OMFG.

Y'know, I've been horrified by the way my discipline has been taught in public schools for the past several decades. 

I have just had it brought to my attention that history has had it worse.  I had a student argue that the national security agencies need more authority to better protect us from internal terrorists and saboteurs in time of war, and that were it not for such agencies, Pearl Harbor and the September 11 attacks would have had far higher casualty rates. 

Oh. 

Oh, no.

OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!  This kid had NO IDEA that the LAST TIME we were protected from internal terrorists and saboteurs was during WWII, when FDR rounded up the Japanese and put them in concentration camps. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the proud product of public education: the active idiot.

Please.  Drop out.  And go die in a ditch, somewhere.  I wouldn't trust you with an idiot stick, and you'd probably be demanding $15/hr to mop floors even if I did.

Oh, bloody hell...

I started grading papers last night.  It's been really fucking hectic.  I'm going to have to bust ass tonight and all day tomorrow to get stuff ready to hand back by Wednesday. 

Last night, I spent two hours, and got three papers graded.  Most of that was spent on two papers. 

They.

Were.

Terrible.

I could tell from reading the paper that neither student understands spoken English, nor comprehends it written.  Nor can they write coherently in it. 

No, they don't speak Spanish.  They speak Arabic. 

I've left each a long, handwritten note on the back page of their paper, and have suggested they go find a tutor.

The rest of their class shouldn't be so much of a challenge.  

I have two more, just like 'em, in the other class.  We'll see how well that works out.

Mind you, I do not believe that they're all so fucking incompetent in English--the third student I graded also speaks Arabic as a first language, and his paper was MUCH better.  I also watched and walked him through the composition of that paper, so I know it's his.  Want to know what I think made the difference?

He sought out a tutor to help him before peer review day. 

Seriously, can we just give an English competency test as a requirement for college, for both native and foreign exchange students?  It would make my job so much easier...

DTFO, and go get some serious help.

I am a survivor of rape (during my childhood).  I do know that it can, and does, leave lasting psychological and spiritual damage.  I can empathize, to a certain point.

That point was pole-vaulted over when this whiny little speshul snowflake insisted that classical mythology is no longer suitable to be taught in a fucking literary humanities class because it hurt her little feelings. 

I read the myths in question.  I read them when I was about eight or nine years old, just a year or two past the point of the worst of the abuse, and before it had totally halted.  They never triggered any flashbacks.  There were things that did (like the idiot psychologists, forced visits over weekends with my abuser, running into my abuser unexpectedly in the town where we lived, etc.), but instead of whining about it, I pushed past it and dealt with it as best I could. 

Some people don't understand that these works of art have been a part of the curriculum for longer than their grandparents have been alive, and should not be removed due to the oversensitive sensibilities of one fucking person who does not have the right to never be offended by anything. 

Some people should drop out of college, go wrap themselves in cotton batting so tightly they can't move, see, or hear anything that might "trigger" them, and go live in their parents' closets. 

I'd even be willing to pay them to remove themselves from society, and from the gene pool.

Stupid student tricks...

1. One of my Saudi boys turned in good papers all semester.  I double checked each one, and none seemed plagiarized (the English was too good).  Well, I graded his blog this morning, and double checked on one of his posts...and it was copied and pasted from a persuasive essay website...which took his high A for the class down to an F.

2.  My blatantly racist student was just in here complaining about how confusing another professor in another department's ways of figuring grades is, and asking me to explain to her how her grade was figured.  I HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE.  She's also missed four out of five of the workshops (each of which is worth ten points), but managed 90% on all of her papers for me, and was wondering if there was anything she could do to raise her B for the class to an A.  Um...nope!

3. I have two students who have not turned in the research paper as of yet.  One of them had an A before I gave her a 0 for the paper, and the other had a D. 

4.  I had a student to whom I gave an incomplete last semester contact me and ask me if I'd graded her papers yet...so that I could make sure and turn in a grade change request...to give her the piece of mind that her Incomplete doesn't turn into an F.  I haven't received her papers, so how the fuck could I grade them???

DTFO!!!

I have had one of the most uncomfortable mornings teaching that I have ever had in eleven years of standing in front of a classroom.  For the first time in my career, one of my students said something blatantly racist.  We were discussing how long drugs can be detected in someone's system through their hair, and this fifty year old woman pipes up with "That's why so many black men shave their heads bald."

Umm...what?  No.  No, it isn't. 

This woman has not struck me as the brightest bulb in the box.  She's needed more help to get less done than everyone else in her class, and now?  Now, she says something blatantly racist like that in a class where everyone is twenty years younger than her, at least, and then tries to defend said statement with "I'm not racist!  My fiance is black!"

Wow.  And she didn't even realize that the whole class was about to dog-pile her for that statement, and glared at me when I shut discussion down to move to another topic. 

There were two black kids in that class.  And the young man is one of the two cleanest-cut of his particular age group in the class.  There are four Muslims in that class, and they are all very dark, and were just as shocked and disgusted as everyone else.  The one sitting next to her got up and moved a seat down away from her.

And she didn't realize how angry the entire class was.  Nor that the whole class was about to dog-pile onto her.  Nor yet that almost all of the black men on campus wear long, beautifully maintained cornrow braids, nor that most of the bald guys in the area shaving their heads are white.

That takes a special kind of stupid, one that I don't have patience with, and doesn't belong in a college setting.

I don't care what you think, only that you think...and that includes determining when and where is appropriate to open your mouth and spew stuff that sounds like it came from the Jim Crow south.

This dumb bitch really needs to drop out...or at least drop my class.  

Students...oy.

