, you would have known that when I revealed how long I HAD been teaching. Usually this is just meant to soft-peddle some really harsh comment that follows, but it's more like an insult on top of an insult if it's not your first year teaching. Funny how we don't get to comment about it being their first year of college or––for most––their first year of adulthood. I could make all sorts of things sound better: "I don't know if it's your first year without parental supervision, but real adults actually come to class," or "I don't know how long it's been since you graduated high school, but here we already know how to spell." See? Much better.

Here's to the holidays & the end of another semester.

Devilish Doreen Gets Asked To Reach Out to the Slackassers. And She Does. Oh Dear, Doreen.

I have about 200 students this semester in my courses. In computing my final grades, I found that 9 had never shown up for anything, never submitted a thing, didn't show for an exam. Did they exist? Who knows, but the department head gave me some "advice"--

"Well, we have a number of students who feel lost here in this big university and just need someone to reach out to them. Maybe you can email them, asking what happened? Maybe give them the chance to get an incomplete or something. Or, you could get their phone numbers from the Registrar can give them a call. It's really important to reach out and keep our students involved."

What I wanted to say: "Reach out? What you want me to do is give these little brats a free reach around, jerk them off in A+ style, and make sure they're still smiling at the end of the month when they log-on the uni's system and get their grades. Well, here's my advice to you, reach around your hand to your backside, shove your hand as far as possible up your own ass and pull really hard on that mop-covered hard thing you feel embedded up in there. You may just find your head again, assmunch."

What I did say: "I'll email them."

This Christmakkah, I want my spine back.

What One Student Can Do. Whitney from Wichita Withstands a Whiner.

I am notorious for being a little too happy in the classroom. What can I say, I truly do love my job, and love what I teach (humanities/English at the CC level, by the way, year two on the TT). Most students enjoy my classes and appreciate my efforts to make composition fun and meaningful -- okay, not fun. But as painless as possible. But this girl was different. This one actually resented, nay hated, me for being happy. ("I don't understand happiness. I've never been happy, and I never will.")

I noticed her immediately when I entered the classroom. Which just so happened to be NEXT DOOR to my own office. Oh my god. This is going nowhere good. She sat and glared at me with the kind of scowl I had never actually seen before except in the movies. That was on Monday. On Wednesday, as I prepared myself for class (got in character, if you will), she appeared in my door, with her lovely frown on. "I have a problem." She stated. To be honest, I don't remember what her problem was, but I definitely remember my response (well, the response in my head): So do I: You! But alas, I smiled and asked her what her problem was and how I could help. (I mean really. Did she think an English class would not require her to save a fucking file??? And just how is that an unreasonable think to make her do?) I didn't know then what this person had been through, or just how much she hated me and the world around her, but I knew she would be trouble.

I had no idea how much trouble, and it haunts me to this day. Without going into any details, which would assuredly give both our identities away - but entertain the hell out of RYS readers - her conversations with me and her first paper were so disturbing that I had constant visions of Virginia Tech. The colleagues who share my corner of the world were all aware of her. My office mate - thank god - was on office hours during the time I was in this class, so he was a witness to 99% of her shit. (Not the way she looked at me in class, but by the way she treated me in the office before class every fucking day, he could figure that part out without too much trouble.)

I wanted to get my boss involved, but was concerned that this chick had served her time and paid her dues, and she just needed someone to be nice to her. (Messiah complex anyone?)

But it seemed to be working. By conference time for Essay #2, she stopped being mean and hateful, and I was introduced to her alter-ego, SuperWhiner. (Honestly, in my 4 years of teaching, hell, in my 33 years of life, I've NEVER heard whining at this level before, save perhaps from my 7 year old niece 3 years ago, and even she has nothing on this chick.)

But in the face of it all, I stood my ground. Twice I decided it was time to bring in the big guns and get the dean involved. But the first time I got my nerve up, Dean chose that day for a little vacay. The second time, I caught her teaching her own class and just never made it back.

Things actually seemed to be getting better until the last two weeks of the term, when, well, I'll spare you the details, but now the dean is involved and she knows everything. And here's the kicker, and where my regrets come full circle. In the course of our conversation, which started out with me practically to tears, but ended with a bit of schadenfreude over who gets this one next semester and how they're going to Kick Her Everloving Ass, my dean mentioned that she wished I had come to her sooner because, having heard the details, it sounded as though this student was harrassing me and would likely have been removed from my class by midterm.

They can do that?!?!?!? Actually, I am thankful that I have a dean who has my back and, though she's no more perfect than I am, she will back me all the way. If memory serves, the words "Bring it on" came up. And, for the record, as much as this little darling scared the everloving shit out of me, I honestly don't believe she would shoot up the campus. She seems more likely to poison my coffee than to go all out ballistic. Had I believed she was dangerous to anybody but me, I would not have hesitated to bring in somebody else. Oh, and the girl could write! Had she been getting grades that reflected her personality rather than her ability, had she not had so much promise as a writer, I definitely would have brought in the dean before I gave her back her paper.

And here's the deal. The little &$%#@#% really did make me a better teacher. I stood up to her and never let her see me sweat (or cry). I dosed up a little smack-down of my own on the last day (sampling: "This is college. This is not high school. This is not GED school. This is COLLEGE, and my job as an English professor is to grade your work, not give you 100% just for turning in some crap. If I did that, your Comp II teachers would eat you for lunch!" -- I mean honestly, 100% just for turning in something that is "close to the topic assigned"???? In Comp I? Are you KIDDING me? Doesn't she know what English classes are for?) I learned not to take this shit from anybody, no matter how hard they are trying to intimidate me (that might work in prison, but this is the real world, sparky!) And I learned that my dean really does have my back, and I really can do this job.

But gawd. How much better might that class have been if I'd just gotten rid of her? And on the days she was absent, it became clear that it really was a wonderful class. There were some losers and a few slugs. But there were some wonderfully gifted students in there, who got the short shaft from me because I ended up teaching the whole class on the defensive from the wall of hate sitting in the front row.

Sophomore Sindee Is Tired of Her Skeevy Proffie.

To my 50 year old proffie:

When you talk about "Gossip Girl" every day in class, and we all listen and laugh along? We're not laughing with you. We're laughing at you. You are the definition of skeevy. We think you're a joke.

What do you think you're accomplishing with your semi-pedo-philia? Of course we let you talk on and on about it; we don't want to do the work we're avoiding while you're getting your jollies.

I don't know what you think we come to this college for, but it's not to be friends with you. You may not believe it, but we're looking for someone to respect, not someone to LIKE. We're NEVER going to be friends with you. Don't you understand that? We're 30 years younger. We have our own friends.

I don't know if there's some secret manual or something, but you're not the only proffie who does it. I just thought you should know about this, because you are creeping everyone out.

Don't you have better things to do than to try to keep up with kids? That isn't what your job is, right? And you supposed to be a leader, someone who can teach us what we don't know?

Oh, and quit talking about "Twilight." That's what my little sister reads. You won't have the chance to weird her out for a few more years.

Perv!

Some Replies to Big Thirsty. What We Did Wrong.

We got a lot of really lengthy replies to yesterday's Big Thirsty about what we did wrong in our classes this past semester. Oh, they were horrible, some of them. Sad, tragic. It's as if we all just took a big poop in Fall 2008 and our students will never recover. Usually we like the misery, but this was too much. So we've had to choose some that won't make you want to eat your pistol. Enjoy the flava below. We're also going to publish a couple of the longer pieces this weekend:

• My royal FU? I was "easy" on my students this semester. Yes, easy. I gave them days off to study for exams or work on assignments. I made the final exam optional. I graded generously. I bought in soda and candy. You know what? Their whining increased to a dizzy pitch. Their grades are artificially inflated. They know diddly-squat about the topic. And I don't give a crap about a single one in the lot. It was my worst semester ever. I'm back to being strict, firm, & demanding. Maybe they'll learn something. I know I did.


• I slept with two freshmen. No, kidding. But doesn't that make me leaving a whole set of essays in the Pittsburgh airport seem a lot less terrible?


• After a hard swim at the college pool, I went into the locker room, took a nice, long shower, and then walked in the buff to the lockers only to find a young woman in front of her locker. Problem is: I am a male. Yes, I had the wrong room!


• Too much "learner-centered" activities to satisfy my Dean before my tenure decision. They didn't help the unsuccessful students, and pissed off the students who were working at the course.


• I have a stuttering student. It made me crazy because he talked all the time in class. I hated him by semester end, not for his stutter, but for how he dominated class and I felt powerless to stop him from doing it. The rest of the class just let him go, never engaging themselves and I was too chickenshit to tell him to be quiet.


• I pretended that the students would be reliable. I didn't harp on deadlines, I just announced them. I made ONE request for assignments. I held them to the standards and didn't hand hold. And I'm sitting in front of a grade book with 9 Fs and, 4, Ds, 2 Cs, 1 B, and zero As. I can't turn this grade book in, and I know it.


• On the day grades had to be turned in, I realized that one of my "favorite" students had not turned in a final project. I have no idea how it happened. It's worth 25% of the grade, and without it she would have gotten a C. With a great project (like her other work) she would have had an A. I don't remember her turning in a project. I had no way of getting in touch with her. It's entirely possible she didn't do it at all. I gave her an A anyway.


• One of my students has a job and a family, and he's unusual in other ways, too. (Oh, I won't go there.) He called my home at 11:59 pm to tell me that he had just found his last assignment in his backpack. Somehow he'd forgotten to turn it in at our last class. (He missed 12 classes out of 45 for the semester, so it's not like I noticed.) I was groggy on the phone and for some reason I told him I'd accept the work late if he'd meet me at a coffee shop just off campus the next morning at 8 am. I sat there for an hour and he never showed. My big mistake? I lowered his final grade from a C to a D for pissing me off.


• I've been so beaten down by my shitty community college, told so many times not to grade so hard, I just sort of gave up. I've got tenure here, but hate it. I feel as though I settled, and I'm just sick of teaching grade 12 and a half. So I let it go. I didn't argue with the students. I dumbed everything down. I used to require a full essay midterm, now it's just multiple choice. I gave out grades like you can't believe. Students were happy. I had no complaints. I gave out 50% As and the rest are all Bs and Cs. Nobody deserves any of it, but nobody bugged me once.


• I swapped out all of my old notes for a new textbook and new online manual. I felt like I was doing my students a favor getting the newest material. But what I didn't realize is that I had to read it and understand it all, too. My wife was pregnant all semester and I had more work at home than normal with our other kids. I walked into class MANY days not knowing what I was teaching. I found myself perspiring, panicky, and doing a shitty, shitty job. I embarrassed myself.


• I gave my notice at my college, thinking that I'd rather not have a job than teach someplace that I hated. Then when the job market went south, I discovered that I'd made a huge mistake. I spent almost no time on my classes, scrambling instead to save a job I'd given back to the Dean. I missed class several times, was late other times, didn't hold office hours. When I finally negotiated to stay on, I realized it was week 13 and my students had been robbed of nearly a whole semester of my attention.


• I said "What the Fuck" to a student who had annoyed me. It was a momentary victory for which I paid all semester long. The students stopped respecting me, didn't pay attention to things I said, and I could tell they knew they could get to me anytime they wanted.

"The Regulars." Dana From Decatur Gets With the Program And Secures Her Classes For Next Year!

Guess. What. I just got a letter from the Collegial, Cooperative Committee of Inter-Collegiate Assessment and Consideration (CCCICAC ). It may sound boring. But they apparently have a really awesome new idea for me. I’m stoked. The letter went something like this:

Dear Aimless, Nameless Adjunct,

When you receive your delightful little student evaluations (just another way we like to ensure that your job is demeaning as possible) you will receive a “Tell-Us-How-Your-Students-Know-More-Than-You” Checklist (“Purple-polka-dotted form,” since we know you fuck-ups can’t keep things straight). Please take a few minutes to complete the form and return it within the day to the Chair of your Department, including your syllabus, a written rationale for why we should let you keep your job, a vial of your blood, and the phrase “I am expendable” written out—legibly—one-hundred times. In your form, you will reflect on what exactly you have learned from your student evaluations, how they have informed your future teaching endeavors, and how you can better cater to our lovely, brilliant, perfect, paying student body. Please make sure to consider how you can better give students the grades they are paying for in your response.

Sincerely,
CCCICAC

Oh heeeelllls yea. I am all geared up for this one. I’ve got my “expendable” sentences all written and ready to go. All I need is those student evals back so I can dig in. It’s been a while since I’ve had someone treat me like an undergrad and assign an impromptu writing assignment; I am fired up!

You see, if my former experience with student evaluations is any indication, I already know what they’re going to say. First, they’re going to say “don’t hold class so early.” Done and done. I will sleep the fuck in instead of conducting class—that shit is going to go in my first sentence—“Based on my student evals, I will now sleep the fuck in.”

Okay, then the kid who was missing for half the term but showed up for eval day will say something really great like “she didn’t explain things very well.” That’s cool; from now on, we will learn exactly one day’s worth of material per semester. That way, I can explain the same thing every day, so that even students like Slack-jaw Steve over there will “get it”—“Teach one day of material only.”

Then, there will be a plethora of perky pupils who will lament that “there was too much writing in this class” and that “she graded waaayyy too hard!!” Right on. Less writing and easier grading. How about I just get a stamp made that says “Excellent work, my little snowflake! You have once again crafted a flawless essay! You are special and brilliant, and it is my honor to have you attend my class sporadically! A+++++” Of course, I will only use this stamp on a couple of one-pagers (which we’ll write in class), since I don’t want to burden them—“I will stamp A’s onto all very short, in-class assignments.”

I think you can see why I’m excited! I just can’t believe that this college is so awesome that it wants the school to run as it would if the students got to make all the decisions. Thanks, CCCICAC! This has been an amazing opportunity to demonstrate that my students clearly know a hell of a lot more about what makes a good class than I ever could. I’m off to buy my stamp.

RYS is Seeking a Couple of Live Bloggers For Those Magical Year End Conferences!

We're looking for a couple of bloggers to help us with any big year-end conferences. MLA and AHA spring to mind, but if you're going to another late year conference somewhere and want to send us updates from the insanity, contact us here. Tell us who you are, where you're going, and why we should give you some space.

Two years ago Hungover Horst sent us some live blogs from the MLA in Philly, and it was a much hated post! Who are we to say no to more of that.

You know, we'd like descriptions of the poorly dressed attendees, a running total on the alcohol consumed. We'd love it if our bloggers had a couple of job interviews, because those painful exchanges make for much hilarity. We'd like a detailed rundown of at least awful presentation, complete with clinking of glasses and dishes from the next room, failed PowerPoint demonstrations, and the wheezing open and shut of the doors just as your paper starts!

You do it all undercover, of course, and you can provide your own RYS-style name, or let us make one up for you. (We can use your porn name if you'd like.) We'll do the heavy lifting on the formatting and so on, but bonus points for anyone who's at least a little handy with a camera so we can post some blurry Photoshopped images alongside your glittering prose. (Or poems, in case you swing that way.)

This Week's Big Thirsty: How Did You Ruin YOUR Class This Semester?

I'm desperate to hear about the mistakes others made this semester. I fucked up two of my classes so badly that by semester end NOBODY wanted to come to class anymore - especially not me.

I'd tell you the details, but I'm too embarrassed even in an anonymous forum to share what a doofus I've been. (I did salvage two good classes, however, and for that I'm grateful.)

But, as the semester has crashed around me here, I'd love to know what else people did that they regret.

Q: What was your biggest mistake? What kind of whopper doozy fuckup did you commit that you wish you could take back?

A: Send replies here.

"Best Practice Is to Carry a Photo Of Your Sheep With You At Campus Interviews." How To Deal With The "Partner Question," Even If It's Not Asked.

from 12/16:

Don't reveal your blatant heteronormativeness by asking about my wife, okay? It's none of your fucking business anyway. I'm coming to teach some of your classes and then get a better job next year. We don't HAVE to be BFFs.

--

You know why we hint around about your wife? It's not because we want to know if you're gay / bi / a monk / into sheep. First, we are legally constrained from asking you if you are gay / bi / a monk / into sheep. Second, we don't actually give a shit what you do in your off time. Just don't put your me-in-leather-harness-and-ball-gag pictures up on your blog where we can't pretend we didn't see them.

But really, we could care less about your sex life. (How nice for you that you have one by the way: you can't have been teaching long.)

But we do want to know about your permanent partner. Why? Well, if we could expand all those hints into the questions we would love to ask but are, again, legally restrained from, here's what we would ask:

• Are you married to an academic? Is he/she going to want a job here too? Will he/she settle for a perpetual adjunct position at piss-poor wages just to be in the same time zone as you? Really? There's no chance that you're going to tell us that your partner is perfectly happy to be an adjunct forever, and then spend the next five years machinating, nagging, bitching, moaning, tying every hiring decision in knots, and generally making everyone miserable because we haven't coughed up another TT job?


• Really? He/ she is NOT an academic? Are you absolutely sure he/she is delighted to give up a flourishing career to move here just to be with you? Even though he/she has an excellent, highly-paid and geographically constrained job right where you live now? Which would reduce the chances of your actually taking the job, if we offered it to you, or staying here if you did, to pretty much zero?

Actually, we wouldn't bother to ask you those questions anyway, because even if you know how your spouse feels about the move, you aren't going to tell us if they're less than enthusiastic You're absolutely right, it wouldn't be good for your chances.

There are right answers to our clumsy, indirect attempts to get you to divulge all about your spouse, incidentally. Far the best is the smooth blank look when we start hinting around. That's perfectly acceptable; it's what most people do. And as you rightly point out, it's no bloody business of ours.

But there are other good answers if you can't manage that one:

• "My spouse is a (insert highly portable profession - novelist, psychiatric nurse, doctor, paramedic, waiter) and is looking forward to working in (your town) because (insert any phrase from tourist handbook - you should have these memorized anyway, for your own use.)"


• "My spouse is a scion of a fabulously wealthy family much given to endowing educational institutions. " (For extra points, be one too.)


• "I see there are sheep farms just outside town!"

Bessie from Buffalo Won't Play the Bailout Game.

Since there is a line of adults who should have known better and done things differently lining up at Washington to ask for a financial bailout, I suppose it should be no surprise that the current college generation exhibits some similar traits when it comes to grades. Both are equally taxing. (Har.) But these cases don't require much debate.

