I'm still an English professor. Shoot.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > I'm still an English professor. Shoot.

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

MoarFoarYoarTenbux posted:

I can't believe no one's called you out on this. This is crap. You are crap for doing it. It's like stripping Ussein Bolt of his Olympic medal because he slowed down and beat his chest at the end and therefore didn't run as hard relatively as the other people in the race. You drat well better give someone an A for doing A-level work. If you must grade with some sort of bizarre "A for effort" system, you should make effort make up for quality, not the other way around. If I write something a little worse than someone but spent tons of time and used you for assistance, I should get more points than them because I get extra, not have them get fewer points. I can't believe no one's complained about this. That would be a completely legitimate complaint and you don't deserve to ever grade a paper ever again if you're just gonna pull that poo poo.

Well this is a bit much, but given that, like it or not, the grades you give out will be used to evaluate your students by third parties, it does seems quite unfair to give them grades that aren't accurate evaluations just to "motivate" them.

# ¿ May 20, 2009 12:24

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 21:21

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Brainworm posted:

And there are others like this. Heart of Darkness seems popular in High School classrooms, and I honestly don't understand why. It's a century-old indictment of British Imperialism. Why this is relevant in an American High School classroom, or at least relevant enough to replace distinctly American novels like McTeague or Silas Lapham, I don't know.

Isn't it more of an indictment of Belgian Imperialism? (and a fairly specific incident of it, at that)

# ¿ Jun 30, 2009 18:21

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

billion dollar bitch posted:

Ah yes, it was a greenstick fracture, not a comminuted fracture. Never mind that the Belgian Congo exported rubber and not ivory and that the river is never named and that it's told by an Englishman by a (Polish-born) Englishman, in English, with all the main characters being English. Greenstick, yes...

You mean like the actual trip that Conrad made through the Congo Free State? The site of one of the greatest atrocities of the age of imperialism? Which Conrad was personally acquainted with through his journeys and knowing one of the main campaigners against it?

But ivory!!! (which the congo free state also exported, by the way)

# ¿ Jun 30, 2009 23:00

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Brainworm posted:

Yeah, but I was arguing from the politics of reception -- maybe not the clearest move, I know. You've got an indictment of imperial practice being presented to an Anglophone audience in ~1900, which seems more like a shot to the British crotch than criticism of the Belgians.

I mean, if I write a fictional piece about the French misadventure in Vietnam, it's always possible that people will read it as being about the French. More likely, readers will manufacture some connection between the French experience and America's current position in Iraq (even in the unlikely event I didn't intend or foresee that connection in the first place).

Well the thing is that the atrocities in the Congo actually did get a lot of attention in Britain eventually, and Conrad was involved in that. It's more analogous to writing fiction about human rights abuses in China - sure, some people will see parallels to American "enhanced interrogation" and Guantanamo, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be understood as primarily criticising China.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2009 01:19

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Brainworm posted:

That said, I certainly wouldn't go to graduate school if I thought of it as a sort of sacrifice fly -- years of paying dues that'll land an ultimately rewarding job. If you're not going to enjoy graduate school you shouldn't go, and if you don't like it you should leave; there's no job, professorial or otherwise, that'll meet the kinds of expectations you'll build out of six or seven years of self-imposed suffering.

I think you are being unduly dismissive of the idea that "whether you will get a career out of it" can or should be the deciding factor in whether graduate school is worthwhile. There are plenty of people who would enjoy graduate school, and would be happy to go if they could get an academic career out of it, but who don't want to spend six years of their life on it and then go into a different career, poorer and six years behind everyone else.

And that's why the distinction between humanities and other subjects matters: there are plenty of jobs for chemistry phds outside of academia, whereas non-academic jobs for philosophy phds are even rarer than academic ones.

# ¿ May 4, 2010 13:55

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Cwapface posted:

I think you'd be surprised. Graham Greene once entered entered a Graham Greene write-alike parody contest under a pseudonym and only came third.

Are you sure that's actually true? Because the fact that it's a palette swap of a popular (and mostly true!) story about Charlie Chaplain suggests myth.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2010 13:20

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Brainworm posted:

But just FYI, I think that "I'ma illustrate a problem with criticism" criticism is fundamentally broken unless it discovers some alternative. Most of the time, it takes remarkably little facility to describe a broad problem with any field. I mean, by the end of this semester, I'm sure every student in my Introduction to Literature class will be able to tell me what he or she doesn't like about the spectrum of criticism we'll read, and certainly Sontag's basic complaint -- that criticism generally doesn't make reading more enjoyable -- is common in such courses as the are usually taught.

What takes tremendous skill, and what I think more useful, is providing a new criticism that addresses these problems. Complaining, saying we need to do something different, and stopping there, that's just barroom griping.

I don't really think this is a fair attack. The first step in fixing a problem is identifying it, and ignoring problems because you don't have a solution just makes it less likely that a solution will be found.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2010 19:16

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

They're both correct english.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2016 05:08

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Brainworm posted:

And that said, I don't know whether that's the best of all strategies -- I'm at a top fifty college, which isn't an R1 and also isn't selling plasma. Seriously, I've just turned forty and have no idea whether I've under- or over- performed.

I think getting a permanent academic position at pretty much any non-fake university counts as over-performing? Even more so since it's in the humanities.

# ¿ May 24, 2017 03:51

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 21:21

Jeb Bush 2012: Apr 4, 2007; A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Brainworm posted:

That's assuming a Tenure-Track job, but if the ceiling for your tech writing pay is in the $50Ks it might be worth exploring. And -- I can't stress this enough -- teaching at a college beats the hell out of teaching at a high school. The facilities are nicer, there's scheduling flexibility, and the students are terrible shots.

I think as one of the tiny minority of phds to get a permanent academic position your perspective might be somewhat skewed here! It is extremely unlikely that doing a phd will result in getting the job you describe, even if you assume that phd is from a relatively prestigious program.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2018 20:34

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > I'm still an English professor. Shoot.