So, one of the things I do is help a colleague with setup and grading on one of his online classes.  Friday, his class was working on Whitman's "From Pent-Up Aching Rivers."  All they had to do was write a short paragraph describing what they thought the poem meant.  And one took me five minutes, context, and reading parts out loud to figure out what she was trying to say.  The sentence that gave me so many problems was "He throughout the rule book." 

What she meant was "threw out."

That's way worse than "wah-lah" for "voila."

DTFO

Okay.  We are about three weeks out from the end of semester.  Almost done. 

I have a colleague who I help with his online class's grading from time to time--he's older, has eye dryness problems that cause pain and damage if he's not careful, and has more on his plate than he needs because he's one of the department's go-to guys. 

So, he emails me today, and asks me to pick up with what they turned in last night.  Easy stuff--Thoreau's Walden.  My colleague asked some easy questions to make sure they'd read and comprehended the piece.

And one of his students...three weeks from the end of the semester...on a simple, short, three question post, copied and pasted from Cliff Notes. 

Okay, dearie.  I understand that the end of the semester is always rough.  I get that.  Most of the professors on campus simply don't think about all of the homework that will be piled on you right at the end.  Most of the professors don't think about what kind of grading that sets them up for, and a few who do know, don't care. 

I get that.

That said, my colleague has had those assignments posted all damn semester.  A couple of his students have already finished the class's work.  She easily could have, too, but instead chose to plagiarize.  Copy and paste plagiarism, even. 

With maybe twelve posts to go. 

And this girl threw away a high B/low A in so doing.

She needs to either re-prioritize her life and the things she chooses to do, or drop the fuck out.

My colleague forgives a not-done assignment before he does a plagiarized one. 

Taking a deep breath, and cracking knuckles...

Forty-two papers down, seven to go, out of a total of forty nine.  I managed about five Thursday afternoon last week before I got disgusted (shell stone?  Really?  Fracking breaks up shell stone?  DTFO!), and a couple more before I got dug in this morning.  But I'm down to the last seven, now.

I can do this.

DTFO!!!

I got an email from my department head, last week.  Seems one of my blockheads that could not comprehend that the due dates for the class she was taking were not the days that the course designer said they would be, despite weekly reminders.  That one, despite repeated whining emails with responses of "Due dates are Friday, not Sunday, and late work gets a 0" could not bring herself to turn stuff in on time.  I also told her--several times, through email, and through announcements--that several of the assignments weren't opening for me, so they were changed to not count.  And that the busy work for the last three weeks was changed to not count.

And she emails my boss, telling him that she failed because I ignored her homework.

No, bitch.  You failed because you didn't fucking pay attention  to my fucking instructions, messages, and/or emails telling you to turn shit in on Friday instead of Sunday.  And no, I didn't ignore her homework--she did busy work shit worksheets that I told everybody I couldn't grade, or told them not to do.

Just...drop the fuck out until you grow the fuck up.  It's no fucking surprise that my Comp II class was the third one you failed.

DTFO!!!

I have a student who earned a B for the course (with me being generously easy to not inflict that level of helpless stupid upon any of my colleagues), is whining about it, and asking if there's any extra credit they can do.

NO!  I DO NOT DO EXTRA CREDIT!

They also asked if I'm going to grade assignments that I SPECIFICALLY STATED in the weekly announcements that I was NOT going to grade.

Get.  It.  Through.  Your.  Head.  You are NOT special, and I will NOT treat you as if you are.  Drop the fuck out.  Go push a broom somewhere after closing time, because you are not fit for human interaction.

DTFO!

Don't ever ask a composition teacher if you really need to write a conclusion paragraph to a formal essay.  Especially not with the current ammo shortage meaning they can't shred a copy of your paper when you turn it in (and inevitably fail it because, well, you're too stupid to be in college). 

Why, oh why has that student not dropped? 

DTFO!!!

I got an email from a student pretty early this morning.  I just finished deciphering it, since it's written in almost unintelligibly thick AAVE*.   I finally figured out that the student wanted to know how long their essay (due week 10) needs to be, and whether they need to have a works cited page for an assignment that calls for research.

The assignment sheet clearly states, within the first third of the first page, that the paper needs to be 3-5 pages with at least three correctly cited sources. In bold.  Before the detailed instructions. 

READ the FUCKING ASSIGNMENT SHEET before you ask your fucking lazy-ass, stupid, I-can't-be-held-responsible-for-my-own-learning, do-it-for-me, speshul snowflake princess questions. 

Oh, and drop the fuck out, and go suck-start an illegal Glock, since you're apparently too fucking stupid to figure out how to use an idiot stick.**

(By the way--this is the third post inspired by this student.)

*AAVE--African-American Vernacular English, also known as Ebonics.

**A stick with a shovel, broom, or mop head on one end, and an idiot on the other.

DTFO!!!

If a student is incapable of understanding simple, written, "Do this, then this, and this" instructions on an informal assignment, they should:

A) Take classes in a traditional classroom where they'll face minimal written instructions, and all backed up by spoken instructions.

B) Whine at the instructor that they don't understaaaaannndddd!!!  Not any of it!  Do it for me!

C) DTFO, as they're obviously unsuitable for anything other than mopping floors with no human interaction.

Oh, good Lord...

I had a student email, asking me why they'd been docked five points one week for a mistake, then ten points the next week for the same mistake.

Those of you who are gainfully employed in the private sector (no government or education jobs), please tell me: are people permitted to make the same mistake over and over again without consequences?  Don't those consequences usually end up with said loser out of a job?

DTFO, asshole.  I don't want you in my class--not when I clearly explained that in the assignment feedback.