• No, I will not go back and magically erase those absences you have. Yes, they could impact your grade, as per the syllabus. Failure to ignore reality is not going to earn you a bailout.


• I think it's amusing that you just now noticed with your keen powers of observation that you're missing "a few" assignments, considering the ultimate semester deadline was a week ago, and those assignments were due in some cases two months ago. No, you cannot just "pop by the office and drop them off." They're not a box of donuts, they're grades. I'm sure everybody else in the class would've loved an extra two weeks to two freaking months to put their assignments together. They had a plan, you didn't. Pretending this is no big deal is not going to result in a bailout.


• Lobbying me constantly via email and with cutesy comments is not going to make me improve your grade. I didn't fall off the turnip truck. Nor will showing up at my office at the crack of dawn improve your results--especially when you send me an email wondering why I'm not there at the crack of dawn (I was in a fucking meeting). There is a reason I said we would give them back at 1:30 in the afternoon. I don't like lobbyists. You don't get a bailout.


• I'm not sure why your grade didn't "show up" via the online system that requires YOU to take the quizzes which then magically appear in the online grade book. I have nothing to do with it--it's all the wonders of the Internet. If it didn't show up, that likely means YOU didn't do it. Why should you be bailed out for a clear failure to do YOUR job?


• Yes, it does in fact "suck" that you spent the whole semester putting things off until you forgot that things were actually due. We are in agreement that you suck. But why, if there has been no change in your day to day operations, should I invest in you with a bailout? Won't you just have the same academic bankruptcy five months later?

Hattie McHatesalot Got Screwed. What Happens When A Colleague Passes a Bunch of Morons On To You. (Don't Lose Your Head!)

So, a colleague drops by my office ever so casually to say, you know that class you'll be teaching next semester? Well, those were her kids, and gosh darn it, she just couldn't bring herself to fail any of them. Even though there were a few in there who probably deserved it. Well, it's pretty much split down the room, actually. Half are pretty good, and half are pretty bad. So, you'll be getting a mixed bag next semester, {chuckle}, but you can always email her if you have questions about them.

Thanks, yo. Never mind already that the class will take place in the dreaded "dinner hour," where they're thinking about nothing but lunch anyway and whether I'll let them out early to stuff their gourds with what passes for meals here. Now it's going to be populated with half a set of losers who have been encouraged to continue their loser ways because another teacher confirmed and coddled that behavior.

They're going to have a false set of expectations that I'll have to dash now, thanks very much, which of course will be chalked up to me being the bad bitch of a teacher, and why couldn't we just have Ms. Blondey McNumbnuts again? She was so nice, never made you work hard, you could hand things in whenever you wanted to and even though you knew you'd failed the class, by golly, she just didn't have the heart to do it to you. Not like this current devil's minion, Prof McHatesalot, who must have simmering coals in place of a beating human heart.

Class is in session, bitches. Oh, and to my "colleague"? Santa is totally leaving lumps in your stocking. I hope they're the brown, smelly kind.

When The Pain Comes, We Just Let It Out.

From the opening two sentences of M's paper: "Jane Austen did a great job on writing this book [Pride & Prejudice]. It had tense moments in which all I wanted to have happen was to see how the movie would come to an end." OK. So you didn't really read it, but couldn't you have at least faked it? Did you have to let me know up front that you'd just watched the movie? At least tell me which one: the 1948 Olivier version [doubtful]? Keira Knightley's [probably]?; either of the BBC versions from the 80s or 90s? [probably too long]. Sigh.

B: You were so worried about the third exam and how you'd do. But you haven't turned in either of the papers [40% of the course grade], and you haven't been in class often enough to even register on the 'preparedness and participation' scale for the course [10% of the course grade]. Why worry about the 50% that's left? Didn't you learn to figure percentages ['per cent' means 'per 100', or in the case of a grade, 'out of 100%']? I put a little 'refresher' course about this in the syllabus, but then you seem to have lost that the first week. Is this F you're getting going to be a shock to your system? Will I have to deal with a plaintive email asking why you flunked?

S: [Currently in critical condition and recovering from emergency surgery]: Get well soon! I can't believe the first thing you had your family do was to contact your instructors to find out how to deal with finals. I'm just giving you the grade you've earned so far [A-] with no need to do the final paper. The last thing you need now is the pressure of completing an 'Incomplete'. Here's to a speedy recovery. And I hope to see you in future classes.

T: When I emailed everyone to check their email the morning of the final regarding the possibility of bad roads, I didn't mean that the final was optional. I meant for everyone to check to see if I'd cancel it for the scheduled 7:30 a.m. time. As it turned out, the roads were fine, and everyone else made it to the final. And then you were annoyed when I wasn't in my office later for you take the exam at your convenience.

P: It's not up to me to custom grade your exam so that you can get your final grade before the already ridiculously early date it will be posted next week. Faculty would like to get out of here as soon as possible, too, but we've got hundreds of papers and exams to grade first, and we don't do it on the basis of 'he/she who hassles the most gets theirs first'. Everyone wants to 'go home' and get ready for Christmas / Hanukkah / Solstice / whatever mid-winter ritual or holiday we celebrate, but we've got to get through this stuff first. Wait your turn; it will come soon enough. And it isn't bright to hassle faculty with red pens hovering over stacks of papers / exams; it just makes us crabby. And you never want your faculty to be crabby when they're grading.

Listen. The First Clue This Guy Was Trouble Is his Name is "Student X." That's Fucked Up.

This all plays out during the end of the last week of classes and finals week, so a particularly annoying time.

Student X, a freshman perspective major, sends me an email saying that he will miss the first week of classes next semester because he will be researching the healthcare industry in country C, and he would like to meet with me to prepare for his absence. He asks for the notes, and assignments for the first week of classes, and the syllabus.

First, his claim sets off my BS detector; a freshmen doing real research -- supposedly independently I found out later when he stopped by -- and in the country he's from. I suspect its just an excuse, but take it at face value. I'm a little taken aback by his request for my notes.

I reply that he can consult with his classmates when he returns for notes, the (small) reading quiz that he'll miss is online so he can do it while abroad or receive a zero, and email him the link to the syllabus, which he could have easily found on my webpage, from the last time I taught the course, with the admonition that some things will change including the specific textbook, but I tell him the new textbook. I assume that nothing else has to be done.

He then stops by my office -- without an appointment -- on the last day of classes. I'm obviously busy, but I tell him he can have 10 minutes. He prods me again for notes, and is obviously disturbed when I don't give him my lecture notes. Not that they would be useful to a student. He then asks about a pre-req for the course; if he needs to know the material from that course. I say, of course, that's why its a pre-req. I assume the knowledge from that course. I ask him why he asks. Turns out Student X hasn't taken the pre-req. When I asked him how he registered for the course -- as I know that the registration software doesn't let students register without a pre-req, having been asked to waive the pre-req for other students -- he says he talked to the Chair of the department.

I'm dumb-founded. WTF? Why would you ask the chair to let you register for a class before even talking to the professor teaching the course? I think to myself: my Chair is actually a really good chair and a really advanced high school student could have the material in the pre-req, especially a foreign student.

So I quiz the student, and no, he doesn't know any of the material from the pre-req; he barely knows the material from the pre-req to the pre-req. He somehow conned the Chair into letting him skip the pre-req. I proceed to point out to him again that I assume knowledge from the pre-req, the homework assignments will assume knowledge from the pre-req, and that I wouldn't have let him enroll in the course myself. His response is that he can study for it over the break. So he asks me if he can borrow a textbook to study from. I list several texts that he find himself, and point out that the most obvious solution would be to borrow a copy of the textbook for the pre-req course from one of his classmates, and that he would have a great deal of studying to do. I do tell him which chapters he should focus on.

Then during finals, I receive another email from him asking for the location of the first online reading quiz. So he can take it before he leaves for the break. I write back that it will be on blackboard at the beginning of the semester.

I haven't heard from him again, but I'm not looking forward to seeing him in a month.

Oh, It Does No Good To Dream, Really. But, If RYS Readers Could Cook Up a Perfect Campus Visit, It Would Certainly Have Some Of These Essentials!

We've done a shitty job of trying to sort through the wide variety of replies to yesterday's "early thirsty" on the ideal campus visit. We used to be so good at this, poring over the email, sorting, deciding, weighing. Now we just don't have a fucking clue. We won't even pretend that these are the best of the most representative. We're hanging on by a thread after Sugar got zero votes on Survivor. Here's some flava along the ridiculous/sublime axis:

• Don't send the drunkest faculty member to pick me up at the airport. But I'll take the drunk in lieu of being forgotten there altogether.


• How about just treating me like an invited guest, not some impediment to your day.


• Don't bicker in front of me like Mommy and Daddy used to.


• I have this itinerary, right? Do your best to stick to it. I've planned out my day using it, and when you suddenly tell me we're going to meet the Dean of Bassoons when I'm expecting lunch, I'm going to be grouchy.


• I'd love it if every 4 hours you let me go to the bathroom.


• At all costs, don't do anything that makes me think, "What a zoo!"


• If you ask me to teach a class, MAKE SURE THERE'S A CLASS TO TEACH. I'm not going to pretend 4 faculty members are 30 freshmen.


• Could you make sure I have time for water, bathroom, and maybe a freaking sandwich?


• Emulate the campus visits that the university hosts for the really valuable candidates: high school athletes. Arrange a private room in a club for me. Stock it with strippers and high-end booze.


• A foot massage and a hookah full of hash.


• Could you have someone from the department check the hotel out? If it's nothing but whores and truck drivers, cough up an extra $10 to get me into the Holiday Inn Express.


• It's not a one way transaction. I'm interviewing you as well. Be aware of that. I don't have to take the job even if you offer it.


• If we're at a restaurant for a meal at the end of the day, don't make me deal with the "drinks" question from the waiter first. I want a scotch, you know, I mean I'm 30 years old. I can have a scotch. But if you make me go first, I'm going with iced tea and I'm going to be pissy for the rest of the visit if the next three people order up shooters.


• Don't rope in the 5 dumbest students on campus to meet me.


• For meals, you don't have to take me to the most expensive restaurant in town, but don't take me to the hospital cafeteria either.


• Just don't lead me around like freshmen at orientation. God I hate "tours" and having to chitchat with the tour guide. Refreshments, a golf cart, and a driver would be nice. Note DRIVER as opposed to tour GUIDE.


• Sure, that weird Moroccan restaurant sure shows how cosmopolitan little Dustyville, Kansas is. But if nobody's ever been there before, don't test it out on my visit!


• While you're asking me questions about my teaching, don't be afraid to volunteer some of your own answers.


• I know there's tension in the department of some kind. And it's probably okay to talk about some things that the department has struggled with. But don't let Tick and Tack have a screaming match while I'm there. I mean, really.


• Don't invite me during the one week when the Dean is off fishing in Mexico so I have to meet for an hour with someone who doesn't know shit about the job search and who can't answer any of my questions about how big my office is going to be.


• Don't reveal your blatant heteronormativeness by asking about my wife, okay? It's none of your fucking business anyway. I'm coming to teach some of your classes and then get a better job next year. We don't HAVE to be BFFs.


• Let ONE person be in charge of me the whole time. Don't hand me off from one to the next. I want some continuity.


• Let me meet as many people as possible. Don't let the guy who's too dumb to avoid the job get stuck leading me around all day. I bore easily.


• What on earth makes you think I want to see the back of the new fucking library? Show me the building where I'll office and teach. The rest I can catch on the website.


• I'd love it if you'd save up the last few student newspapers for me.


• Don't leave me alone with that one weirdo in your department. And if you don’t know who that is, it's probably you.

"The Regulars." Dana From Decatur Examines the Teacher Popularity / End of Semester Axis.

I am, as it turns out, insanely popular. I spent most of the semester thinking that my students considered me a useless waste of space. But for some reason, when December 1 rolled around, they all started talking to me. I mean, they’re staying after class, they’re COMING to class, they’re emailing me incessantly…I guess they really love me after all.

I can’t quite figure out how to use my new found popularity. I could, of course, try to get the nomination for Homecoming Queen that I never quite managed in high school. I have a feeling these kids would nominate me for about anything right now. I could also just laze around, watching them scatter and genuflect around me like little drones. That might be pretty fun. Or, I could go fishing for some compliments and see who will be the first to tell me how much they “loved my class,” and that I’m “the best teacher they’ve ever had.” And to think, just a few short weeks ago I was staring at a bunch of blank expressions, rolling eyes, and under-table text-messaging! Ah, what a difference December makes.

It’s just so odd. I mean, up to this point, I’m pretty sure they thought they knew everything, and I knew nothing. But now, they clamor for my advice and input. They treat me like someone who has something to offer. They admit that they don’t have a clue. I can’t possibly say why they’ve changed their minds about me. Of course, it would be insulting to imply that this has anything to do with the looming end-of-term grades I’m about to dole out on the poor little suckers. I’m sure they’ve just seen the light, with no kind of ulterior motivation.

For now, though, I’m enjoying this far too much to worry about such things. I will let them flounder and flap, enjoying my three weeks in the sun, letting them think that they might be making some kind of meaningful progress with me. What’s that, Lazy Lucy? You can’t tell me how much this class has helped you? That’s wonderful! How’s that, Slacker Steve? You’ve really appreciated all my patience with you, and you think that I’m a great instructor? Super! And you, Asshole Aaron? You really think that I might have been right about that first paper after all? Fantastic! Keep it coming, kids. Your grades will remain absolutely unchanged, but keep it coming. If only it could be December all year round.

Cold, Cold, Carla From Canonsburg Sends a List of Exuses She Never Wants To Hear Again.

Ah, that time of year when the smell of grades is in the air. It makes students realize their bacon needs to be saved, and then the excuses come forthwith. There are three in particular over the years that enrage me and do nothing to promote a student's chance of getting a better grade.

"I'm not getting anything out of this class." It's not our job to edutain you. Frankly, I could put a twelve course gourmet meal in front of you, but unless you pick up the fork and try the dishes, you're not going to get anything out of that, either. I usually only hear this when grades are close to coming out--a thinly veiled attempt at passing the blame off on the professor. Besides, a prof could be dry as dirt, but that doesn't matter--because you're not paying to be entertained. You're paying for access to someone else's expertise. If you're not getting anything out of it, that's probably because you mistook the clicker question for a remote control.

"I don't see why I have to take this class." The answer lies in the statement, sweet snowflake. Seriously, the fact that you can't figure it out probably means you desperately need to take it. The thing about a liberal arts education is that it's supposed to make you a more intelligent and engaged citizen who happens to have a speciality in a particular field. If you misunderstood that a university was supposed to inform you about history, science and the context of the culture in which you find yourself, you should've probably applied to a trade school. One of my favorite former student came to my office, no less, to bitch about his Spring schedule. After a few rounds of this particular argument, I finally choke-slammed it by asking, "So, please explain to me why you don't want to be a better and more broadly informed person?" Honestly.

"I have to get an A in this class." I would like to stab this excuse with a rusty spoon and watch it slowly die of tetanus. Actually, what I would really like is a snazzy comeback that incorporates all of the arrogant ballsiness and responsibility-evading of the student version. Sort of the academic equivalent of "Well, I'd like a gold plated toilet seat..." or "Let's wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up faster." I'm open to suggestions.

Hiring the Whole Person. An Early Thirsty on that Dreamy Campus Visit.

I'm chairing my first search committee this year, for a t-t job in the social sciences at a mid-sized state uni. I've been on committees in the past, but never designed any part of the campus visits.

One thing we're doing this year for the first time is making a leasing agent / realtor available to candidates who choose to meet with the person. (It's someone completely disconnected from the uni for obvious reasons.)

Q: But I'd like to ask your readers (both job candidates and search committee folks) to share their most ideal elements of a great campus visit. What elements are necessary for the best visit possible?

A: Send replies here.

Madge From Madison Sends In Pet Peeve #43, The Lazy Ass Student.

In the last 48 hours, I have received four increasingly frantic emails from a student wanting to know not only the titles of the books I have assigned for my persuasive writing course next semester, but also the ISBN numbers.

I know she's trying to order her books online to avoid paying full price at the book store. I do not begrudge her for that -- I did the same thing in college, and especially in grad school. What I do begrudge her for is bothering me with something so trivial during finals week when I have a million papers and portfolios to read, grammar exams to correct, and grades to calculate.

It's not as if the information isn't out there. She could trot over to the book store -- at most a 5 minute walk from every other building on campus. If she's too lazy to do that, she could look at the bookstore website, which lists the books for each course by both instructor name and section number.

I don't have my copies of next semester's books in my office. They're on my desk at home. Frustrated by email #4, I replied that I didn't have the ISBNs handy, but gave her the book titles, the names of the editors, and the edition numbers -- more than sufficient info to look the books up on Amazon, or Half.com, or -- gasp! -- the textbook publisher's website. (And she could have found all of this out two days ago, when she sent email #1, if she's just taken the 2 minutes she spent to write me looking the information up instead.)

My cordial and relatively detailed reply was apparently not enough for this girl. Oh no. Within 5 minutes, she replied to my message with, "The website I'm using won't let me look up books without the ISBN so I need you to get those to me a.s.a.p."

On principle, I am not going to reply to that email even once I get home and have the books in front of me. I refuse to facilitate laziness and do her work for her -- the babying cannot begin before the semester even starts. If she wants to buy her books online, an exceedingly simple task, then she can look up the damn ISBN numbers herself. Or just type the info I kindly provided into Half.com -- I am certain she will be able to find the books that way.

Only Two Idiots? Sounds Like an Honors Class to Us.

Last week’s idiot (and we’ve got a 1960s TV theme going here):
Hoss Cantwrite plagiarizes by taking an essay from Freeessays.com. Five minutes with Google, and it shows up on my screen. I print it, contact student affairs, and am told I have five options. I choose the most severe: failure for the course and a record of the incident with student affairs. I write him a letter telling him of my actions and his (limited) options.

Suggestions:

1. Drop some coin and buy decent essays.


2. Don’t try to convince me you decided to rewrite a two and a half page essay into a five page essay, with multiple sources, on a totally different topic, because you didn’t find the first one interesting. (Oh, and in your evaluation, proofread, because one clue was that you consistently wrote about your “papper,” not “paper.”)


