Friday, February 19, 2010

Dear student, (or not)

Dear student,

I've seen the campus newspaper here. Frankly, it's not that great. It's six pages long. Two of those pages are articles culled from the "college news wire," one of those pages is about our mostly-losing sports teams, there's a comic done by someone whose love of manga is far greater than either their understanding of it or their talent for drawing, there are the usual puff-pieces by faculty or administrators to make themselves look good, and then there are the boneheaded opinion pieces by students who confuse "facts" with "things I personally think are true and that I pulled out of my anus, just now"

So I'm really extra insulted when you whip out the paper in the middle of my class and start reading it. I mean, really. You're telling me that a story on how our basketball team lost again is more interesting to you than Darcy's Law? Or that some idiot who can't even spell ranting about fuel-efficiency standards is a more valuable use of your time than listening to my explanation of what you're going to be doing in lab?

I mean, OK. If it were the latest "Twilight" saga book, or if it were, I don't know, "The Economist," I might understand. But our silly little campus paper? Really?

Or were you just looking to see if they had Domino's coupons?

1 comment:

Heroditus Huxley said...

Did the little darling start in with the "Can we *go* now?" rant immediately after finishing the paper? (I had one that did precisely that my first semester teaching--not fun.)

Sometimes, as much as I love the job, I also hate some of the students.