next »

[carnitas]

I take it you don't see any left-wing assault in recent years funded by Soros et al? Or, is it only right-wingers that practice "assaults"???

fym22,

You’ve found us out.  It’s true - only right-winger practice assault.  Left-wingers practice the oboe, foot-reflexology and ultimate Frisbee.  Our shoes always fit comfortably and we have excellent sex – every time!.  We wear the latest fashions.  Our pets love us.  Bright-eyed children surround us with their playful laughter.  Fish swim right up to the bank to greet us.  Sweet and gentle rains caress our brows and the west wind carries us when we tire.  We have perfect pitch and our piggy banks are filled with shiny pennies.

[devereauxjr]

999

For My Dearest Forumites
(With sincere apologies to Allen Ginsberg, because I’m a really crappy poet.)


I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical bathrobed,

dragging themselves to the Chronicle Forums at dawn looking for that ultimate post,

brilliant minded academics burning for any connection to the 5-starred dynamo in the machinery of night,

who in tight jeans and baggy socks and bad hair days sat in the supernatural brightness of computer screens drinking chocolate vodka contemplating a millennia,

who bared their brains to mackerels and the hu and saw Downey Balls stolen and the end of the deathmatch,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating The Fiona and pedant-light tiaras among the scholars of old,

who were deleted from the forums for publishing anti-troll odes on the threads of the foolish,

who wrote poetry huddled in bright rooms with Seuss and Eliot and the rhymers of bygone days,

who baked cookies in red-checked aprons and carpooled and watched with loving eyes the growth of us all,

who mourned the losses suffered, the missed genius gelatin puff whose wisdom will never be replicated,

who read of tenure and teaching and paper clips and margins and snarkiness and smiles,

who heard of bats and babies and sleepless nights and Bocky and batgirl and love,

with the absolute of the forum good to read a thousand times….

Until tomorrow, folks.

[case_insensitive]

Re: sabbatical pacing?

The most productive time of my professional life was when I was in graduate school and when I did my post-doc.  I published frequently, I read widely, I had original ideas. The pace slowed considerably once I started teaching.  I've had two sabbaticals now. For both, I imitated my life as graduate student.  I stayed up all night writing when I felt like it.  I slept in without shame. I read widely. I drank wine and made beer. I exercised every day. I dropped everything I was doing to do something else. I let myself get carried away. I worked hard on things that didn't pan out. I collaborated with people outside my immediate field. I went bird watching.  I saw a lot of live music.  I published frequently, I had original ideas.

[case_insensitive]

http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,31022.msg422521.html#msg422521

There are no goddesses, my dear, and all unrepentant homosexuals will flame forever in Hell, whereas Christians will rejoice in Heaven, and justly rejoice in the godly punishment of those in Hell.

[case_insensitive]

http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,31022.msg422521.html#msg422521

There are no goddesses, my dear, and all unrepentant homosexuals will flame forever in Hell, whereas Christians will rejoice in Heaven, and justly rejoice in the godly punishment of those in Hell.

http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,31064.msg422550.html#msg422550

Who cares what Augustine says?  The bible says what it says.

[e_spenser]

I'm not 100% sure I'm doing the quote function right, but if it breaks your rules, acrimone, maybe you'll forgive me since I'm trying to quote you :)

My dear Julia,

     No one is out to get you.  Some of us would like to beat you senseless, but only so you would shut up for a few minutes.

     The reason it seems like I don't really read your work isn't that I don't read it, it's that it's impossible to say something about it that is both intelligent and nice at the same time, so i am reduced to vague-sounding hemming and hawing coupled with the occassional general suggestion which is really just a veiled invitation to take a class and learn the English language.

     I went over your head last semester during the committee project because I wanted it to get done, not because I don't like you.  I don't like you, but it had nothing to do with my decision to do things without consulting you.

     You only got tenure because the powers that be begged and pleaded that we get a feminist theory philosopher.  Professor Philips didn't retire early because he wanted to spend more time with his family.  He had laid an ultimatum down that if you were given tenure, he'd quit.