3. When I hand you the letter telling you you failed the course for plagiarism, don’t ask, “Well, do you still want me to take the quiz?”

This week’s idiot:
Today, My Favorite Moron says to me, "Uhm, could I have an exemption to this exam question?"

"What for?"

"I didn't get this one at all."

"What do you want me to do?" I ask, incredulously.

"Let me write another question."

"No," I say, "that wouldn't be fair to anyone else. Besides, I gave the questions a week ago, went through them and asked for any questions about them in class, and cancelled class on Wednesday to hold additional office hours specifically so that I would be available for help. And I passed out discussion questions on this essay, spent two days going through it paragraph by paragraph, and illustrated it on the board. It should be in your notes."

"Frankly, I don't have any notes."

Duh, I'm thinking. You sit in the front, and I can see you don't do a fucking thing. But I say, "MFM, does that sound like what an average student does to succeed? It doesn't? Well, then that's below average."

Shuffles back to seat. One minute later, shuffles back to me. "Uhm, would it be cheating if you told me what the thesis of the essay was?"

"Yes."

"If It's Them, We're All Screwed." Earnestine from Elgin Replies to Neelysville Nathan.

Today, after tossing back a couple of cups of horrendously strong black coffee and stoked up with as much sugar as the snack table had to offer, I myself gave some Ds which should have been Fs and a couple of Cs that should have been Ds. Why do I feel like as long as I’m not giving As that should be Bs, or Bs that should be Cs I’m still holding onto a shred of academic decency?

At those moments, I asked myself the question Nathan the Newbie asked earlier this week. On the surface, I try to convince myself that it’s me. The truth is I’ve found it is much easier to think it’s me because I can fix that, Nate. I can take a class, read a book, go to a workshop, try harder, switch textbooks, learn a new teaching method, or buy different pens. If it’s Them, well, I’m screwed, and so are you, my friend.

Them have invisible armor that blocks even the most highly disguised modicum of knowledge. Them have x-ray vision and can sense I’m about to say something Them might need at some point in their life. Them can seal off their hearing by blinking. Them can carry a textbook, sit in a classroom, and even raise their hand from time to time. Some of Them can even participate in a discussion, forgetting each word as they speak it. Them are the first wave of the next evolution of our species – nonlearnius halosapiens.

If it’s Them, I’m forever destined to be locked in room after room full of students who are so cruel, they won’t even keep it a secret. Them want me to know they could learn. There’s no problem with their tiny little brains. Them just won’t. Learn, that is. Them have consciously decided Them will not advance, and Them make sure I know I can’t make Them.

So, Nate, tell yourself it’s you. It’s easier to believe we’re lousy teachers. Read a couple of journal articles between semesters and take a nice long nap. Maybe next semester The Powerful Registration Gods will give you one of the endangered species students who take notes and study. They’re still out there. I know ‘cause I saw one once, moving quietly across campus, almost blending in with the rest of the crowd. It stopped and looked up at the sky and smiled and said “blue sky.”

It was beautiful, Nate. It still brings a tear to my eye. May you have the same kind of wonderful moment on the way to the Pit of the Pitiful.

"The Regulars." Mutinous Mildred Finds a "Vision" In the Mirror at Semester End.

It's the end of term. I can tell because I saw Tommy Lee Jones in the mirror again this morning. Every year he looks a little more like a hound dog. It takes two weeks' decent sleep before the bags under the eyes recede. And then it's time for the new term.

Every year at the beginning of term I think, I can handle this, it's only 14 weeks, how hard can it be? And I set out jauntily, gleam in the eye, banners waving, full of new ideas on how to teach my classes, bouncy and energetic.

And every year I reach the end of term staggering, head hanging, plodding one foot in front of the other, grimly shoving that rock uphill. The one that's about to roll over me and all the way back down, so I can begin again in a few weeks.

I don't know what makes it so hard. There's the marking, sure. But even that aside - and this year I can set it aside, because I haven't done most of it yet, and in fact am writing this in a frantic last-ditch procrastinatory effort - teaching is still exhausting. The emotional effort of meeting the classes and performing 10 hours a week is more tiring than can be rationally accounted for; the drain is emotional, and unquantifiable. And the drain of preparing the classes and never being quite ready no matter how often you've taught it before, forever dashing into class with something I've just remembered that I didn't have time to look up - perhaps that's just me.

And then there's the dealing with students. This term there are 509 emails from students in my "teaching" folder. I've answered them bloody all. And again it's not just the time; it's the emotional energy, and the energy, especially, it takes to say "no".

It is always easier to say yes; the student will be happy, you'll get that brief positive-energy contact buzz, it's the path of least resistance. Coming up with a reason to say no in the face of student hopes and expectations is always the uphill route. Because you always need a reason; you can't just say "forget it, kid." At the very least you have to say "forget it, kid - read the syllabus".

Through term the questions were "can I be excused this quiz/ have an extension on my paper?" Those ones are easy. "Do you have documentation of your crisis from an authoritative source? Yes? Then fine. No? Sorry."

But this week the questions are all "can you raise my paper grade?" And those are harder. I think I can divide them into groups by excuse:

1. "I nearly have an A in the class, all you need to do is raise the paper grade .0008%." Honey, that isn't even a reason to reread your paper, let alone raise the grade.

2. "You never said we were supposed to do X." Really? Check page 3 of the exhaustively detailed instructions for the assignment. Or have shown up to either of the entire classes I devoted to taking you through the assignment in detail, even getting the entire class to chorus "Every assignment must include X."

3. "I know I had some spelling errors and my grammar was a bit loose and I missed some of the things we were supposed to put in and it wasn't that well organized and I didn't actually argue a case. And I know that you told us exactly how you were going to grade it and how much every one of those things counted for. But I didn't think it was that bad." No? I did. And I have the advantage of having looked at all of the other papers in the class. I know how yours compared. And you know what? Most of your classmates had a clue.

4. "But I worked so hard!" This is the one always gets to me. Because when I reread those papers, I can tell, usually, that they DID work hard. And it goes to my heart to give a failing grade to someone who knocked themselves out, and just didn't get how they were supposed to do the assignment, despite repeated explanations.

So I have to reread at least all the assignments in group 4. And then I have to explain to them, as gently as I can, that I know they worked hard. And the effort does count for something. Usually it makes the difference between an F and a D. But effort alone is not going to get you an A.

So, good morning, Tommy Lee. I'm not exactly pleased to see you again, but I'm not exactly surprised.

On the other hand, at least teaching is over for the term. I'll be running out to make snow angels in the street as soon as I can haul myself out of my chair. Someone notify the media.

The Terrified TA From Tazewell Emails a Semester's Worth of Pain.

I worked as an undergraduate TA this semester, and boy, there was a lot of pain. Though departmental policy prevents me from grading the real juicy stuff, I did get the titillating opportunity to get to know these students... personally, through their daily assignments and their excruciating behavior in class.

By "personally," I refer to seeing all the shades of 'wrong' amongst them. I learned that Dimwit Derrick sounds coherent and thoughtful in type, but can't scrape together two correctly spelled clauses to save his life without the omniscient power of MS Word's spell-check. I stopped to think once, "Am I a dick for writing 'You're better with spell-check'" on one of your hand-written masterpieces? ...nah. And poor Bawling Belle! She must have been bawling, anyway, to take advantage of Perky Prof's lenient late-work policy four unique times due to separate medical emergencies - none of which were hers - and deaths in the family - none, of course, in her immediate family. Those grandmas and aunts are just hardwired to drop off as deadlines approach.

I won't forget you two either, Sorry Sarah and Belligerent Beth. You sat right by each other in class, and when I began to see your assignments handed in together, Sarah's sorry ass half the time of Beth's, I scrutinized your assignments a bit more carefully. The structure of your answers identical, the tenor of your opinions embarrassingly similar, one differing from the other not in ideas expressed, nor in their order, but only in vocabulary spluttered, I clearly remember availing Perky Prof about the situation. All the circumstantials fit: Beth was the better student, doing the homework for the less gifted roommate. They had let on they were friends in class. What a bullet you two dodged when Perky Prof regretfully told me they just weren't similar enough to make the call. I think he just wanted to let you off easy.

There's always the obligatory cell-phone whore, this semester played by the part of Clueless Collin, the bored major who showed up for every other class, sat in the front row, and messed around with with his iPhone every time he deemed to show. You told me you dropped your most challenging class. If you can't stand making it to this one, why the hell couldn't you have dropped it instead? Ah, that's right. No conscience about education. Oh, and who could forget Skater Sean, who walked in every class period at least 15 minutes late, sporting aviator sunglasses in November -- after six inches of snow -- clearly still tuned in to his ear buds, until gallivanting out two minutes early. Every class. The only intelligent thing you did this semester was hand back your evaluation sheet blank.

There were also those embarrassing personal moments, when by inviting me into the depths of their souls, I realized that these snowflakes were really scraping the depths of their brains to get past incoherent theistic conceptions of the mind, consciousness and personal identity. You couldn't even get the well-argued theistic positions! If you don't even understand what you believe, chickadees, can you really expect that your intuitions, poorly stated in class, will hold any weight? Dear Perky Prof: THIS is why the folk don't matter -- the folk are drooling into their purses at 1 in the afternoon, ignoring their professor's meticulous explanation of why their last paper sucked and exactly what they ought to do to improve their performance. They aren't intelligent enough to understand the value of taking classes outside their major (which is clearly pathetic, having taught them zero critical thinking skills), and they're certainly not coherent enough to aim for basing our theories around conformity with their intuitions. When you ask a question about the readings, Perky Prof, the folk sit around saying "I don't care" while I, the obvious TA-plant, raise my hand yet again to give the scripted response to the argument that they should have had no problem understanding.

The saddest part of the whole ordeal, the most terrifying at worst, is that these darling little inflexible snowflakes are my future. They are my future financial advisors and second-grade teachers for my kids (god forbid those ever happen). Their obvious lack of adaptation skills will just make them great lawyers, won't it? Oh well, I suppose they'll learn or drop out anyway. I sure as hell know they can't be my friends, though. Anyone so certifiably dimwitted as to not only not recognize but to staunchly deny the value of reaching out beyond one's current beliefs and actually interrogating them is a static, worthless excuse for a human being. You can't grow into real individuals, or have real relationships -- you'll only grow in your inertia and become further caricatures of the husk of potential your darling Pissy Parents may have once raised in you.

Perky Prof is a hopeful man. He lives in a world where we can make a difference in these poor kids' lives, and his optimistic, comprehensive research/service projects reflect that fact. But my poor Perky Prof is just setting the bar simultaneously too low and too high for these incorrigible little demons. After all -- they really can't be that high up on the food chain if I, the future poor, overworked first-year grad student, get to decide their fates next year.

"Katie" Offers the Last Word on an Ugly Little Episode. See? "The Regulars" Feature Is a Hit!

Whatever.

I'm sio done with this! I thought it'd be fun to add a clear and reasonable voice to your pathetic group of misanthropes, but your readers revealed themselves to be ignorant and I simply won't stop to their level.

I do not need anyone to tell me my value. I know my value. I am not bothered one bit from the meanness that you have shown me. I am so much better than you and I won't let myself be dragged down to your level even though it's clear you are baiting me.

I do know the writer of "Katie Redux," and I'd like to ask her, after our MLA panel, who got asked all the questions? Uh, yeah, I thought so. Maybe the sun shining out of my ass drew them all to me instead of you.

• Katie's original post.
• The replies.
• Katie Redux

Katie Redux.

Your new "regular" Katie is hardly just some anonymous blogger. Her identity is quite well known in the academic world as she's presented at least one paper about academic blogging where she talked about her own blog and its relation to her "real life" persona.

I, too, presented at that panel, and have been an "online pal" of hers for a couple of years. She is, I must say, exactly like she comes off in her post on your site, however. The glorious sun rises and sets in her ass, and if you don't believe me, just ask her about it. But to be fair, she's also a very hard worker, and I know from my own conversations with her, a really interested and dedicated teacher.

Also, she is NOT on the job market. Her own site (which I won't mention because it seems you've decided not to) has chronicled her dismay with her current institution and her previous forays on the market - as recently as last year. But as I'm sure you know from the last few months of posts, she's in her tenure year and seems resigned to stay where she is. If she's written you a post about a trip to the MLA, then it has to be recycled material.

I can't help but believe she won't be happy with your chosen set of replies. Surely somebody had something nice to say! Using your own words, the smackdown was delicious, though.

Poor Katie. It might take something like this to lend her a little humility. She could use it. She's got a ton of potential, and I actually like her. But she's gotten away with murder on charm and bluster, and it's nice to know that RYS and its readers weren't taken in.

Oh, Katie.

Katie, who made her first appearance as a "regular" yesterday, took a real beating in the overnight mail. Listen, we see a lot of meanness, vitriol, and smackdown, but some of this stuff even pinned our ears back.

Lots of folks thought she might be a put-on, but as is nearly always the case, you can't make shit like this up. Katie is, in fact, a very well known and popular academic blogger. We'd bet what's left of our TIAA-CREF accounts that most of you have read her. One of the moderators has sparred with her via email over the past year or so, and she has appeared with a couple of small posts here (always in a list of replies, not as a featured bit). How she came to write for us is as complicated a tale as how we keep Wicked Walter from killing us in our sleep. But it came down that she offered and we accepted, and now - after the comments below - we wonder if she'd like to continue with some more pieces.

We also want to note that she did some substantial anonymizing of her own in the piece. We don't think it's out of school to mention that while she claims to be on the job market this year, we already know (because she's already sent it to us!) that her next piece in fact chronicles a job search of hers at last year's MLA. On her own blog, in fact, she talks openly about her recent book and her long term plans to stay at her college. We actually don't have a problem with this. The points she makes about being on the market are all the same, and perhaps she's merely draping an extra (and unnecessary) layer of anonymity over the whole enterprise.

Anyway, we're just delaying. We don't really want to post the comments below, but, well, of course we DO want to post them, but we just don't want to be anywhere near Kalamazoo when the shit hits the fan. And we are sorry to all the folks for whom we didn't find space who sent imaginative and lively ways in which Katie could go fuck herself. Next time, we promise. If you're squeamish, you may want to avert your eyes:

• Oh, I see. Katie from Kalamazoo is a Kunt.



• Here’s the deal, sweetheart. Deep down, we know you will be manning the controls someday. That’s why we are trying to keep you from getting an entry level job now. We are scared shitless of what you morons will do to the greatest university system in the world. Perhaps your scholarship of current TV shows will help you understand. It’s like the heroes of the Terminator movies: we know what the future holds and we are doing whatever we can to prevent it from happening. The only difference really is that instead of using advanced AI, your brains seem to be running on the equivalent of a Commodore 64 with a self-esteem upgrade. Sure, you’ll learn how the system works once you get into it, but we really don’t think you’re bright enough to figure it out in a mere 25 years.



• “I’m wonderful. Somehow, I got a crappy job. Why won’t the world give me what I deserve now? I have a BFF. Did I mention how great I am?”



• Poor Katie. I take it that when you say “new Regular” what you really mean is “little Cocker Spaniel bitch-in-heat doused with beef broth and hung by her ears above a bunch of rabid, starving pit bulls,” because such – I fear – will be her fate at the hands of the RYS readers I know and love. Do you do such things just to provide us with a spectacle? Whenever I see a brave little trial balloon like this one go up, I am reminded of the Hindenburg’s final few seconds over Lakehurst, NJ and Herbert Morrison’s agonized commentary “…it’s crashing in flames! Oh, the humanity!” What will be the fate of poor Katie? Will the pit bulls of RYS leave her dangling yet delicious carcass alone, or will she explode in an enormous, expanding fireball from which no eye can be averted? I have my theory, but I’m not tellin’ anyone. However, any 30-something PhD college professor who uses the term “BFF” richly deserves whatever is coming to her.



• Katie had better be a joke, people. Or I am telling ATF where the compound is. I use satellite data in my work. I can find you. What are you THINKING? Humorless twaddle.



• Snore. Bore.



• Katie, my love, no one is forcing you to offer this ego-wank, so if you aren't sure you want to do it, it's more than OK with me. "Talented young blood forced to stagnate." The pathos is just too, too much and I am wiping a tear from my computer even as I write. Sad fact is, there are way too many, very talented Humanities PhDs. I very much doubt that you're the unique talent you think you are, and your apparent lack of self-awareness regarding how the impression you give of yourself in your post is striking. Maybe your colleagues aren't jealous. Maybe you appear to them as you do to me, as deeply condescending and the epitome of the graduate-school snowflake, managing simultaneously to congratulate and pity yourself on slumming it at a "nondescript" place that clearly isn't worthy of your unique talents. And I say this because my profile at an early stage in my career rather resembled yours, in terms of publication, teaching talent etc. But I don't think I was remotely as insufferable.



• Katie from Kalamazoo is a condescending bitch. Forget snowflake; she's Old Man Winter. I'm sure her current university is glad to see her go because then her office can actually be useful as a broom closet, rather than the vacuum of narcissism. Calling educators "powerbrokers of universities and colleges?" Bragging that she actually did her job by publishing something? Name dropping her grad school and advisor on an anonymous site? Claiming she has the best evaluations in the department (which is probably because she's not even paying attention to your classes, which means all of her students passed -- so of course they'd give her good marks)? Is that how far she stuck her head up her ass to get so full of shit? Forget Weepy Wayne's list of how to kill the site -- you just did it in one blow. Great job, knuckleheads.



• Are you fucking kidding me? You're making "Katie from Kalamazoo" a regular? Katie the Prosh Snowflake, who whines that she has the WORST OFFICE LIKE OMG and bemoans that the "nondescript colleges" she applied to weren't wowed by her obviously stunning overabundance of self-esteem and entitlement? Her colleagues and potential colleagues didn't immediately fall at her feet and fawn over her for being a unique, special....snowflake. All her students love her. I'm sure. All they have to do is tell her how AWESOME she is, and how WONDERFUL her classes are, and how she's REALLY COOLER than their other profs and she's REALLY influenced them this semester, and how about that "A" now, Doctor Special K? Christ, she has all the appeal of an infected paper cut, and all the humility/modesty of a Vegas Showgirl. If you're seriously going to let this esteem junkie wonk-job become a regular, I'm going to hunt up Walt. We'll be on the beach at Cabo, guzzling Tequila and watching the Wild Mating of the Cheeba Monkey, and offering pointers and commentary/



• I think Katie from Kalamazoo just out-snowflaked my worst snowflake ever in terms of ego and self-promotion. Well, ya can't say that K from K doesn't possess a strong sense of self. I'm glad my school isn't hiring this year, just to avoid dealing with a candidate like that for a day...



