The "Education" Thread

I've had one prof who swears, and it's a language teacher, and she starts off by pseudo-apologizing for her language/content at the beginning of the semester. Swearing is a bigger deal in the Bible belt than the rest of the country I think, but it isn't professional in any case.

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do we go to the same school? heh heh
 
From the age of about 13 or 14 upwards I've always had teachers that swore.


Americuh is weird.
 
I gave up on German, or well i'm kinda dumb when the semester started and I wanted to spend my time on Rugby instead. Oh well
 
I studied German in high school. I miss it quite a bit and still try to keep up with it when able.
 
First few class meetings, and I'm excited. I have all freshmen, but they're interested, engaged, and remarkably talkative for 8:00 am. My class is called "The Simulated Society," so a lot of them joined because they were attracted by the subject matter. Thus far we've had some great conversations on applications of virtual reality and even delved into some dense theoretical stuff on simulation and consciousness (i.e. consciousness as simulation, even).
 
Awesome! I've had a lot of colleagues who have said to avoid teaching heavy theory to students because most of it is over their heads. What I've found is quite the contrary. Students love that shit. It's all about how you teach it. I have them read Foucault and Butler and others, and they totally dig it
 
I'm assigning a bit of Plato's Phaedrus over next weekend, but I've gotten a lot of negative reactions to laying the classical stuff on too thick.
 
I'm just having them read a brief excerpt from the Allegory of the Cave. It speaks powerfully to the topic of simulation.

The Allegory of the Cave was probably one of the most powerful pieces that I read when I was in my introductory literature courses at university. It definitely made a profound impact on how I view situations and emotions, or at least attempt to.
 
Had a (friendly but clearly a touch off) student come to office hours, alternating between asking for help on his lab report and asking me questions like "What religion are you?" and "What are the names of your siblings?"

Better than the guy that claimed the government hacked his online homework submission and deleted it, though. It's weird because in both cases they were/acted extremely grateful for my help, especially in the latter case where he tells me he's looking for witnesses on a case against various professors and TAs. It's like they see me as one of their own, but nurturing and motherly or something.
 
New semester, new minority students to hopelessly confuse and embarrass myself with. At least the guy took it in good humor by looking around the lab and saying, "No, that's the other Asian dude" after I handed him the wrong graded report. And there's this one bench that has nothing but Hispanic girls with first names starting in M.
 
One of the campuses I teach at is 70% hispanic. In the one class I have two Diana's and a Dayana. I remember one semester I had an Asian student whom I could never figure out if he/she was male/female. I never asked. It wasn't really important.

Looks like I may be teaching an Intro to Lit course next semester. If so, I'm super stoked