     And I don't have some Latin-male-machismo hangups about women because, genetics and last name notwithstanding, I'm about as Cuban as Lucille Ball.  I just don't like you.

     If you ever touch me again when you are talking to me I am going to break your fingers.

     Shorts and a tank top are not appropriate teaching attire, even when you are essentially teaching pornography.  Just because you are standing next to a screen filled with naked bodies doesn't make you look properly attired by contrast.

     I love your perfume.  What is it?

     Giving a student an "F" does not make me a facist, any more than giving them an "A" would make me an @$hole.

     The Dean doesn't care.  He's told me so.

     Neither does she.  She's told me so, too.

     It is generally considered proper grammar to spell your name with capital letters, even in email.  It's not cute, it's juvenile.

     Exercise is great.  Coming into the department drenched in sweat, while obviously sexually appealing in an animalistic sort of way, is not professional.

     When you-know-who asked you out on a date, it wasn't sexual harrassment and he wasn't objectifying you.  Not by that action, anyway.  He was just asking you out on a date.

     Your husband left you because you are crazy.

     Just because Proefssor Wilton has never been out of the country doesn't make him provincial, doesn't mean his opinions about things aren't just as valid, and doesn't mean he isn't still smarter than you.  It just means that while you were getting drunk and laid in Holland, he was getting drunk and laid in New Orleans.

     Christian students aren't necessarily racist, necessarily sexist, or necessarily anything except Christian and students.  Sit in in my Philosophy 101 class some day.

     I can suffer those "religious nutcases" because, despite the fact that I am not religious, I find them infinitely more pleasant to be around than you.  They don't even try to convert me.

     Chalking the campus is graffiti, and if I were the President I'd have you arrested.

     Toe rings aren't cute.  They are a sign that you aren't wearing enough shoe.

     That's not what Plato meant.

     Adding four hundred extra syllables to a s***ty sentence doesn't make it better.  It makes it worse.

     The reification of anything is fairly boring.

     If you don't like the way I teach Ethics, you can teach it.  What the hell would you teach in an Ethics class, though?

     When someone asks you for help on a paper, they mean the one that THEY are writing, not the one that you want to write.

     If you touch me again while you are talking to me, I'm going to break your fingers.  Did I already say that?

     That necklace is ugly.

     So is that other one.

     The garnet one is pretty cool, though.

     You have a nice smile.  You should try it sometime.

     You weren't oppressed.  You grew up in Beverly Hills.  Your parents paid full tuition at an Ivy League school.  You spent two years travelling.  You want oppression?  Go visit my family back in Cuba, you self-centered self-indulgent @#$^&%#@.

     Everyone knows you slept with him.  Including his wife.  He's still married because you were both drunk and you're not a threat.

     You're too old for bumperstickers.

     Political advertisements are not appropriate for the office door; I don't care what he says.

     You remember what I said about you both being drunk?  That's not rape.

Sincerely yours,

Professor Garcia

P.S. -- Just so that you don't think my entire existence is focused around bringing you despair and misery, I leave you with this small token of my esteem, guaranteed to brighten your day: your getting tenure was the absolute most crushing and one-sided political defeat I've ever suffered.  While you are offensive, immature, lack academic talent, and are generally an insignificant affectation of the human species, you are not careless.  Or you weren't until that thing with you-know-who, but by then you were in.  Alas.  Win some, lose some.

[case_insensitive]

Being single is most difficult during holidays. Especially in a smaller town where everyone else has family. But I will say that after hearing horror stories from colleagues, family, and friends about their Thanksgiving, I'm sincerely *grateful* that I only had to cook a turkey for my two chihuahuas... who really, really enjoyed the white meat. Better to be single than hooked up with someone that makes you miserable--or whose family makes you miserable.

[miseenplace]

from The Fiona:

But alas, the gap between the posters and the lurkariate continues to grow. When I logged on just now, there were 207 "guests" and 5 "users."

Methinks we have spawned a generation of parasites.

Soon no one will write and everyone will attempt to read. Dire things will ensue when we run out of text.

Beware, ye lurkers. Beware.