• She sounds exactly like some of my students--they're convinced of their own greatness, and attribute any negative response to their obvious superiority as a sign that others feel threatened by them. (Sort of like the girl who is convinced she never has a long-term relationship because she's too pretty or too confident, instead of realizing it's because she's just generally unpleasant to be around.) Katie makes it very clear that she doesn't think she has anything to learn from those with more experience. I hope she grows up a little before she permanently damages her career.

Phillie From the Plains Joins "The Regulars" And Opines on Plagiarism.

I knew plagiarists were, by and large, morons of the first water, but this one takes the cake. I have a student, a major actually, who was doing quite poorly in the course this semester. Because of the nature of the course, most of the assignments were simply of the kind where the student gets credit for handing in a credible attempt, but on all assignments where content was given substantial weight, he was failing miserably. He knew this to be the case, and spent a great deal of time in my office asking for ways he could improve his performance. He roundly failed to implement any of my advice, I should add.

Now, sadly, at my school and for this department, all it takes to be a major is checking a box on a form. We try to compensate by making the courses demanding, but, obviously, there's only so much that can be done on the quality control issue for courses taught by grad students, especially during the summer. This student, apparently, had taken the Intro course over this past summer, and was now enrolled in three courses required for majors - my course is restricted to majors, and has a very low enrollment cap. We - all of us who are saddled with him this semester - strongly suspect he took a certain Intro course this summer, taught by a grad student whom we would all like to jettison but, for various reasons, cannot. We likewise strongly suspect that this person was not only passed, despite being manifestly incapable of doing the work, but also perhaps even encouraged to major. There have been discussions of what to do with this grad student that would, under some outcomes, probably count as felony conspiracy.

Anyway, in this course, the students sometimes critique one another's work. They do so at home, having been emailed the papers in question, so they have extended access to their peers' essays. The astonishingly stupid cretin under discussion plagiarized large sections of the most recent draft of a paper that a fellow student in the same (very small) course was turning in, even though I had personally seen both his own most recent draft (prior to the final paper) as well as the most recent draft of the other student's paper, the one he copied from, a fact he was fully aware of.

On the one hand, I'm infuriated by the fact that this student wasted a substantial amount of my time over the course of the semester asking for help with his work. He's now going to fail the class, something he could have done without my aid. I'm also baffled, because while I knew he was incapable of doing the work, he seemed like a person of integrity. He clearly knows what plagiarism is, and it's an open-and-shut case. While he's not up to being a major in our department, he must have realized that he would be caught, failed, and possibly expelled or at least put on suspension. So, I find myself asking, is that perhaps what he intended all along? At least now he has a reason, other than mere incompetence, to explain his failure. Is being a plagiarist better than being inept? I don't think so, of course, but isn't it possible that with enough of one's pride pinned to being a certain kind of person, good at a certain field of endeavor, isn't is possible that a person might come to the conclusion that being a plagiarist really is better than accepting - or even just admitting - incompetence in that area?

Sledgehammer Steve Plays Generous With the Kids.

Winner, "Can You Teach Me Everything I've Not Bothered To Learn For The Past Fifteen Weeks In The Fifteen Minutes Before The Final Exam?" Category:

Email sent by Clueless Student, 11:19pm the night before the 8:00 am final.

"Dr. X, I have a few things I can't for the life of me figure out while studying. I have been trying to for hours, they are really hard to explain and it would be even harder for you to answer via the internet. Would we be able to meet before the test tomorrow morning at all? Thanks."

Reply by Generous Prof, who got the email over breakfast before the final.

"Dear Y, The exam is at 8:00 AM, and it's unlikely I'll be in my office much earlier than 7:45. However, you are welcome to ask me any questions in the period before the exam when I am in my office."

In other words, Flowers for Algernon here started off the semester so mentally challenged that he couldn't learn a damn thing for 15 weeks, but has now suddenly become such a genius that 15 minutes of pouring knowledge into his empty cranium will let him ace the final.

He needs to learn the department motto: "Cash Bribes Only."

Some Quenching Replies to This Week's Big Thirsty. "Does This Class Make My Ass Look Fat?"

Nathan the Newbie stirred up a lot of folks with his tale of woe. He wondered, "Is it me, or is it them?" Well, let's turn to our readers. Enjoy the flava:

• Whose fault is it? I can guarantee you it won't be the students. They didn't do their work? You didn't motivate them enough. They did lousy work? Your standards are too high. They cheated? You made it too tough for them, so they had no other way to "succeed". They don't come to the office? You intimidated them.Even if they're caught red-handed and there was overwhelming evidence to convict them if their work-shy ways were considered criminal offences, they would never be charged. They're completely innocent and free of any responsibility or obligation.When I was an undergrad back in the Cretaceous Era (sometimes known as the early '70s), if I goofed up, I paid the price for it. Nowadays, most students come to college or university already well-trained as professional "victims" and know every angle to evade liability.



• Let me tell you something about your grad school supervisor, who said that "Most of the students want to learn, so even if you're not the best teacher, you're not going to hurt them." He or she is full of shit. Your supervisor teaches at a research one, right? And you teach at Bumfuck U.? That says it all. When I was in grad school, at Famous Ivy U., my profs were completely out of touch with the real world of 4-4 loads, doing your own grading, and slacker snowflakes who are only in college because they think it gives them a better chance to drink and get laid. Keep up your high standards. You'll get some good students who do want to learn, like gold flakes in a miner's pan of gravel and dross. They make it worthwhile. As for the rest, keep flushing until they go down the bowl.



• Posts like Nathan's are getting predictably redundant. "How is it that I am working so hard to teach my courses," we ask, "while a lot of my students don't seem to give a flying fuck?" I suspect that replies to Nathan are, predictably, going to fall along the lines of "Don't take it personally." I'd like to offer a suggestion I haven't seen published on RYS yet: Collect some data. If end-of-semester course evals aren't providing enough insight into the "Is it me, or is it them?" conundrum, go the next step. There's the mid-semester course evaluation, the focus group, the questionnaire, and the video-review. Enough with the introspection, guilt, suspicion, and finger-pointing. Study the course and the students as one would inquire into the workings of any (dysfunctional) social group. The marketing world didn't invent data collection. We did! So, let's put to use the tools at our disposal and get some data about what's really behind the teaching-learning gap. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's them. Until you develop a hypothesis and test it, you'll never know.



• Of course it's them. Unless you were standing in front of your class all semester picking the lint out of your navel or other such self-absorbed, non-communicative activity then you were teaching. OK, maybe you weren't as stellar as you usually are (it happens); maybe you just got a group of students who are complete and utter slackers (it happens) and the feeling of boredom and resentment of a few students spread across the whole class (that definitely happens). Not all classes are going to be reprises of Dead Poets Society, so stop whining and beating yourself up for being a bad teacher and accept the fact that sometimes your students don't listen, may not care, and will write shitty exams.



• It’s them. If no one comes to the office (even just before an exam) or goes to a review session or even bothers to write stuff down that you tell them is going to be on the exam, there’s not a hell of a lot more that you can do. In their defense, it’s possible that some of your colleagues give A’s and B’s out the way we give out candy on Halloween. That way, students don’t bitch and moan about their grades. Then you actually push them and they don’t know what to do. I’ve had students who were failing the class miserably ask right before the final what they need to do to get a B. My answer of “invent time travel” isn’t met with much enthusiasm. What I’d really like to say is “invent time travel and keep your parents from ever meeting.” We’d find out if the time travel paradox was true. Since you seem to be new at the school, they don’t know what to make of you. After you assign grades, word will spread. Weaker students might avoid you. Hooray. Others might actually be daring and ask a question. Or even two. When I get the usual emails griping about a grade, I just tell them what they got, what the class median was, and their grade for the course. They usually shut up at that point. For heaven’s sake, don’t turn your grades in early. They’ll be pounding on the office door. Wait until the last day or two when most of the snowflakes have gone home, then turn them in so they have to email you instead. You don’t have to be sober when you reply.
  


• Ha ha ha ha. Funny you should ask. I just finished grading my stack of blue books and final papers and am having about the same response. As usual, the answer is: both. It's you and them. But lest you take on too much responsibility for those who seemed perpetually plugged into their iPods even though you checked, twice, for the tale-tale sign of wires sprouting from their head, a few words. When the whole class is failing miserably (as in the case of my final papers), perhaps it's the wording of the assignment, or maybe what seemed easy to you with your grad school education is woefully beyond their ability to comprehend, let alone deliver in a well-written, coherent fashion. I'm facing this, as I gave them a new assignment with new material. The results weren't pretty. Truth Be Told: I'm scuttling that last paper, not even including it on the spreadsheet as I recognize the responsibility fully is mine. (That's why I'm glad we're anonymous on this site, although I did confer with other, more seasoned vets of the classroom before making that decision.) And one nice side effect is when even the brilliant students were flopping around in prose several times their brain size, it saved me from grading the last half of the stack. However, I have a final that has been well-tested through several classes, adjusted, tweaked and I have great confidence it its ability to weed the vapid from the able. When a great slew of them were taking nose dives, I shrugged, graded and kept on going. Tests/papers/"grading implements" (in admin speak) are both a way to evaluate the students AND your teaching. It's not the end of the world if you gave a bad assignment and they've missed the boat and are drowning in the harbor. Just send out a life vessel (tweak the available points, change the percentages, maybe the questions will be worth 5 instead of 8) and learn from the experience. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither are great teachers. And never give back that last assignment

A New "Regular." Katie From Kalamazoo On The Market.

I am not convinced I even want to do this. Katie is not my "real" name, nor is it my "blogger" name. It happens to be the name of my BFF from grad school, and she's letting me use it.

I'm not a big fan of this site, but recently I was turned on to a few posts that I thought showed some promise. So I've been checking it out. When you posted a few of my pieces - for which I was grateful until I saw the "funny" titles you gave them - I never imagined the vitriol with which my very modest suggestions and ideas were met by your following of depressed academic goons.

So, I'm surprised you're interested in my voice, and I decided to take you up on the offer purely to show the other side of things. Perhaps I'll learn something from the process. Perhaps you'll learn something from me, as long as you listen and not judge.

My first posting will be on the job market. It's a pet peeve of mine how poorly junior faculty are treated. Your abominable "gumdrop unicorn" dustup from last year showed a great deal of what's wrong in our profession. Talented young blood is forced to stagnate. The deadwood rules, and people like me hop to a new job as soon as we have the wherewithal. And then of course we're blamed for that as well.

But, that's too bad. The truth is that my generation of teachers IS the future of the academic profession, and we WILL be the powerbrokers of universities and colleges for the next 25 years or so. So what we do, how we handle ourselves, and the courses WE chart will make the American academy what it will be. You don't like it? You don't have to. Attrition is a wonderful tool. Step aside now or later. It makes no difference.

So, I'm on the market this year, despite the fact that I'm at a decent enough state university now. But I'm on some kind of treadmill-track nobody told me about. I strive and achieve - even publishing a book in my third year! - and I get little or no notice. If I weren't so kind, I'd say my colleagues are jealous of me. Oh no, not little ole me, the junior faculty member with the WORST OFFICE IN THE BUILDING.

Yet, that's how it's gone. So I've got my application in at several excellent SLACs nearer my home in the northeast. (Oh, I went to [a famous private uni in New England], in case you're wondering.) And getting back there or its environs are what I'm eager to do. My BFF got a job in counseling in [that city], and my mother and father still live nearby. But any school within a morning's drive will suffice, and at 30, I think I've got more than enough credentials to pick and choose a job. I suspect - and my dissertation advisor [an extremely famous British Lit scholar] confirms - that I'm doing exactly the right thing, searching for a department that will welcome me, my scholarship, and my leadership, not a department where I'm simply a cog in the wheel.

But the market is tough. When I took my current job, I applied to several nondescript schools just like it. Some were wowed by me, and some could care less. I knew then I was looking at the wrong academic homes. I didn't trust myself to shoot for the highest level of schools, and I kick myself to this day about that.

But I've thrived here. My student evaluations are higher than anyone else's in the department. (Don't ask me; I just know.) My students love me. I have four peer-reviewed articles, and of course my book, which was a quantum leap revision of my dissertation - which I was told was of publishable quality from the start.

But if you will allow, I'll chronicle the market this year, starting with my upcoming visit to San Francisco at this year's Modern Language Association meeting. I'm not only taking on interviews, I'm also presenting a paper on [a scholarly look at a current reality TV show]. It's sure to turn a few heads. From San Francisco I'll report on the conference activities, the networking, the schmoozing, the panels, and of course my job interviews.

Just for record keeping, I've applied to 12 asst. level jobs and 2 assoc. level jobs. I will push hard on any of the asst. level jobs for those positions to be converted to assoc. level, obviously, having the background I have. I only have one interview set so far, but it's a slow year - what with Thanksgiving being so late and all. This week all of us job market folks should hear the good news of those deadly (but sometimes fun) hotel interviews.

Thank you for this forum. I look forward to checking in regularly.

Part-Time Poe Checks in from The Pacific Northwest, Where He's Clearly Not Doing Enough For His Students Who Apparently "Deserve" Better.

I'm one of the low people, a bothersome and annoying adjunct who gets in the way of big full-timers, even though I park on the street, don't have an office, and usually make my copies at Kinko's because the adjunct workroom is locked when I'm on campus.

Anyway, I teach freshman composition at a bullshit community college that is run so poorly that I often have to call campus security to open up the classroom building at 8 am, even though that's when class starts. (My students and I huddle together under the awning staying out of the persistent and pissy rain here.)

We're closing in on the final days of the semester - and that last beautiful $498 check! - and my students are working on their last essay. As I try to do a couple of times a semester, I've offered one on one conferences for all students during our normal class time, so that they can get some immediate feedback before next week's due date.

Today I had scheduled nine 10 minute conferences. Last week I passed around a sheet and the students chose any day they wanted, any time they wanted.

Of the 9 scheduled for today, 2 people came, 1 of them 30 minutes after his time, as I was leaving the building. (And he got a conference all right, in a fucking rainstorm. I didn't even share my umbrella.)

During my earlier wait in the classroom, the English department chair stopped in my room. He teaches next door at the same time and was the person who hired me.

He asked how I was doing and I expressed my dismay that the folks weren't coming in. He said, "Well, they have a lot on their plates. And it is quite early in the morning."

And I said, "Yes, but this IS the time of their class. We always meet at this time."

He says, "Perhaps you could give them a little treat for coming, like an extra 10 points on their essay, or maybe something sweet to eat."

I thought to myself, what a fucking idiot, but I didn't commit to such an answer out loud.

He left.

I waited some more, had my one and only good conference, and then waited some more.

Then the chair came back again. "I was thinking of options for you," he said. "Why don't you call all the students who missed and invite them to come back this afternoon. You can meet them in the lobby of the building, or in any empty classroom you could find."

I said, "That would work, but I've got other things going on this afternoon." (I teach another class at a slightly better college 55 miles away, and it's common for part-timers to teach both places.)

Then he sort of shook his head. "Well, we really encourage all of our instructors, especially the part-timers who don't have very good footing, to go the extra mile for our students. They deserve it."

And then he left again.

Nathan the Newbie From Neelysville With This Week's Big Thirsty.

I've spent my morning thumbing through a stack of blue book exams that contain responses showing no evidence these people were ever in the same room with me this entire semester. And certainly they wouldn't be able to recognize their textbooks in a lineup. As a T-T assistant prof., I'm conditioned to look inward when confronted with such matters. How did I fail these people on such a colossal scale? I hold office hours that are ignored, schedule study sessions that no one comes to, I even told them a couple of specific things (very specific) that they should look at to prepare for the exam. There was no evidence that they made any attempt to follow my advice.

The semester seemed like a stand off. It wasn't hostile or uncivil, but the way these students approached their work, it always seemed like they were just daring me to maintain my standards. "Surely, he'll come down to our level," they seemed to believe. "We dictate the standards of scholarship and happily converge at sub literate mediocrity." And it looks like they're going to win. I'll give Ds when I should be giving Fs, and Cs where Ds were earned. And it still won't spare me from the shitstorm of complaints I'll get from students, parents and administrators over the next month.

To be sure, I've got a lot to learn about being a teacher and I'm always looking for ways to improve, but I can't believe I'm this bad. I'm reminded of something one of my grad school supervisors said to me about learning to teach: "Most of the students want to learn, so even if you're not the best teacher, you're not going to hurt them." Not exactly the words of Ward Cleaver, but still.

Q: So, I put it to you. Is it me or is it them?

A: Send replies here.

A New "Regular." Dana From Decatur Dismantles Shy Guy.

Well, hey there, shy guy from the back row. How the fuck are ya? Oh, I’m sorry; does it look like I’m about to walk out the door? That could be because I am. You see, I had this sheet that I’ve passed around the room for the last three classes. It’s called a “conference sign-up sheet.” You may have heard me mention it 79.2 times. No? You don’t listen to a damned thing I say?

Okay, well, let me explain. It is the sheet where people sign up for conferences (apt title, don’t you think?). I then sit in my office and wait for them to saunter in, usually around five minutes after the appointed time. By the end of the day, when I’ve gone through 20-30 dear, sweet, squishy, snowflakes in 7-8 hours, I’m pretty much ready to run for the door, set fire to the building, and drive to the nearest state line. You see, your name wasn’t even on the sheet. So….

Okay, you just want to talk to me about one thing. I’m going to regret this, aren’t I? Okay, let’s talk about your research paper. You haven’t started researching? Great! I’m really glad you stopped by to tell me that. Well…oh, you want to talk about your last two papers?

