Beware: Here Be Rambling

No blog yesterday. Does this mean I’m starting to lose interest? I don’t think it is, but I have a bad habit of starting something with great enthusiasm and then trailing off. We’ll see if that is the case here.

Even though I’ve got a big stack of papers to grade, I’m still procrastinating. They are actually quite short (too short if you ask me, but I don’t write the prompts), and since this is the final paper, my comments don’t have to be as detailed. If the students didn’t read or pay attention to my pleadings after the earlier papers, I can’t really help them any more this time ‘round.

I did discover that I’ve got a nasty reputation among the students though. I found out through a couple of sources that I grade ‘too hard.’ I believe this stems from me actually asking the students to make a try at coherence and grammar. Silly me.

Ok, now on to the reason I started this post in the first place. Yesterday, there was a nice get-together for the grad folks and a couple of faculty. Incidentally, this makes for a great excuse for not grading papers. Naturally, much of what we talked about was school and our related shticks. One of my friends there was talking about how the Women’s Studies classes were coming under siege from conservative activists who would take the classes and try to undermine the teacher.

[I deleted a story about a TA who got called a communist and fascist (neat trick, that) because the student thought he was preaching liberalism in class. I decided that as interesting as the story was, it isn’t needed, and the details were perhaps a bit too detailed.]

I’m not a fan of conspiracies at all, but I’m not really surprised about this at all. If the situation were reversed, I would hope that liberals would challenge teachers in the classes (hopefully within the context of the class). All in all, I don’t think it’s such a bad idea for conservative students to speak up and have a good debate in classes that are designed to support that. What I think is unfortunate is if students are taking classes specifically because they dispute the validity of the class itself. That, I think, would simply lead to disruption for the students who took the class out of interest.

I think it is a fallacy to say that politics has no place in the classroom. I think it’s condescending to see college students as being so naïve or malleable that a liberal (or conservative) professor will either destroy their learning experience or twist them to the dark side, whichever side that may be.

I’m not sure there is an overriding point to all this. I think my campus has never been a very politically active one, and it is becoming so. Maybe I’m not so worried because I am part of the vast liberal academic machine. Ask me again when they open a George W. Bush School of Elocution.