[supernumerary]

This forum has a really messed up system.  As you may recall, a few months ago I did an experiment to see which words got ***ed.  It looked like this:
f*** f u c k
c*** c u n t
cock
pussy
dick
b*tch
a**hole
breasts t i t t i e s

and so on.  Notice that the words related to women are disproportionately ***ed out.

<snip>

 s***.  I cursed again.

[case_insensitive]

Why is "hu" needed here? Hmmm....?  ;-)

Good luck!

Oh, that's right. I can't believe I called Him "hu". He is Very Male. This is scary, I'm starting to use 'hu' even when it's Not Needed.*

*haven't read thread on random use of capitalization.

:o)

[case_insensitive]

I found myself wondering this myself, for one student.
 
She claimed to have a learning disability that prevented her from doing well on my multiple choice tests, because I don't use the exact same wording on the quiz as in my lectures, to actually make students thing about this stuff and prevent rote memorization (many people weren't doing well, and still don't, since no one has taught them to think).  She had been given extra time for the quiz, but that didn't help.  So I gave her a short-answer quiz, to let her use the exact same words, if she felt it necessary, and she did even more poorly on that quiz.

So she confronted me while I was eating lunch in the cafeteria, stating loudly that she had to get at least a B in the class (which was pretty much numerically impossible at that point), and that I had to change my quiz to use the exact same wording as the lecture because she had a learning disability.

I stated that I wasn't going to do that, that I made the quizzes with different wording because I didn't think that rote memorization was enough to get a good grade in college, and that the information was useless if you couldn't think about it.  She wasn't happy, and the discussion went around and around a while as I finished lunch between rants.  She stomped off and apparently dropped the class, but not before poisoning DSS about my not helping her at all.  Which made me quietly furious, since I'm really flexible to doing what I can to help, short of compromising my principles entirely, and I had tried several things to help this particular student.

If a person is getting a psychology degree and yet can't use the information in any way, can only regurgitate rote passages which mean nothing at all to the student, what good is that?  None, in my opinion.

If you need help learning, great, that's what I'm here for.  If you can't think, what good is learning?

<emphasis added>

[crazybatlady]

In my experience, the larger problem is not with whether or not smart people know they're smart.

It's that stupid people, by definition, are precisely those least likely to know that they're stupid (let alone the extent to which their stupidity can/will swell).

And more: if you tell them, again for obvious reasons, they often don't understand.

Finally: once you've gotten through to them, you must be aware the whole terrible problem will likely come up again.  Stupid people have an awful habit (once more, - I observe for the sake of any stupid people who might be reading - by definition) of forgetting they're stupid.

You just have to gently set them down at some point and say with all clarity, "my friend, you're a fine person, but remember: you're stupid."  Oh sure, there might be some initial dismay (they either failed to realize it or have forgotten), but you should just gently continue, "no, I'm sorry, but you are. You're stupid."

They eventually come around.  The best among them will grow into this new self-knowledge and eventually a raised eyebrow alone will illicit, "oh, yeah, right.  I'm stupid.  Sorry. Forgot." 

Alas, the mass of them (once again, being stupid), will never be able to realize their own stupidity and may even shun you in the future. ("He called me stupid.  I'm not stupid.  Why, HE must be stupid.") 

You see the terrible state their stupidity leaves them in, mewing around in their (blissful, I'm told) little fog. 

Sigh.

They'd be cute, even endearing, if it wasn't so terribly tragic in the end.

[zharkov]

Am I screwing the pooch here by not taking a bird in the hand.

In the administrative forum.

[case_insensitive]

Mine is to send a form rejection letter to anyone I haven't heard from once I receive a contract for a tenure track job.  It goes like this:

Dear Search Committee:

Thank you for your interest in my application.  Unfortunately, I have decided on another position.
You have an outstanding department, but you do not meet my present needs.

I wish you the best in your attempt to find a candidate.

Best Regards,

Aristotelian

[case_insensitive]

Woof

Ablewasi?  Is that you?

Grupt,

are you Ablewasi? He used to bark like that.

Alas, I am not.  Too bad - I get the sense that if I were I would get laid more often...

Boy, are you ever wrong...


...woof


a