You want to know why you scored Ds on both of them? How curious you have suddenly become, Shy Guy! Do you have these papers with you? Of course not! Okay, S.G., let’s talk about these papers. Forget the fact that the last time I looked at or thought about them was in September and October, respectively. Forget the fact that I have read hundreds of papers between now and then. I mean, I must have every student’s paper on auto-file somewhere in my brain, right? Well, from what I can remember, S.G., your papers really sucked—just really, really sucked hard, you know? I mean, that would explain the grade, right? Is this helping? You want to know how you can improve for the next paper? Well, since the assignment is to turn a previous paper into a researched paper, I would say the first thing you have to do is get one of your previous papers not to suck so much. That would be the first thing I would do, anyway. Once you do that, you need to do some research, and then I guess…

What’s that, Shy Guy? What are you saying over there, you quiet little bastard? This meeting isn’t helping you very much? Well isn’t that fucking sad! You know what’s not helping me? Sitting here with a student who had no conference scheduled, and who—as far as I can tell—just happened to be walking aimlessly past my door at the precise wrong time.

You know what else is not helping me? Having to pretend that I care enough to give you the time of day when I haven’t heard two words from you all semester, and when you are clearly just making a last-minute maneuver at Pin-the-Grade-on-the-Instructor. Yea, I don’t see where that’s helping me at all; I don’t enjoy that game too much. And since we’re both so clearly not helping each other, Shy, I’m out. Let me know if you ever want to play a different game some time. I have a feeling you’re great at charades.

"I've Got Your Wombat Right Here." Winnie the Wombat Wrangler from Winnipeg Wigs Out.

Jesus effing CHRIST, you irresponsible assclowns!

For a week I announced to the whole class that students *must not miss* the final. There are over one hundred of you in this freshman class (in just one of my sections, no less! There is a comparable number in the *other* section!) and if I lose a bunch of slackers to oversleeping, I would have to schedule a goddamn room to hold the make-up session, whereupon you slackers would, no doubt, commence to bitch about how you can't be there at four ayem, when the room is available during finals week, because you have to be milking your herd of wombats at that time each day, or whatever it is you freakazoids do with your time. And besides, they want your slackety-slacker grades back in the registrar's office within forty-eight hours of the scheduled final, yo.

So I said, many times, "don't pull all-nighters. They only hurt you. Neuroscience has proven this beyond a doubt. SERIOUSLY. DON'T." Almost three weeks before the final, I also said "here's the study sheet, so get cracking early and don't study last minute." I made sure there was a study session in the week before classes ended, so you didn't put it off to the weekend or the night before the final. I told you not to oversleep, to take your damn vitamins and wash your filthy hands and not to catch a sniffle; indeed, I told you not to miss the final unless you were in fact ON FIRE, because makeups would be nigh-impossible.

And I trusted you not to fuck it up. Because, to my surprise, you liked me very well this semester. All the experimental stuff I was doing with the pedagogy for this course? You ate it all up. You applauded me on the last day of class, for the love of little lactating wombats, and still, *a bunch of you slackers did not actually listen to me.*

And so your slackass email barrage began just as your bipedal, tool-using, calendar-and-clock-reading classmates were leaving the final. "I woke up with a funny swelling and decided to go back to sleep to see if it would get better. How do I take the make-up?" "I stayed up all night studying and laid down for a nap and now it's, like, afternoon!"

I know I should expect it. I know. I've been in the game long enough that I understand this is part of how it works. But because I put so much into a new course, and because the response had been pretty good, I sort of hoped that even the lazy-by-nature would take me seriously.

All-nighters, as I mentioned, are very unhealthy and bad for learning, and so I do not plan to stay up all night weeping over your Fs. Sweet dreams, my sweet little wombat-herding snowflakular failbag slackers!

One of Many Notes We've Received About Walt.

Maybe I'm a buffoon, but I really care about the whole Walt problem.

I admit that I'm a fan, and I come back to RYS fairly often hoping to see his name (and disturbing likeness). What "really" happened with his recent departure from the site is really not my concern. (I'm about half sure that it was all an act, anyway...)

But what I do want to say is that Walt, whoever he is, is one of my academic mentors. I beg you to find a way to let his voice ring out again.

Okay, he's a nutjob. He's likely a little insane. But his posts have actually encouraged me to be less fearful in my career, and no advisor or colleague or mentor has ever been able to do that for me before.

What Walt does (and what this whole page does, really) is offer up the courageous path to all problems. He doesn't recognize fear or weakness. He blusters through acting as if he were right, as if the work he's done to become Professor Walt entitles him to lead the way in his own career, his own classroom, and in his own research.

Of course it's overblown and hyperbolic - what on RYS is not? But whenever I finish a Walt post I'm more prepared to face my own situation here at Mediocre and Sad College Where Dreams Go to Die.

Some Walt-isms that I love:

• If you can touch three walls of your office at one time, you're a BIG FUCKING LOSER.
• If you get an office in some building's basement, then you went to the wrong grad school, girlfriend.
• Finally, a special shout out to those cretins on the job path. Oh, they are lovely, sweet dears, so persecuted, so incredibly sure that the system is out to spoil their chance at success...all the search committees have ganged up to find ways to make them unhappy, and when they do get interviews, they imagine senior faculty Stanley is flicking boogers at them, and not playing along with the modus operandi which is supposedly: "We welcome you and your intellect, and can't wait for you to show us how it's done, you 27 year old fucktard."
• It seems that all I do is write to you assholes to tell you to get all four wheels on the highway. You're always veering off, taking little pictures of the scenery, buying trinkets for the folks back home. Fill it with gas and let it rip. Burn up the 4-lane, and quit looking in the rear view mirror to see if your passengers are happy. The shitheads and the weenies will hop out a window on a curve, and the folks who want to take the trip will be back there anyway. Turn down the voices in your head, and turn up the Foghat. Don't make me come down there and kick your asses.
• You know what people should see when they look at your [office] door? Wood. That's it. Maybe a small piece of paper with your hours and name. Anything else is just jerking off.
• ...at least those of us who are real American professors, sure of ourselves, not crouched in a permanent fetal position like 95% of our kind, standing strong, teaching it right, calling it crazzy when it's crazzy, and being real when real is like so out.
• I mean, do you ever go by the faculty club and see the losers in there? If they aren't wearing bibs, they should be. And lately I've been spending a couple of minutes each day hitting the academic blogs to see what's out there. I can barely contain myself. I end up snorting, retching, and peeing my pants so much you'd think it was 1975 and I'd just gotten back from an Eagles show in Riverside.
• Oh, and English profs. They're delicious. They always have the nice Shakespearean fonts on their websites, a big quill next to their unbelievably white faces. They're always writing about how summer will bring them to England or Scotland, where they will trudge down some muddy trail to where Wordsworth once smoked a big bowl, or where Coleridge once ate a beaver because he thought it was Mary Shelley.

It seems to me that I've been surrounded my whole career by folks who don't say what they mean, folks who play the academics-as-politics game. I feel that I've been encouraged by colleagues and administration to let students walk over me in favor of higher evaluations and more FTEs!

Walt is one of the few people I've "met" in the academy who says it like it should be, and I think we're poorer for not having his voice on the site.

Lex from Lakeland Swats Away As the Semester Crumples.

• To Worried Wilbur, whose concern for his grades leads him to ask "Can I pull a C in class?" as I'm collecting quizzes but has never yet managed to lead him to my office door for a real conversation about his performance, grades, and future: Your desperate email begins by addressing me as "Mr," a perfectly innocent slip that I could let pass except that I don't want to. You've come crawling at the end of the semester, desperate for an eleventh-hour gesture of unearned mercy, and to my mind that level of desperation calls for some serious ass-kissing. So let's "Dr" it up, shall we? You got a D on the midterm, the second-lowest score in the class. You turned in only half of the short written assignments, managed to lay claim to only 19 of the 70 quiz points available over the course of the semester, and stopped attending class altogether three weeks ago. Having not done the work and not made any effort to seek my assistance, you email me, 16 weeks into the semester, to ask if you can still turn in your assignments (even though some of them are nearly three months late), take make-up quizzes, and perform extra credit work. I'll save you a trip: the boat has done sailed, and you've been left standing on the F dock. Irresponsible banks and carmakers get bailouts, slacker students don't.



• To Ballsy Brenda, who sent to me--a week after our last class meeting--all of the assignments she had failed to turn in on time: Let me get this straight. You did only the second half of the first assignment and the first half of the second assignment? And you did the third assignment on the wrong text? And you thnk I should give you partial credit for all this partially completed work, even though the deadlines were weeks ago? Do you realize that the first assignment was due in September? How much credit should I give to half an assignment turned in nine and a half weeks late? (I use the rhetoric of "giving" rather than "earning" because, let's face it, your half-assed, slacker efforts haven't earned you a damn thing.) I'll make you a deal: I won't bother to read this hopelessly late work, and you'll accept with grateful heart and tearful eye the 4 ¾ points (out of a possible 100) I'm writing next your name in my gradebook.



• To Dumbass Dick, who stated rather than asked, "You're offering opportunities for extra credit, right?": Listen carefully Grasshopper, because I'll only say this once: In my class, there is only credit; there is no "extra."



• To the Six Kings and Queens of Slackertude, who couldn't manage, over the course of 16 weeks, to complete an assignment that required nothing more than a simple Google search and seven minutes of partial concentration: You are all pathetic. I could not design an easier assignment. I'm guessing that if I just gave you points, you couldn't manage to hold out your hands to take them. The assignment asked you to do what you already do all day, every day with your friends: surf the web and write a short note about what you saw there. While you're posting and blogging and twittering away to your friends, you might have managed to complete the assignment and learn a little something you didn't know before. But you preferred to spend your internet time on activities that taught you nothing and that earn you no points towards your degree. And to the two of you who have emailed me asking for more time: check your Facebook walls for my very special "sucks to be you" reply.

"The Regulars." Milo From Manchester on Secretaries & Sabbaticals.

I’d like – in the spirit of the Thanksgiving just past – to highlight a couple of things I’m grateful for: secretaries and sabbaticals.

I learned as a first-year grad student that the real power in the department was not the Chair, but the secretary. Treat the secretary with respect and you got your mimeographed copies back in time for class; treat her with disdain – something with which grad students seem to come preloaded – and the original stencil you had so laboriously typed up, carefully correcting errors with that special fluid, might just disappear. “Are you sure you put it in my inbox?” she’d ask, fixing you with that don’t-ever-fuck-with-me stare. Even after the advent of word-processing and photocopied handouts, I’ve tried to stay on the good side of secretaries. You want that reimbursement for conference travel? The paperwork has to pass through many hands, but it doesn’t go anywhere until the department secretary moves it along.

As it happens, our departmental secretary – the only one I have ever known during my twenty years in the department – is retiring. Not only is she retiring, but she is doing so the semester before a new guy is endowed with the awesome and arbitrary power of the Chair. Which is to say, he will be floundering around like a mackerel on a boat deck with nobody to toss him back in the sea. And to think, it might have been me. I was nominated, but declined the honor of having the dean appoint the other guy anyway. But am I bitter? No, I’m not. Our retiring secretary, without whom we could not function as a department, has a salary (after thirty years) that is about one-third of mine. Also, I have it a lot better than many, many proffies around the country and I know it. There really ought to be a union or something. Oh, there is. You should join. For your own benefit and the benefit of your brothers and sisters toiling amidst the blizzard of snowflakes in American higher education.

But mostly I am not bitter because I am going on sabbatical. I realize that even saying this in a place like RYS will bring down the wrath of adjuncts on my old gray head. All I can say in reply (while protecting myself as best I can from their enraged battering) is that the employment system in American colleges is broken. There are some places, like mine, where we work very hard to keep the number of contingent faculty to a minimum and to treat those we do have with respect, but we are in the minority. Which is too bad, because a tenured faculty is a more effective and productive faculty. Yeah, tell it to the business office, I know. The VP for finance, even at my good school, would never be mistaken for an intellectual, nor certainly an upholder of humanistic verities.

I am not the first to say it, but I’m grateful to RYS for allowing beleaguered faculty members to come together to en-courage each other. And we are all beleaguered, even those who are relatively well-off like me. We are all in this business together and we need to act like it. For guys like me, that means remembering our privileged status; for adjuncts and various other contingent laborers in the vineyards of Academe, it means continuing to focus on what matters and not giving up on the life of the mind, for yourself or your students. Or maybe it just means not losing your mind. Happy Holidays, colleagues!

Does it Bother You That We STILL Want The Job?

Guess what? Our department found out that the position you applied for (and will so desperately want until you see the teaching load, the "service" component, and the pay) was "deferred" at least two months **after** the job had been listed on the association's website! Ever heard of "the mushroom treatment"? You know -- being kept in the dark and fed a lot of shit? Well, sweetie-pie, that's how The Administrative Powers That Be on college budget committees treat we poor schmucks who have to chair searches. And doesn't THAT make you want our no-longer-there assistant professor position EVEN MORE?

And we send a big BooHoo to you for having to spend a couple of bucks to mail us all of your brilliant research papers. We feel really really bad that you won't be able to buy that Extra Tall Frappe Half-Caff Half-Assed Latte Jamocha that you sip so preciously as you walk to the post office with your ouevre in hand. Guess what? The disappearing position in our department means my colleagues and I will, once again, have to carry the extra load that we WOULD have dumped on your assistant professor shoulders next year. Try pricing THAT, my dearie.

But there is a small bit of good news in all of this: You know that puppy I asked Santa to bring me for Christmas? She will be very, very pleased that your paper on "Heursitically Co-Variant Behavior of Lab Undergraduates in Monte Carlo Draws of Random Walk Stock Picks" weighs in at more than 100 pages, because that means I'll be able to give her something dry to pee on every two hours rather than every four. We thank you.

Dr. Schadenfrau Returns To Smack Down Some Online Learners.

Dr. Schadenfrau here again — you may remember me as maladapted, and with too many cats.

In all the rantings on RYS, there’s one I haven’t seen: online students, especially adult learners in advanced programs. We’ve battered the folks in the undergrad face-to-face venue, slammed international students and their understanding of intellectual property rights, and railed at idiot parents but no one’s had a good kick at the online cohort. So, like David Beckham, here I go.
My good pal at another institution, Dr. Dick Tator, and I teach face-to-face classes but a good portion of our load is delivered fully online. In particular, our online students are usually adults undertaking advanced-level work. Now, I’m not even considering whether or not advanced studies are truly possible or desirable as fully online entities. I don’t make university policies; I only heed to the whims of administrators and deliver the goods. I don’t, after all, have tenure.

Both Dr. Tator and I deliver structured courses with weekly requirements including readings, presentations, collaboration and all the other muck that’s supposed to invigorate the experience. Propelling us forward in the endeavor is the Learning Management System (LMS) for online delivery. If you’re unfamiliar, just remember that the average LMS is designed by Torquemada and members of Byzantium Engineering Inc. to ensure maximum pain and complexity, especially for new students. As the instructor, you’re not escaping this techno-dungeon without some shrieks of agony either.

Over time and drinks, Dr. Tator and I have found that online learning attracts a fairly small but consistent set of students to its techno-cloisters. Generally, most students are at least 2 or more of the archetypes listed below. See if you can identify any combinations in your online courses from the list:

Barbie Bandwidth. Barbie can’t do her work on time because she doesn’t have an internet connection at home and isn’t smart enough to poach from her neighbor’s unsecured wireless network. She roams coffee shops and other places touting “free internet” and can never seem to find a stable connection for viewing the weekly content, meeting online group members or submitting assignments. The connectivity requirements, as defined by the school, remain like gossamer fantasies of pixies at dusk for Barbie. Litanies of emails await you, the instructor of record, about technical problems with the university’s system.

Frankie Foreigner. OK, so Frankie got past the various language batteries, admissions essays and what not but now he’s asking questions about what he’s supposed to do every week. Frankie will email to ask if he should read Chapter 5, do the quiz and write an analysis; of course, the instructions on the LMS will say, “read Chapter 5, complete the quiz and write an analysis”. Instructor responses that say, “Please follow the instructions” generate more emails from Frankie asking again if he should read Chapter 5, complete the quiz and write an analysis. Frankie will then read Chapter 6, ignore the quiz and write a first-person narrative on puppies, replete with a non-sequitur Haiku.

Ida Impenetrable. No matter what, reading and following instructions do not seem to meld with Ida’s way of doing things. Ida never took the required tutorial for the LMS so she can’t follow any instructor’s directions because she doesn’t understand the system’s vocabulary. Every assignment she submits reflects her inability to carry out what’s asked of her. Her poor grades do not clue her in to her own shortcomings; rather, they make her pounce jackal-like on the instructor—that’d be you—with email litanies comparing her grade to Mary’s and demanding an explanation.

Ken Know-it-all. Yeah, Ken is that special guy; as an instructor, you wonder why he even deigned to apply to your institution’s Podunk Program when clearly, he aligns himself as Harvard or MIT material. On his profile, he is an “expert” in 27 activities. No matter what the situation, Ken’s emails begin with “In my 20 years working for [insert list of global-mega companies here]” and manage to mention his certification as a saturation diver, black belt in tae kwon do, and philharmonic sousaphone player. All emails from Ken cite how he cannot understand what’s asked of him in the assignments, as they don’t relate to any of the 27 areas in which he’s already an expert.

Marvin Midlife. The kids are in college and he’s thinking about doing something different—undefined and nebulous, but different. More than likely, Marvin just received a buy-out package and an empty box from his last employer. It matters not. Rather than getting a sports car and dating an idiot, Marvin’s decided an advanced online program is the way to go. Each week, Marvin obtusely asks how what we’re doing could possibly relate to his non-existent career goals or the real world. No words will appease him; Marvin’s indignant 24/7. The indignation generally ramps up each week via email and vacillates, it seems, depending on his meds, bipolarity and all of his friends with the first name of “Jack” or "Jim".

Mary Menopause. As ovulation ceased, Mary felt the need to fulfill herself in other ways. She can read and write but she’s totally computer illiterate. She produced her senior thesis on a typewriter and chose to stop the personal evolution then and there. She sees no need to buy a new computer as she’s got a perfectly fine Pentium (1992) system at home. She is utterly perplexed at why the LMS doesn’t seem to run on her computer. She also doesn’t understand that the underlined blue text in the course content is a hyperlink to other material. Thus, she misses half of each week’s content. Litanies of instructor-directed email, sobbing phone conversations and countless calls to tech support for HRT are her standard operating procedures.

