Go look at these. I have to go eat breakfast.
Monthly Archive for October, 2006
Rate Your Students is spot on lately. I recommend this and this. There will be a quiz.
I have long been baffled and often simply outraged at what students think is an acceptable email to send to an instructor. I’ve ridiculed their improbable communiqu?s before, but this, coupled with a few real stinkers in my inbox today, had me burbling with ire all over again. It’s almost as if they don’t care if their professors think they are even literate, let alone intelligent or decent writers. It’s as if they are completely unashamed that they don’t know the difference between a question and a statement, or how to spell "Wednesday." Witness:
um hey i was wondereng if u could let me know what we need to read for wenesday. thx.
Hello this is Bill from you class and i was not in your class today. what do i need to do.
I was hoping you could tell me something to write for the paper since I dont really have a opinion on the authors. Thanks in advance.
Not only is there an overwhelming disregard for proper spelling, grammar, usage, and punctuation, but they also almost universally refuse to capitalize the word "I," proper nouns, or the first word of a sentence. I find this infuriating–I mean, don’t get me wrong; I had my E.E. Cummings bad poetry stage myself, and didn’t we all? I did not, however, ever write an email to a professor in the style of Mr. Cummings, nor in the style of Mr. Cummings’s hypothetical punk-ass teenaged grandson with an unlimited text-messaging plan. I mean, "thx"? Seriously? You are for real with that?
The worst part of it all, though, is that, for the most part, they’re writing me to ask unforgivably stupid questions. Questions I have already answered for them on paper, in no uncertain terms. I carefully construct a syllabus each term that lists a detailed schedule of what will happen in class each day and what needs to be read when, as well as all the course policies (attendance, late papers, weight of each grade, etc.). Do they ever consult this syllabus? No, of course they fucking well do not. That would be too much work, I expect. They just fire off a barely intelligible email and wait for the answer to come drifting into their inbox. Lazy oafs. I won’t even get started on the one who wants me to tell him what to write because he "dont really have a opinion." How nice it must be to float like that in a gentle haze of ignorance, unburdened by opinions of any kind. Or apostrophes.
Students! Don’t embarrass yourself by emailing your teachers as if you were texting your friends. As much as you may wish it were true, your teachers are, like, totally not your BFF. We don’t want to hear about your boyfriend who dumped you; we don’t care about your dead grandmother; you can’t borrow our shoes; and for the love of dog, we don’t ever, ever want to see the word (ha! "word") "thx" in an email from you.
Thank you. Is that so hard?
Don’t you hate it when you think of the perfect response to something someone has said, only it’s a day later; the conversation’s done; and (if you’re lucky) you might never see the jerk again anyway? That’s pretty much the story of my life. I am like George Costanza, dreaming up ways to re-create the situation just so I can use the perfectly withering comeback I didn’t think of at the time–the exact retort that will brutally slay my interlocutor, forcing her to admit defeat and cower in shame.
I woke up this morning replaying a conversation I had last night with some chick who joined our group at the bar and, in the course of some good-natured interdepartmental snarking, tried to float the assertion that the only two ways to analyze literature were from the perspective of The Colonizer or that of The Colonized. If you know me much you know how absolutely wearying I find all those outgrowths of Marxist criticism, so this argument especially chapped my ass. When she tried to force me to take sides between her two alternatives, I replied simply that I do not write about issues of empire at all, and that, shockingly, one does not have to.
What I found myself wishing I had said this morning was that I respect critics who engage with a text deeply and with intellectual rigor, and that her assertion bespoke a reliance on the kind of superficial meta-scholarship that is both hollow and fruitless and belongs in a Sociology department, not a Literature program.
Since I missed my chance, I felt I had to tell someone. Whew. I feel better now.
Dear Smarmy Joe,
When you knock on someone’s door and she calls out cheerfully, "come in," and you come in, and her face falls, and she looks at you in blank confusion, this is a clue that you might not be welcome. Perhaps her cheery response to your knock was premature. Perhaps she was expecting someone else.
When you use your old, tired salesman’s trick of pretending to know her ("Sally! Hello," you intone, smarmily.) and it doesn’t work ("Uh, no. Sally’s office is now in Other Building."), this is another clue. You can’t pretend that you know someone, be exposed as a fraud, and then still expect to do some kind of business deal. This will not work. I didn’t even go to business school and I can tell you that.
At this point, Smarmy Joe, you should really just walk away. That’s my advice to you. Do not attempt to wheedle your way into the lady’s good graces, all "Well, Sally, I am here buying textbooks do you have any textbooks to sell I see you have a lot of books there!" Your excessive enthusiasm and crazed, glassy eyes are doing you no favors here, young man. People may still attempt to be polite to you ("No thanks, I’m not interested. Yes, I keep all my books. Yes, I use them! Anyway, they’re not textbooks per se; they are novels. It’s not like they go out of date. Um, OK, so, I am working here, so if you could move on please."), but if you don’t catch a clue soon enough, they may be forced to shoo you out with the universally understood "shoo, fly" gesture and then close the door loudly in your face.
Just a tip. Like I said, I didn’t go to business school or anything.
Humbly yours in an advisory capacity,
Still Not Sally
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