Owen Opensource. Owen is an Open Orifice software guy, vehemently disparages the LMS to other students, and will not download the free-to-students Microcerf Orifice and use it. Never mind that his files don’t open properly, if at all; he insists all semester that Open Orifice is identical to Microcerf’s version and that the problem lies either with the LMS or with you, the instructor. Using that logic, it can then be said that I, Dr. Schadenfrau, am identical to Heidi Klum in every way. And, providing you truss me in lingerie, put me in a pitch dark room and get very, very drunk, that statement is true.

Sarah Singleton. Sarah is in her late 20’s or mid-30’s. Against, the grad advisor’s advice, she’s taking 3 online classes in addition to working a fulltime office job and holding down a part-time job in highway construction. She also cares for an elderly aunt, fosters an immigrant family, and runs an orphanage in her living room. To make up for the fact that she hasn’t had a personal life since G.H.W. Bush was in office, Sarah fills her days with a series of rotating crises and high-pressure demands. She vaporizes from the course for weeks at a time and wonders why you, the instructor, will not cut her any slack. Don’t even think about emailing this one regarding priorities. The elderly can’t be forgotten as roads need to be paved so degree wielding orphans can foster immigrant office workers [insert social outrage here for even suggesting otherwise].

Steve Sloth. Steve lists an impressive roster of activities on his profile including saving gnarly rump-breasted hoot owls, ending global warming with composting toilets, and other whacked-out shit. By mid-semester, you learn Steve has really been puttering inertly at his low-end accounting job now for 15 years and hitting the World of Warcraft (WoW) scene. His real impetus for the master’s? He’s met some online WoW hottie doing a post-doc in quantum physics and he’s feeling a bit inadequate as per his endless stream of whining, limp-dick emails to you, the instructor. No doubt being touched by human hands, other than his own, has never happened.

The End of the Semester Blues. Two Verses of a Very Long Song.

• Of course, it would be the very last paper of the semester. Either the student ran out of intellectual steam -- not that her boiler had much pressure to begin with -- or she was hoping that I'd not notice her plagiarism in the last-minute glut of final papers and quizzes. No such fucking luck. Honestly, I wish I had not caught it; a plagiarism case means 500 board-feet of documentation paperwork, at least four meetings with admin wonks to justify failing Widdle Preshus, and putting a call-block on my office phone to avoid Preshus' mom and her ranting "It couldn't have been my daughter!" calls. Preshus hadn't been setting the world on fire with her solid "B-" average, but she had been making progress. I had hopes that she'd end up becoming semi-literate. Now she's going to eat hot failure, and somehow in her vacuous, vapid world-view, it will be everyone else's fault.
  


• 20 students in the class and 3 took about 50% of my time. I helped them when they asked for it. I found alternate assignments when problems kept them from finishing. When their advisors reached out, I made extra work available. I extended office hours, met them in odd locations around campus, took extra time to grade and remediate their work. I took phone calls at home on weekends when they wanted extra clarification. They pushed for help and I gave whatever I thought was fair and reasonable. And then in the last week of the semester they all crumbled. Each student had been given a glut of options, various assignments, alternate dates, whatever. All because the chair asked me to; all because my need to help sincere students make it. And each student has just phoned it in, bailed out, or turned in a neatly plagiarized final paper that is word for word from an easily Googled site. So, what was all that effort for? To make me hate the fucking profession.

Prof. Claus Makes His Yearly Stop To Let Search Committees Know That They're Always Naughty, Never Nice.

Ho, ho, ho, Search Committees! It’s been nearly a year since I last dropped you a line, so I thought now was as good a time as any to update you on the mail that’s been filling up my jolly old mailbag.

If I’m being honest—and why wouldn’t good old Professor Claus be honest?—this year’s correspondence has been a bit boring. Most job seekers have written to me about the same old problems. No response to applications, no firm commitments about interviews (even though conference time is right around the corner), rejection letters sent for positions job seekers didn’t even apply for, rejection letters not personally addressed. Really, it’s the same old story year after year, it seems. Any idea why that might be the case, search committees?

That said, I did receive one poignant letter that I feel obligated to share with you. Here it is:

Dear Professor Claus,

Please pass my words on to all the search committees you converse with at the end of the year. This year, more than any other year, I have realized that the knuckleheads on those committees—from both the academic and administrative sides of the street—are completely disorganized.

Here’s what I mean: I have applied for countless positions this year, and, as usual, those applications required me to perform an unfathomable amount of acrobatic just to get my materials to said committees. I can’t count the amount of times I put together an enormous doorstop of an application packet (that cost several, several dollars to send), was also forced to send an official transcript right up front (that cost some more coin), and then had to contact my electronic filing service to send out copies of my letters of recommendation (that also cost some more dough).

For the moment, let’s forget about the fact that no sane, ethical search committee asks for this much shit up front and just cut right to the chase: After spending all of that time, energy, and money just to dive into a pool of hundreds of other applicants for a position that, let’s be honest, was pretty shitty to begin with, the fuckheads closed the search because of “funding issues.”

Seriously, where the hell have all of these people been since September? It’s no surprise to anyone that we’ve been in an enormous economic slump for MONTHS! Couldn’t they have gotten the funding situation squared away before posting the position? I mean, that’s what logical people (perhaps even, say, people smart enough to earn Ph.D.s) would do. Please, Professor Claus, please get the word out to these people that this shit just ain’t right.

Well, there you go, committee members. Your shit just ain’t right. Perhaps if you get your shit together, young newly minted Ph.D.s might not resent your disorganized asses so much. At the very least, if you got your shit together, you wouldn’t have to hear from me every year!

Merry Conferencing!

Fortyish Fiona From Fredericton Tells Us Not To Sweat The Distractions and Dumbasses.

I am a "mature" college student and see my share of students who show up late; not at all; fall asleep; have vacuous stares on their faces when the Prof asks for questions, comments, answers to questions, etc; use their laptops for playing games; text message; get phone calls during class, get up, leave the room, take the call (presumably) then come back in during the middle of the lecture.

Yes, it is a distraction, but I am a big enough girl to deal with it. I don't much care what they do, because they do their thing and I'm getting As and Bs for the quality of my work. I'm there, on time, sit in the front row, listen, ask questions, debate with the Profs, etc. When I have a legitimate difficulty understanding a concept or remembering details on an exam, my Profs go out of their way to help or give me as much credit with marks as they possibly can: when it is warranted and certainly within limits. They know I care and I want to learn.

Why do you all get your big boy/big girl panties in a twist about this? The students who are serious will ignore the distractions and get the material anyway. The students who are doing their own thing....let them do it. They do pay your salary, right? (snicker, ha, ha, ha).

Let the deadbeats entertain themselves.

HOWEVER, when the little darlings are failing because of their tardiness, absence, narcolepsy, absentee brains, text messaging, game playing etc., simply tell them, "So sorry, I already taught that information. I don't repeat myself, " or, "Gee, maybe you should have been in class, (on time, paying attention, etc.). Good luck!"

Failing that, maybe they would understand you better if you articulate yourself employing the linguistics in which they are so fond of expressing themselves: "Go fuck yourselves."

Mild Milton On Makeups, Penalties, and Mildred.

I enjoyed Mildred's recent note re cutting the kids some slack. However, I would like to propose an alternative course somewhere between being a hardass and being a pushover. While Mildred does require documentation, she is a bit too far to the pushover side of the spectrum for me.

I have a firm "no makeups" policy -- unless the little slackers have contacted me in advance. If I am contacted in advance of the class /exam / deadline, they are then granted an extension; no advance contact, no extension.

And then, if an extension is granted, the poor little dears lose 10%per week. Turn it in one day late, lose 10%. Turn it in after a week, lose 20%, etc. No exceptions. Everyone, no matter how good or how poor the excuse, loses 10% per week. Same policy applies to everyone, and to every kind of excuse, including school-related activities like athletics.

The advantage to me: I don't have to ask for documentation of the excuse, and I don't have to weigh whether it's a worthy excuse or not. Did you contact me in advance? Fine. Turn it in late, and take your lumps. Did you fail to contact me in advance? Oh, gee, tough luck. I will not accept your shit, or your excuses, for any reason.

The advantage to the students: they learn to anticipate deadlines.The otherwise good students who have an occasional emergency are slightly penalized on one single assignment, and it doesn't really affect the course grade. And the rare ones who want to abuse the policy with a dead dog or flat tire or ailing grandmother for every single assignment -- well, they get what they deserve, too, in the loss of points.

Easy all the way around -- easy to explain, easy to enforce, and it seems fair.

The Distance Ed Awards, Where Everyone Gets F'd.

It’s time for the Distance Education Academy Awards. I’m you host, Tom Talkinghead. We’re really excited this year, since there have been so many new developments in our local distance education classes and they’ve led to some truly special moments in pedagogy. Before we get started, we have a tap-dance number which will be performed by Spineless Sam and the Administrators, doing the golf shoe shuffle on a dance floor which consists of the naked backs of adjuncts and untenured profs, all of whom have been told to bend over, hold their ankles, and “take it like a man.”

“Worst performance by a male student in a leading role.”

The award goes to: Football Fred from Farmerville!!! We had high hopes for Fred since his first starring role in the sixty-minute special “play with the microphone button and create a symphony of percussive static which sets everyone’s teeth on edge, then pretend that you weren’t doing it.” However, this performance was completely eclipsed by Fred’s show-stealing performance in “Walk in with your buds twenty minutes late, make as much noise as possible, then have animated private discussions with the microphone off for the remaining forty minutes.” Bravo. Football Fred receives the coveted “F”.

“Worst performance by a female student in a leading role.”

The award goes to: Feckless Fanny from Farmerville!!! Fanny never fails to disappoint. From her jaw-dropping role in “You never told us that we had to use abstract thought in this class” to her cutting-edge performance-art piece via email: “I’m so sorry, but I haven’t been paying attention to you for weeks,” Fanny proves that she has all the skills necessary to hold down a job in fast food service or telemarketing. Bravo. Football Fanny also receives the coveted “F”.

“Worst performance by a male student in a supporting role.” This one is generally easy to decide, but this year we have to give a two-way tie to Fred’s buds, Phil and Frank. A supporting actor is judged by how well he supports the acts of his leading man, and Phil and Frank were outstanding. We all remember the obvious roles like “He didn’t do it” and “Why you always picking on us,” but it’s the subtle things—the eye rolling, the book shuffling, the things that often aren’t noticed since they’re only coming across thorough video monitors and classroom speakers—which really make these performances work. We have good news this term. Rather than share the “F,” we’ve gone ahead and gotten “F”s for the both of you. Congratulations, boys.

“Worst performance by a female student in a supporting role.”

The award goes to: Phoning Felicia from Farmerville!!! Felicia is another subtle actress who pretends to turn her cell phone off, but who keeps it on throughout the class, hidden away in her purse, where it can continue to disrupt the microphone signals in both classes. Her performances have the capacity to affect every single student in the classroom, ensuring that no one’s train of thought extends any longer than one minute’s duration, at which point a fresh burst of beeping and clicking whisks away any semblance of thought. While sitting through her performances, it’s impossible to not be exactly as empty-headed and dim-witted as she is. An “F” for you, Felicia. You’ve earned it.

“Worst director.”

We have a literal tour de force this year. Ordinarily this award goes to the merely incompetent, but this year we’ve reached a new height of directorship. Tanya the Farmerville Tech wins hands-down. From day three, when you wowed us all with your brilliant soliloquy: “stop picking on them—they’re good students” to your week eight outburst: “stop picking on them—they’re good students” all the way up to your week nine show-stopper: “It’s not my fault that I wasn’t here to let them into the classroom and they missed most of the class,” you were a shoo-in. However, yesterday you exceeded all expectations. Who would have expected Tanya to actually distribute student evaluation forms to everyone in the class (during a term when no evaluations were scheduled) and then to fax them directly to the Dean?!? And oh, the pathos. Did you actually TELL them to draw little frowny-faces on the bottoms of the page, or did they come up with that one on their own? Tanya, we’re sorry that there are no more “F”s to give out. However, rest assured that word of your behind-the-scenes manipulation has gotten around, and you won’t be burdened by working for the same poor little studio for much longer.

"The Regulars." Chiefiest of All, Weepy Wayne, Finally Gets On Board With Helping us End It All!

Because RYS is always and forever "desperately trying to find a way to kill the whole enterprise," I figured I'd do my part to help matters along.

Top Ten Ways to Put This Website Out of Its Collective Misery:

#10 - Live Nude Engineering Professors!

#9 - Dumb Down Big Thirsty Questions so even incoming freshmen can play. Next week's offering: "Dude, like, ever iron the seat of your pants and it smells like butt?"

#8 - Instead of easy potshots at hapless undergraduates, switch focus to gleeful evisceration of virtual colleagues. Rechristen site, "Rate Your Insufferable Catblogging Narcissist."

#7 - "Dear RYS, I never thought this would happen to me . . . "

#6 - More Useless and Offensive Prodo!

• Penny the Parent "thank you" cards (Perfect for the Holidays!)
• Polite Phillip Do-It-Yourself Castle and Moat Kit (Crocodiles, Pension, and Reserved Parking not included)
• Clete from Cleveland's own patented pedagogical falconry hood (As worn by him in his own classroom)

#5 - Season Five on RYS: Joanie Loves Chachi.

#4 - All posts undergo po-mo re-contextualization by onanistic grad students drunk on Foucault's "L'herméneutique du sujet." Look forward to the electronic sublimation of phallogocentrically biased texts and their hyper-contemporaneous effect on post-colonial hermeneutics via the solipsistic purview of crystallized six-pointed dipshits.

#3 - Feline Foto Fridayz!!!

#2 - Rely on overworked adjuncts to bail your sorry ass out with weekly posts (i.e., "The Regulars") and get only pathetic Top Ten Lists.

And the Number One Way to Kill This Site:

#1 - Two Words: The WaltCam

Rational Rhonda From the Red River Just Wants Something Reasonable For Christmas.

Since the semester is rolling to an end, and students head out to be pampered into their pre-college state, I have time to construct my Christmas List. While it would be great to ask the Big Red and White Guy to bring me some really terrific students for next semester, I find my needs are really much simpler this year.

I’d like to have a functional white board marker in every classroom, and an eraser that hasn’t been soaked in white board cleaner. I have fantasy dreams about being able to write on the board without fading out, and erasing without slime dripping down the board.

I’d love to have a cleaning crew who runs the vacuum in my office behind the door. Not that I shut the door that often, but when I do, I’m a little scared by the accumulation of paper clips, pieces of paper and spider webs.

I’d really get off on having computer equipment in the classroom that works. I know, how can I continue to add to my already demanding list, but it would be unreal to be able to do my Power Point that everyone insists I do in my class to bore my students without having to jiggle the thingamabob to get it to work.

And, dare I stretch all the way to the outer limit, if the Big Red and White Guy could drop off some bandwith it would be more than incredible. That’s the ultimate. Internet speed. That way when I slip into tech mode to keep the little dip wads interested, I can download before they fall asleep. It would be fabuloso if I could actually produce images as fast, if not – dare I ask – faster, than those over priced pink and green phones my students have in their hands.

I’m not asking for students who are there when the class starts, who don’t text, who turn papers in on time, whose parents don’t call, and who stay awake. I’m not asking for classes that aren’t overloaded. I’m not asking for a solution to anything I’ve complained about this semester. That’s beyond what even the Big Red and White Guy can deliver and I know it and am not one to ask for something I know just doesn’t exist. So, if there’s room in the sleigh, just one thing from my list would be, I don’t know, terrific.

"Enter Crusty." Who Are We Glad Is Almost Gone At Semester End?

This semester, it hasn’t been the darling schnoflakey freshmen that have irritated the everloving shit out of me. At least they’re too busy texting, talking, smacking, drinking, and screwing to realize how ignorant they really are, and there’s something to be said for narcissism – at least they’re too conceited to intentionally hurt anyone else much.

What has really driven me over the edge these last sixteen weeks is a student in my upper-level undergraduate course. It consists of about twenty-five students who show up on a regular basis, and enough of them have had classes together over the years to develop a rapport and certain level of comfort with one another. And for the most part, they’ve been great. However, although this is a relatively specialized course, it’s a sexy enough topic to draw students from outside the department.

Enter Crusty.

Crusty is a mid-twenty-something snotty bitch from a completely unrelated major whose contempt for me, the other students, and the discipline has made many a class completely unbearable. She is from a totally unrelated major, and I have yet to discern why she’s even taking the course other than to show off her “extensive” knowledge of the topic. From what I can gather, her “extensive” knowledge comes from reading no more than four random books and watching extended basic cable television programming. She attempts to hijack the lecture whenever I talk about one of her four subject areas (gleaned from the aforementioned four books), and she has rudely interrupted me to correct what she perceives as misinformation when I’m teaching. I’m not too vain to accept legitimate contributions from students, but she has no idea what she’s talking about half the time, and the other half she is so disdainful that I’m not an expert in one of the said four areas that I end up shutting her down completely and move on to the next point. Her participation in the class is condescending at best, flat-out disrespectful at worst, and even other students roll their eyes and make rude comments about her because her tone is so inappropriate and her yapping so utterly irrelevant to the larger point.

Normally, I try to let these things shake themselves out. Most annoying assholes succumb to peer pressure and will shut their cakehole when they realize that nobody can stand them. And I’m able to manage Crusty’s public scorn for me personally pretty well. Usually I will say it’s a point well taken and leave it at that; other times I will patiently correct her blind stupidity or just say that it’s not really what we’re talking about. The one truly best part of all this is that her work is always so late and/or poorly done that I don’t have to feel bad for failing her sorry ass and wondering if I’m just seeking revenge. Nope, no guilt at all.

But that’s not what really, really annoys me about her. Crusty smells so bad that I can’t hardly stomach it. The one blessing is that it’s a mid-morning class; my breakfast has settled but I haven’t eaten lunch yet. And before anyone rips me a new one for being insensitive, Crusty’s funk isn’t culturally relevant, like consuming a lot of garlic or turmeric. It’s also not due to her socio-economic status because the bitch totes around enough electronic gadgets to bring Circuit City out of bankruptcy. And it’s not even like she lacks potential. I made the class clean up for a special guest speaker who came on campus at the beginning of the semester, and Crusty looked starched and pressed along with the rest of her peers, although I didn’t actually get close enough to steal a whiff. No, this kind of stench comes from weeks and months of deliberate neglect to one’s personal hygiene. It’s the type of foul odor that accompanies that head of lettuce that turned to liquid in the bottom back of your refrigerator crossed with sulfur, curdled milk, and warm fungal residue. She wears a jacket most days so I have no idea what kind of condition her clothes are in, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen her hair because she wears a ballcap. So who knows where her putrid perfume is coming from, unless she’s actually rotting from the inside out. My best guess is that she has so little respect for other people that she doesn't care about what she looks like or what the rest of us have to suffer through to stand within ten feet of her.

All I know is that, between her shitty attitude and scent of decay, I cannot wait until the end of next week.

"Hi, uh, I'm Your Teacher This Term, And, Uh, I Don't Believe I've Brought, Er, Any Protection."

As we often do, we've pulled together some of the lively replies to this week's Big Thirsty on support and protection, and have presented them below with bullets. We think the bullets are great - to the point - concise. They're what our students call "cut and dry." Enjoy.

• I show up at work anticipating nonstop verbal, physical and/or emotional abuse from students, office secretaries, colleagues and administrators. Most days never that bad (they leave me alone for my lunch) and I go home in an upbeat mood.




• I teach in the English department, where students seem to feel that grades are open to negotiation because they view the whole process as subjective anyway. So we have the joy of not only dealing with disruptive jerkwads, but a higher rate of dealing with their personal complaints about profs at the end of the semester as well. When I was a graduate student teacher, I had issues with plagiarists, a segment of the athletic department who wanted to pass their students through my class in spite of utterly failing grades, and the random slack-ass joker who wanted to contest their grade because they suddenly realized they'd screwed their scholarship but good. My department not only supported me *and* protected me, they went to bat for me, even against the uber-powerful football worshipping athletics head honchos. My university isn't exactly top grade. If yours won't protect a more "valuable" investment such as you, you need to find another department.




• If you need support from a department head, dean, or other generally useless waste of DNA and you are not certain you will get it, it often helps to ‘prep the battlefield.’ If you are having problems with a dipshit student, resist the urge to react immediately. Establish a trend by finding out if any of your colleagues are having the same problems with the student’s behavior. If other faculty are having problems with the same idiot, then you can avoid looking like you are overreacting. Next, document the behavior. When a student causes a problem, write down a brief description of the issue to present to your immediate supervisor/meeting hag. Admins love reports, so describing it in writing is more effective than trying to describe it orally to a desk-jockey who lacks the mental capacity to empathize with a fellow professional. Also, a report carries the latent threat that you might share that report with someone else up the chain of command, and admins don’t like looking like they are asleep at the switch. Last, and most important, if you must put some classroom smackdown on a student, be the first to let your local desk-jockey know what happened. I know it sounds infantile to have to explain yourself to the closest admin/oxygen thief, but by getting your story in first you can preempt any snowflake story that you were out of line, abusive, or hurt their little feelings. You come off looking like the responsible one, and flittering snowflake looks like the one covering their ass.




• I just want to speak up a bit about tenured folks and the supposed protection and support others think they might have. Despite having tenure, I'm "eligible" for all the regular abuses, shitty classrooms, enrollment fuckups, disappearing classes, and that lovely euphemism - post tenure review. If anything, since I got tenure I've been treated worse. There's this sense that I'm resting on my considerably mediocre laurels.




• Sadly, the support junior faculty can expect is NONE AT ALL. My stint as a VAP and on the t-t would have gone more smoothly if I'd realized this earlier. The administration's reply to any complaint was, "You can be relaced," and I couldn't do a thing about it. As a VAP, I was little more than a serf: the attitude was, "Be grateful we allow you to farm the feudal estate, and if we pull the drawbridge up with you on the outside, that's your problem." For how to deal with this mentality, see Generation X Goes to College: An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Postmodern America by Peter Sacks. Yes, not supporting junior faculty does compromise education, and yes, it is depressing for the junior faculty, particularly fools like me who like to think they have standards or integrity. It wasn't easy for me to learn how to control my facial expressions, so as not to look exasperated or even surprised, no matter how egregious the atrocity some smelly, slack-ass snowflake who looks like he's done his hair with a weed wacker had come up with. It's good to be a silverback: although I still don't always win, I particularly enjoy the SHOUTING! ("RESISTANCE IS USELESS!!!")




• Fuck it. If you have support or protection, both or neither, act "as if." As if you were worthy of respect. As if your job actually mattered. As if you were acting in the best interests of the college and the students. Anything else and you might as well gobble up that plate of shit some of you seem to be getting served.

A New Addition to "The Regulars." Froderick Frankenstien From Fortuna On "Science For Dummies."

Who knew? People seem to like "The Regulars." We're two weeks into the trial and we're figuring out what to do with it long run. Today we add a new voice, and we're open to more. In fact, we've decided to treat "The Regulars" like we did that nebulous - but MUCH sought after - "chief correspondent" label. In fact, that's how we generated our first group. Wayne, Athena, Milo, Mildred, and Ben were all very frequent and valued contributors to the site.

We wanted to run "The Regulars" once a week for 4 weeks to give it a good test, but we're already happy with the results. We'll move now into a more casual situation. "Regulars" will appear when they want, when they send in something lively and interesting. (Just make sure to remind us of your RYS name! Nobody keeps track of shit around here since Compound Chronos split, the bastard.)

For those who think they're qualified, send us a listing of at least 4 of your best posts that have appeared on the site, and we'll definitely consider you for the elevated and intoxicating status. We'll also need a celebrity to use as a template for your image, and you can TRY to come up with one of the standard RYS monikers - though we tend to like to do that ourselves!

For now, though, keep reading and enjoying. Or just read and hate us, like this arrogant prick.

But, to happier thoughts. "Ladies and germs: Here's Froderick!"

-~-~-~-

Although one may quibble with Milo's specific examples, I agree with him anyway.

If anything, the problem is MUCH more egregious in the sciences. I teach Intro Astronomy, the science course for people not majoring in science. I find my students' high-school background in science consists of NOTHING WHATSOEVER. I need to teach them that Earth spins once every 24 hours and that's what causes day and night, that Earth goes around the Sun once every 365 days (and change) and that's what a year is, and that there's no air 60 miles higher than Earth's surface and so that's where space begins. I also need to show them that gravity and magnetism aren't the same thing, and that ice when heated turns into water, which when heated further turns into steam.

So, what exactly do they do during all those science courses that they claim they take in high school? As far as I can tell, they learn things that are WRONG. About half of my students think that we're held to Earth because it has a magnetic field, because that specifically was what they were taught in high school. Worse, they get a large dose of fear: if there's anything that high-school science teachers today are successful at transmitting, it's their fear of science. It worries me a lot: how are our students going to manage the technological vastness of the future? And I don't mean live on their cell phones; I mean understand that the cell phone is the product of rational thought processes, and not magic.

Of course, not all high-school science teachers do this. Indeed, this problem drives the good ones even crazier than it drives me, but the good ones are far too few. What's worse is that this problem is very much the fault of what these teachers learned when they were undergraduate education majors. I hate to find myself agreeing with Charlie Sykes, but I'm starting to think that we'd all be better off if they would just close down all the undergrad education programs in the country, as a horrible mistake---although, unlike Charlie, I recognize that the probability of achieving this is ZERO.

Orenthal from Oregon On Student Evaluations.

I teach at an upscale college in the Pacific Northwest. Take your pick of which, the class of student is all the same: entitled and full of themselves. Already MD's, PhD's, JD's etc. If only the pesky academic institutions would just recognize this, and dispense with this whole mandatory college requirement to obtain the letters behind their names. Fine by me! I mean, c'mon! Mom, Dad and Uncle Jack are going to use their influence to get junior into the best med schools or the top firms anyway! So, really, why force them on us, the hard working profs that actually had to earn what we got? And have the student loans to show for it? I say, sign the check mom and dad for the full 4 year tuition, here's your sheepskin, junior, now go see if you can manage in med school without the benefit of my training you.

I'm sure this complaint has been made 100 times before, but not by me. So it's my turn. How dare these students judge my competence, the validity of my assignments or my intentions? How dare my college even consider their incoherent rantings as meaningful? These are the same students that can't even manage to dump just their cafeteria waste into the trash bins; they put the whole tray in the trash because they're too busy with their cellphones or listening to their Zunes. But then, really, why should they have to interrupt their entertainment and enjoyment to make the custodial staffs' job a bit easier and cleaner? That's right, these are the kids that determine our fates.

I currently have a class full of students that are GPA-centric - never a good situation. After my last exam, I had 8 [EIGHT!] 8 students in my office demanding that their tests be re-graded. One typed up a sheet of comments showing me why I was wrong at each comment. Right, I'm gonna sit here and read that same piece of crap...AGAIN! Sure, here ya go...it was a C+, now its a C- ....I missed a few things the first time around--thanks for calling it to my attention. Second of all, God forbid you should challenge them to think outside the box. If you do, then the test is just too "comprehensive." I'm sorry, did we get a manual on what IS the necessary level of detail? Princess, you aren't the A student you think you are...sorry to be messenger on this one. But someone had to do it, lest it be your malpractice insurance company at a later date. I may have saved a life with that new grade.

Previously on RYS:

• Student Eval Instructions.
• Wisdom Concerning Evals.
• Are Students Just Evaluating Themselves?
• The best fake graphic we ever made.
• What 18 Year Olds Can Know.

Big Thirsty! What Kind of Protection and Support Should We Expect?

Tuesday's "Give and Take" feature scared the shit out of me. (Even though the "creamy potatoes" line laid me out...Compound Calico is King Shit!)

I'm three years into my first t-t job and I've only rarely wondered how much protection or support I have from my colleagues, chair, and the college.

Reading about Slack Ass Safford's situation made me just want to puke. That's not a job worth having, "coin" or not.

I know tenured folks have protection, even if they don't have support. And I know adjuncts and part-timers probably don't have any protection, though they may have support. But what about the rest of us, folks on tenure lines, heading somewhere, folks with VAPs that might become tenure lines?

Q: What kind of support and protection can we (should we) expect from our departments and our universities while we're in this limbo? Can we make students toe the line? Can we speak up at the faculty meeting? Can we drop Plagiarizing Peacock on his multi-hued head? Will the school have our back?

A: Send replies here.

"The Regulars." Mildred from Medicine Hat On Cutting the Kids Some Slack.

RYS shames me. I have no spine. I am spineless. And yet I cannot help myself. Worse, I do not want to.

Samples:

Dick Doberman: May I have an extension because my dog died?
Mildred: Provide me with documentation of your dog's death and you may have an extension.

Tommy "Tiger" Teebox: I have to miss that exam because I'm on the golf team and we're in the provincials that weekend.
Mildred: Oh yeah, I saw that in the campus paper. Okay. I'll excuse you from that one.

Infectious Irene: My paper is late because I have strep throat/tonsillitis/the flu/ have been throwing up for four days.
Mildred: Bring me a note from your doctor and you can have an extension.

Dearly Dumped Dora: My boyfriend just dumped me for my roommate.
Mildred: Bring me a note from counselling and you can have an extension.

But here's the thing. I don't actually care. I don't like to be played, and I ask for documentation if they haven't already provided it because I want external verification of whatever their excuse is. Also, I don't want to reward dishonesty. But provided they're telling the truth, why should I give them a worse time than they're already having? I have no problem with cutting a little slack for people who are legitimately, for whatever reason, having a hard time right now. I don't see why I should be a hardass.

I don't grade on a curve, so their possibly slightly increased grades are not threatening anyone else's. Sure, not everybody who was sick that week let me know; some of them soldiered on through a high fever or domestic tragedy or whatever, and their mark may have suffered because of it. But I can't help the ones I don't know about.

I know, when they get into the real world they'll be expected to perform. But in conditions of legitimate illness or domestic emergency employers will cut them some slack too. Why shouldn't I?

Plus, the amount of paperwork involved in student appeals is insane.

Ravenswood Rico Sends In Some Random Smackery.

• This one is for the major in my writing workshop who asked via email if it was okay if he just skipped out on turning in the rest of his drafts, self-critiques, and other assignments for the rest of the semester, since his paper was already ship-shape and ready to go. Yeah, uh... it's not. Although, frankly, I should have let you. I've already shown the draft of the paper you considered "finished" to the grader for your course, and I already *know* what grade you'd have gotten on it.


• To the guy who keeps sending me emails sans attachment and then claims that no penalty should attach to not turning in his papers on time just because he had "problems" with his email: an implicit part of your grade is the ability to follow instructions and complete assignments, which includes the minimal technical abilities required to do so, or at least the ability to lie about it more convincingly. Whichever one has proven to be an insurmountable problem for you, fuck you. You fail.


• This one is for the guy I had a few semesters back (hey, I didn't know about RYS then) in Philosophy of Religion. After a twenty minute discussion on the problem of evil, he raised his hand and, when called on, declared in a loud voice, "Well, I believe Jesus is the Son of God," ending his proclamation with a slap on his desk. Whatever your personal beliefs are, sir, you're an imbecile. And, frankly, you're giving people who do believe the things you believe a bad name.

Eloise from Effingham Tries to Steer Our Sinking Ship Back to Students.

It is wonderful that RYS is an open forum because it has been well established that we need to rant in order to maintain our classroom composure. I’ve also read here on the site that it has become enormously popular. I’m not sure why – was it mentioned on a talk show somewhere? Honestly though, I’m beginning to resent is the influx of comments that basically say “it’s not my fault” disguised as thoughts about the weaknesses in how we handle the trials and tribulations that face today’s college instructor. I’ll take a smack down from a colleague, from someone who is in the trenches somewhere, albeit a trench that is lined with roses and a free supply of fresh coffee – unlike the hell hole some of us are forced to live in – at least the trenchee is aware of what goes on out here. What I don’t like is hearing from those who wish to remain blameless in a system that is rapidly going to hell in a hand basket.

First we heard from parents and the whole please feel sorry for the snowflakes who want to miss Monday and Tuesday classes so they can be home of Thursday. How in the hell did they find us? Why are they reading this site anyway? I’ll bet these are the same people who hounded the high school teachers into giving out grades the students hadn’t earned and donated to the college so the kid was accepted. The response was over whelming and I agreed with every word, but what are they doing here? Seriously. They wouldn’t last five minutes in most of the classrooms we teach and they’d never make it through the end of semester “oh my gawd I’m going to lose my scholarship no one told me I have to actually go to class I thought college was about having fun” barrage I went through today.

Next we hear from our good friends in Registration. Please feel sorry for us for overloading your classes. Again, really? While I can see a little more likelihood that they’d be interested in the content, I’m appalled at their gumption to beg for our forgiveness. Please don’t blame me. Honest? You want me to feel bad that you put 21 students in that class so Sally has to share a computer with Maxwell and the last student in has to, horrors of all horrors, sit in the front row, all of which is under the guise of serving the student? Come stand in a classroom that’s packed to the gills and see that I now have too many students in the room that it is far from the low ratio of student to instructor we advertise - it is a friggin’ zoo.

Who goes next, I wonder? Administration asking me to forgive them because budget cuts have doomed the hallways to drab institutional beige, classrooms that are hot in the summer and freezing in the winter, while they sit in cozy offices with real plants? Finance wanting me to feel guilty for wanting to be paid? The Board of Trustees begging us to ask the union to be reasonable at contract time so that we can continue to get by with a 6 to 1 ratio of adjuncts to full-timers, minimal health insurance and fewer days off? For all I know, that idiot of a governor in a state which shall remain anonymous will be writing in to see if we’ll take his side in the push to get funds back from universities because the state budget is fucked. Before this barrage is over, I fully expect to see a message from the guy who fills the vending machine asking us to be kind to him, that it’s not his fault that the change machine is always broken, that the coffee machine frequently gives me a cup of hot water instead of black no sugar no cream sheep-shit pretend coffee, and that he never puts in enough Snickers bars to get me through the week.

It doesn’t matter who is at fault. No matter what, I still spend my days, 16 blessed weeks at a time, trying to remain optimistic about the future of this country while I face kids who got through the free public school system I pay for out of my taxes and can’t read, can’t write, can’t spell and for the life of them can’t put together an idea about anything. Believe me, I’d gladly send little Snowflake Sally home early for Thanksgiving if I thought you were going to make her sit down with a book in her hands, watch a real news show, or engage her in a conversation for at least an hour without texting, listening to music or answering her cell phone.

So, if you are reading this message, and you aren’t an underpaid adjunct, an overpaid tenured prof, a washed up ne’er-do-well instructor, in short – someone who actually has students to rate – I would ask that if you are going to go to the trouble of being asked to be included, send in some real suggestions. How do we keep them off their cell phones, stop them from texting, keep them from cheating, stop them from plagiarizing and, the ultimate goal, keep them awake? Without hitting them, I mean -- because as far as I know and as much as we want to, we still aren’t allowed to do that.

"The Regulars." Athena Continues to Smack Down Those Silly, Hopeful Students.

Timeless Timmy: I make appointments with people who can't make it to regular office hours, not for people who don't want to risk having to wait in line. You don't have class during my office hours. I'm already on campus way more than 40 hours/week, besides the time I spend at home working on all the stuff I can't get done at school because of the students in my office. I'm not interested in making a special trip in so you can have alone time.

Hopeful Hattie: I have hundreds of students in four classes. Look around at just the other 200 people in your own section, put your brain in gear, and give me a little more to go on than, "Dr. Athena? I'm the student? Who sent you that email? Yesterday?" and an expectant look.

'Eadstrong Eric: If you send me another email to "Mrs. Athena" I will send a response to "Mrs. L," despite the fact that your first name is Eric. On the other hand, the gesture would probably be lost on you.

Allie the Achiever: You emailed me to *complain* that you have to score 75% on the final to keep your B for the course? You mean, you can make a C on the final, which is 40% of your course grade, and still earn a B for the course? And you think this is somehow unfair, and I should do something to let you earn extra credit so that you can have a more comfortable margin, because you're used to being an A student without working for it? Dude, that request takes balls. Suck it up and earn your 75 on the final, or take your C like a man.

Cliff the Climber: What can you do to earn a C in the class? With an average of 37% on the first three exams, you need to earn 120% on the final. Good luck with that. And when you retake the class, try finding the prof's office sometime before week 12 of a 14-week semester.

Give and Take With RYS Moderator Compound Calico.

I guess I am one of those "slack ass" instructors. Or, perhaps Milo has the most supportive bosses ever.

You see, Milo, I teach at a for-profit career college. Our survival as an institution is 100% dependent on, and hence management's only goal, is keeping the students willing to return tomorrow. I do not have luxury to challenge every student for each breach of etiquette.

Sure, there are rules. When the rules are broken I do call it to the student's attention. However, if their behavior does not change, what are my choices? Interrupt class again to discuss the repeated offense w/ the student? If they are told to leave, they will complain to the Dean. Since the Dean's job depends on if Johnny-B-Rotten gets thru his program, what do you think will happen? Students stay in class, disruptive or not.

So if they want to sit quietly and text, fucking GREAT! The good students are usually capable of tuning such distractions out - then I can actually get some teaching done.

Slack Ass Safford from Scottsdale

-+-+-+-+-

Dear Slack Ass,

You see what a horrible situation you're in, right?

If all you can do is pass everyone and let their bullshit go, then that's a rotten educational experience you're getting, forget the students for the time being.

Milo does teach, and has for years, at a decent small university in the northeast. He has tenure and has bosses who'll stick up for him. And these qualities should not be so incredibly rare that we have to make note of them.

If your situations is not like his - and we know you are not alone at your for-profit sweatshop - then that means the system is rotten and you have 2 choices. You can take it up the ass, make your coin, and not worry about the students who refuse to follow rules or who just want to text all day. Or you can stand up for what's right and risk the coin.

We've been in situations where the coin matters more than pride or being right. And we know what we'd do.

But what we wouldn't do is look at a big pile of shit and say, "Hmmm, creamy potatoes!" Nor would we wish our neighbor's potatoes were a little more bitter for him.

Compound Calico the Cousin of Cleo

For RYS

Milo From Manchester Unleases a Mind Melter. "The Regulars" Series Continues.

I had been thinking about this idea that we proffies are employees of our students and their parents even before Penny set off a shitstorm in response to her extended whine about her baby boy’s travails with Thanksgiving break and that mean old teacher who wouldn’t let the boy skip out early for the bus station. So, Penny, this one’s for you – but not just for you, because in the week preceding your appearance in these pages, the same exact students-are-customers line was promulgated right here in these hallowed precincts by – gasp! – proffies them own selves!

They are not customers, they are students. I was appalled by Clete’s response to Sledgehammer Steve, who had it exactly right. Most of the other responses were not much more than excuses for not taking responsibility for what goes on in one’s own classroom. According to Clete and the rest of the slack-ass instructors who replied to Steve, students have “paid for the class and may do with the time as they please.” Please. Fifi has it right: if the classroom is not a special place then all the high talk about value of education is just so much edu-blather. If you conceive of teaching as a financial transaction and nothing more, then you might as well be working at Wal-Mart because the whole thing has been drained of its significance. Education is not convenient. The classroom is not an ordinary space.

I presume that Steve has a section on his syllabus regarding the use of electronic devices. I do, as follows: “Classroom etiquette: Please do not come to class if you are too tired to stay awake. Falling asleep in class will be considered the same as an absence. Cell phones, music players, cameras, and recording devices may not be used during class. They must be turned off and put away. (Remove the earphones.)” I don’t specify consequences because that leaves me the most flexibility to respond according to the situation. I’m actually pretty laid back in the classroom and usually use shame to enforce my expectations, but repeat offenders have been asked to pack up and go.

I have no compunction, by the way, about enforcing behavioral standards in the classroom. Would these little snowflakes text each other during church? Maybe they would, I don’t know, but if they did, who would defend them? The woman who runs the general store in my small town has a sign stuck to the door: No Pajamas. She has her standards, I have mine. Even strictly commercial spaces like the general store require certain standards of behavior. So: No texting during class. If you don’t like it, there is another store four miles up the highway, another classroom at the state school across town. Maybe the guardians of civilization aren’t on duty there.

There was a commuter train accident in LA recently with multiple fatalities – turns out the guy driving the train was texting instead of paying attention to the signals. You don’t think the classroom presents students with life-changing choices? If not, proffie, you’re in the wrong line of work. It bears repeating: education is not convenient. It is convenient, of course, to tell students lies, which appears to be the basis of Abilene Al’s pedagogy. Talk about completely missing the point! I’d be delighted if my students' paragraphs came out of left field, Al, and I don’t care all that much about lining them up like ducks in a carnival, either, as you noticed in my own piece.

It is true that I can’t force a student to learn, but I can do my best to preserve a free space in the classroom where learning might just have a chance to take place. Texting in class, passing notes, smirking in the back row while a fellow-student is trying to contribute to the discussion – all of these degrade the freedom of the classroom by trivializing it. When a student is texting in class, it is by definition a distraction no matter how discretely the little elf hides her rudeness. An instructor who looks the other way at the students texting (and etcetera) is telling everyone in the room that this is all bullshit and there is no need to pay attention. Look out for that train.

Ninny From Norwalk Offers Some Old School Smack, Student-Style.

Sensitive Sally - You're taking a class about the behavior of animals. Guess what, hun? Animals fight, feed, and fuck. You're little utterances of "ew" and "gross!" serve no purpose other than to draw attention to your pretty little face and oh so delicate demeanor that can't handle the vulgarity of animals having sex. But the way I've seen you after class in the hallway hanging off your boyfriend's arm and licking his ear with an absolute lack of modesty lets me know that you are quite aware of the more primal urges.

Smokey McSmokesalot - When you do decide to come to class, you come in with your own aura of poison stench. I think I got addicted to nicotine from sitting three seats down from you. Every time you ask an inane question, which you do at least once a class, the death-rattle in your chest makes me sick to my stomach. For the love of God, stick a patch on, clean yourself up, and enroll in a class you are actually qualified for.

Stewie Stinker - I have three classes with you. I know this not because I recognize your unshaven face or strange collection of DND shirts, but because of your stench. Your stench is so powerful that while you waste away in class it roams the halls, escaping to the streets where it terrorizes small children and cats. It is so strong that while I've endeavored to sit in a corner as far away from you as possible, I am still always aware of your presence in my vicinity. it is so strong that I'm going to buy soap pellets to pelt at you secretly and "accidentally" trip and fall while holding an open bottle of cologne.

Snotty Simpson - Going up to an organic chemist and telling him that you should get more points on your test because he "used an incorrect notation" and you "don't feel this is the proper way to write a line structure" is not only arrogant, foolish, and snotty, but extremely funny to watch as he flat out tells you that you are incorrect and you trudge out of the classroom. I'm sure having spent all of one week learning about these things you know better than the man who devoted his life to them.

Silly Susie - Funnier than the collective groan that occurred when you raised your hand today was the expression on your face when you whipped around to see who started it. Take a hint.

BRITNEYDAY 2008!

There is still one compound dweller on the Britney train. You might remember we celebrated her last October when her terrific Blackout CD came out, and we do it again today now that her sexy and smashing Circus CD is available.

MSN.com has a review of the CD, and we've clipped some flava for you below:

Second Spears comeback

almost as good as the first

It's time for another Britney Spears comeback: Call this one the remix version. It was only last year that our damaged diva attempted to put the focus back on her once spectacular music career with "Blackout." A tight collection of sexy club-oriented grooves, "Blackout" was a delight, and had so much hit-worthy material even Janet Jackson could have been resurrected with it.

But "Blackout" never had a chance at success because its star wasn't as well put together as the album. (It's hard to generate hits when your personal life is in turmoil.)

Now Spears — while still very different from her previous superstar incarnation, circa 1998-2003 — seems on the road to recovery, thanks to court-appointed guidance from her dad and other positive developments. She seems ready for a rebirth, so it's fitting that "Circus" — her sixth studio album — makes its debut as she celebrates her 27th birthday.

And like any good circus, Britney's version will leave you thoroughly entertained. Though "Blackout" was a gem, it seemed like the album was mainly due to the creative and technological wizardry of its producers, with minimal vocal effort from Spears. This time around, her pleasant yet thin voice comes through more clearly, not aided by as many layers and studio manipulations. She is also credited with co-writing two tracks.

Spears spends much of her energy trying to get people in the mood to groove, and it works on fun disco tracks like "Womanizer," "Shattered Glass" and the cleverly titled "If U Seek Amy" (say it fast and you might need your mouth washed out with soap). She teams up with former collaborators like Max Martin (who wrote her career-making hit "... Baby One More Time") and Nate "Danja" Hills, who was responsible for some of the best music on "Blackout." But newcomers also help out, like the Outsyders (on "Womanizer").

A few songs hint at the media circus her life has become, including "Kill the Lights," where Spears takes on the paparazzi.

But she strikes the most personal and emotional chords on the slower tracks, most notably on the dreamy, synth-centric "Unusual You," on which she coos, "Baby you're so unusual, didn't anyone tell you you're so s'pposed to break my heart, I expect you to, so why haven't you?" Though she didn't write the song, it's hard not to wince in empathy when you think about the string of users who have filtered in and out of her life.

The most poignant track is the ballad "My Baby," co-written by Spears. On it, she sings to her "precious love." It's an ode to one of her sons, with lines like, "How did I get through all of my days without you?" Considering she doesn't have full custody of her two boys and is trying to strengthen her parental bond after a period of turmoil, it's especially touching — so much so that we can forgive the song for being just a little bit sugary. After all her recent drama, Spears deserves something sweet in her life.

"The Regulars" Already Has Spawned an International Star! Beaker Ben For You!

Rating My Students, International Edition

I don’t know how things are in the musty, worn-out humanities buildings, but our spiffy new research labs are filled with foreign graduate students. We love ‘em, not because they ignore the valueless American pop culture, they respect the faculty, their families value hard work, and foreign students pay full tuition. We love our internationals because, more and more, universities couldn’t do any science and engineering research without them.

It’s not all happy gumdrops and unicorns. This wouldn’t be an RYS post if I didn’t mention some of their most annoying habits. Hopefully, somebody in the Dean of Students’ office will read this and put together a special 30 minute PowerPoint slideshow in time for next fall’s grad school orientation.

We’ve caught some students using the sink in the men's bathroom as a bidet. I realize that this is a simple cultural misunderstanding that could easily be cleared up, but you try tell somebody with a straight face that the sink is for washing your hands, not your ass.

Over the years, our dean has heard some complaints from Middle Eastern students that their scantily clad, female lab partners inspire impure thoughts. His response? Too bad. Those young ladies threw up a lot of good food to keep themselves looking like that. Don’t let their hard work go to waste. (OK, maybe I’m paraphrasing here.) There are lots of reasons why America is better than other countries and half-naked chicks in lab coats is one of them. (BTW: I love my dean, as much as one man can love another man in the great state of South Carolina.)

When I’ve treated my research students to lunch, they show off some strange eating habits. A new kid once ordered a piece of chicken at KFC – a PIECE of chicken. Shit, son, you’re in the United States. Your lunch will have a minimum of 1200 calories and it comes in a bucket. Do you know why so many people around the world are starving? Because they only eat a single piece of chicken for lunch. Now dig in. Leftovers are for pussies.

International students cheat just like our homegrown variety but they have a built in excuse: their culture allows it. Look, I understand that other countries are run by socialists who want to share the wealth (ahem). Copying test answers doesn't help create a workers' paradise, it creates an F for the student and a lot of paperwork for me. They also tell me that it is a long, honorable tradition in their culture to copy a source and not cite it. Whatever. Their culture is traditionally on the wrong end of our boom-sticks, so I'm not impressed. Let's get with the program and show me a bibliography, OK?

Why would any of this matter to RYS readers who generally skew towards the liberal arts? I figure that soon after internationals complete their domination of American science and engineering, they’ll probably start getting degrees in all the other stuff we teach at college too. Consider this as a friendly heads-up: think twice before washing out your coffee cup in the bathroom sink.

Zai jian, mirë upafshim, dehna hunu, Allah yisallimak, adiu,
Beaker Ben

Some Rapid Fire Replies (4 Days & One Whole Turkey Late) to "The Kid Who Won't Go Away."

Last week's "Big Thirsty." What do you do about that pain-in-the-neck, dumb student who disrupts class every day he attends when he always walks in late and always spends all the time he's in class talking and distracting other students?

• When they stroll in a few minutes late frequently, I’ll ask them if it’s (class start time here) Jerky Johnny Standard Time. Or I’ll put on the board the time I expect him to come in. When he comes in, I’ll say I blew and and ask who had (the current time) in the Jerky Johnny Pool. When he chats with those around him, I’ll stop class and say he can feel free to ask me any question he wants. If he doesn’t have a question, then he can be quiet. Or he can leave. If he truly feels no shame over that, don’t sweat it. Real life will kick his candy ass.


• Don't joke about sending him out of class like an elementary kid. It's the only kind of punishment that sort of student often understands. Truth is, you're letting the student ruin things. It's not him, darlin', that's the problem; it's you.


• There's an easy cure for this kind of asshole kid: an established attendance policy--even if it just exists on the syllabus, it's a nice means of eliminating dead weight.I have a "three strikes" rule. They get to miss three times, and then I have the option to administratively withdraw them. It's in the syllabus. Staying in class after drop/add signifies acceptance of the syllabus policies...not that they read anything other than the work I make them do to earn their grade on the syllabus. So if I get a kid who pulls these stunts (after a few "grow the fuck up" warnings), a little tweaking of the rolls (pick three days, any three days, and mark them absent) gives me an easy way to flush the kid. If they complain to a dean (the "I was there, I swear!" line), we set up a meeting, and I just quiz the kid on the material that I offered up on the days I marked them absent for. After about three drawn-out, hedging "uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum" moments, it's clear that the kid doesn't know what I offered up anyhow and the withdrawal stands.


• Clobber them with a syllabus, grades, conferences, etc. Don't just let it happen. Show some courage.


• Worse than the dumb student who wont go away is Velcro Vance, the smart kid with no social skills who insists on dropping by to visit both in and out of office hours. He has a lot of annoying habits, but his most annoying, bar none, is his sincere desire to give you advice about teaching the class he’s taking from you. “If you called on more people…” “If you didn’t have quizzes…” In response to which I am thinking, “If you would just shut the fuck up and go away.” In my experience the only way to get rid of VV is repeated, obvious rudeness & since most proffies are no good at repeated, obvious rudeness, we are generally stuck with Vance until he graduates, or, if we’re lucky, transfers to a college where, he tells you during one of his final visits, “The professors seem really interested in students’ opinions.”

We Get Some Last Licks in At Penny.

We suppose we could spend all of December on Penny, but it's not going to happen. Last week her original message got things started. We got swamped by mail and put up a quick list of replies. She's now sent us a greeting card, one of those electronic cards that show you really care, and accuesed us of nastiness. Blah blah. But we did want to finish with these last posts. If it seems poorly formatted or if it's missing a graphic, remember we did it on an aging Treo outside Elko NV.

• Hey, take Student out early, bring them home in a limo, and slather them with the love we deny them at our horrible institution. Scan through some of our posts and you’ll see we’ll be glad to have your texting tot out of the class for a day or two. As for the dig about what I’ll be doing, every hot mean hard hearted teacher who responds to this post will be happy to fill you in on what we’re going to do over our holiday break. After I have turkey dinner, I’m going to grade papers. Yeah – I teach English and we have piles of papers on our desk all the time. For every hour I’m in front of the class, I grade for two hours, not including the time it takes to answer e-mails from students who didn’t turn the papers in on time…but I digress. You don’t care about MY problems or MY complaints or MY schedule. Nor do you care about the amount of material I need to cover to prepare Student for the big bad world. I mean, it’s not like the world is a harsh place or anything. I hear McBurger Haven has a table wiping gig set aside for all the well-pampered tykes who don’t want to suck it up, put on the big kid panties, and join the rest of us.
  


• Why not go and pick your snowflake up from school to save them the horrors of NYPA at midnight? You've got to work? And your employer won't give you an extra day off just because you want one because you're just not that special? Guess what? Your student has a job, too: it's called getting an education. And the mean, but hot, professor who won't let your special student come home early is doing his or her job, by holding class on the TUESDAY before a Thanksgiving, (Seriously, you're complaining about a class meeting on a TUESDAY???) and requiring students to attend class because that's the professor's job. Your child is special to you, but just another cog in the machine for us, and for their future employer. Adult life is full of tough responsibilities and tougher choices, and it's time to for you, mom, to start dealing with it. If this is the worst thing you have to deal with this holiday season, you're way ahead of the game. Get a real problem. And Penny, Honey, if you're paying my salary, I want to talk about a raise...
  


• Oh Penny... I hate to break it to you... so I'll take it slow.... and use lots of ellipses... but what has happened here is... you've raised a Speshul Snowflake.I can see how it happened because as the 3 introductory paragraphs to your complaint are a pretty clear indication that you are one yourself. All that extraneous information about your life, and how cool and important you are? That's just screaming "Snowflake!" to your readers.Essentially, what you are saying in your rambling complaint is that you are upset that some Prof has dared to suggest that a rule he/she made apply to YOUR kid. The nerve!And I'll just toss your "have you considered" idea back at you: have you considered that the Prof actually has a sound pedagogical reason for requiring students to attend class? In the case of your precious little angel, I'll bet there is one, and I'll bet it's this: Prof has an attendance policy that allows for a certain number of absences in a semester, and your little angel has probably not mentioned that, well, he missed a few classes already. So, it's not so much that the Prof has said "no one may miss this class before Thanksgiving because I am an asshole," it's that the Prof has said, "Dude, you have missed like 6 classes already, and if you miss this one, I'm going to apply my attendance policy and take marks off."With regard to the whole "Do you people think about who pays your salary?" question, uttered in what I cannot help but hear as rather a shrill tone, I have to answer: "Fuck, no." In my job, I deal with my students as if they are adults. No, really, RYS readers. Stop laughing. I mean it. I operate on the assumption that they can put their own pants on, and wipe the drool off their own chins. They are responsible for their own attendance, and turning in their work, and I don't deal with their Mommies when they hand in late work, or cheat, or otherwise fuck up.To put it another way, if my students are dealing with emotional blackmail from helicopter parents, I might have a twinge of sympathy, but I am not going to make it my problem.