Geez the nerve of those older women! Imagine doing the course in detail!
Holy shit they really should be banned from higher education. Vastly more important that the younger generations of slackers get to demonstrate how poorly they can do the work and still pass. :rolleyes:
Education obviously belongs to the young.
Well, of course, Primaflora. We obviously have more time to appreciate it all the more. 
The obligatory joke made, I have to say I sometimes enjoy it when people go off on tangents during class. It can be entertaining, and you can definitely learn stuff that ain’t in the textbook.
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Creaky, did the older women in your classes do just the extra-credit work, or did they do all of the work well? If they actually paid attention to the class and did well in it, I can hardly think they were there just to have “something to talk about at their next cocktail party”. If they were, they’d have slacked off as much as any teenager without an interest in education. As it is, it sounds like they were genuinely interested.
Professional Curve Killer here. Mind if I snort derisively in your direction?
Did you ever talk to those women? Do you know for sure that the class was their only responsibility, academic or otherwise? Or are you talking through your hat?
While killing curves in, yes, the only class I was taking that semester, I was working eleven-hour days (with an hour-long commute each way), helping my wife raise three children, and generally being your basic Responsible Adult. Sleep? I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
So don’t pull your shit on me. I’ve been on both sides of this and I have a fair understanding of both’s responsibilities. And I’d much rather take fifteen credit hours while being a full-time student than work full time while taking three.
The worst has to be in my math class when the teacher puts a problem on the board and before anyone is finished one kid blurts out the answer. I want to fucking ring his neck and then spit on him!
Ditto, mouthbreather…
My AP’s in two weeks and Alan J. Brinkley says Oswald did kill Kennedy. Who am i to believe?!
Dang it, people! Don’t you know it was the second gunman on the grassy knoll?! Oswald was just the sacrificial lamb, Jack Ruby was a professional assassin, and the Warren Commission was paid off. Honestly, doesn’t anyone watch Oliver Stone movies anymore?
jayjay
I guess you would have, Dude. But you made a choice to get married and have kids first, before going to college. That definitely puts extra pressure on you. And if you needed to work to put yourself through college, I totally respect that. But maybe you could have put off having the kids to save $$$ until you got your degree.
It’s all about timing and choices, ain’t it?
And of course I’m talking through my hat! I never spoke to any of those women personally, or got to know them. But I certainly overheard enough of their conversations among themselves before and after class to draw my own conclusions, which later supplied me with the ability to make rude and sweeping generalizations.
Hey, this is the Pit, after all.
HAH! Shows what YOU know, newbie! I got a useless degree (Anthro) THEN got married and had kids. The later schooling was to teach me something with which I could make money.
I only talk through my hat. Actually having knowledge and understanding of a topic requires far too much time and effort on my part.
I cannot blame you. I would talk to them, but that’s just because I have a weakness for trophy wife types. (It isn’t so gross when you’re closer to their age. Close, if you give it any thought, but, as I stated earlier, thinking is too much trouble.)
Creaky, I hadn’t had the chance to welcome you to the SDMB. I would like to do that now. Anybody who can, without apology, admit to making and describe the process in creating “rude and sweeping generalizations” is my kind of poster.
dropzone!
You rule. I love being able to talk to smart people who can be objective and intelligent as they construct and deconstruct and not take everything personally. I KNEW I was gonna like it here.
Thanks! 
This is the exact attitude that fuels all the snickering and the eye-rolling. It is this deep belief that alot of people have that in a liberal arts course the talker can’t really be that passionate about the subject matter, they must have an ulterior motive, namely, the desire to “suck up.” No one really cares about word choice in Tom Jones or influences on Decarte or how Diocletian’s reforms were effective. But it is quite possible to be passionate about the liberal arts. Intellectual stimulation can be as powerful as any other: My emotional reaction to unfolding certain works of literature is on par with my emotional reaction to my husband: the experience of falling in love with him and falling in love with Milton or Melville was really pretty similar. But when you fall in love with a person, you can talk to your friends about it. When you fall in love with a fucking flavor of ice cream, you can tralk to your friends about it. But if you are 18 and in love with thinking, no one believes you. Even your teachers don’t feel that strongly about what they have taught you. Chances are, no one in your family feels that way. You get used to the idea that this is just not soimething you talk about, becuase even though it is common courtesy to listen to someone else blather on about the guy they like, there is no common courtesy law about listening to someone blather on about meta-narritives. People feel free to deflect intellectual conversations.
And then you get to college, and you sudenly encounter people who are actually more passionate about this stuff than you are. All these thoughts that you have had to have in a vacumn can now be brought out and explored with other, like-minded people. It is truely intoxicating, and when you only have the three hours a week to talk about this thing that is such a big part of your life, well, you sieze that chance. Now obviously, there are polite and impolite ways to do this, and some people are just rude, but don’t assume that someone’s passion for dead philosphers or authors or history is faked–intellectualism can be one of the most emotional experiences of all.
I agree. I also don’t think ‘junior high’ is an appropriate name for grades 6 through 8. When I was that age we had elementary school, K-6; jr. high, 7-9; and high school, 10 - 12. However, we were always advised that the ninth grade counted as high school, for college admission purposes.
Now in the same area the elementary schools go up to fifth grade, middle school is the next three grades, and high school is the traditional four high school grades.
Manda Jo: I never said his passion for lit crit was a put-on. I’m sure he genuinely enjoyed the subject matter. He was really good at it, and he clearly wanted everyone else to know it. If his discussions had focused on the books we were supposed to have read, he would have been a great addition to the class (well, maybe not, he had a number of other unpleasant personality quirks that didn’t relate to the OP) However, when the syllabus says we have to read books A, B, and C, and this guy wastes half the period talking about books X, Y, and Z (which no one besides himself and occasionally the professor) have ever even heard of, that’s annoying, to say the leasy. And it is the professors job to keep class discussions on track and make sure everyone is at least able to contribute to a discussion, even if they choose not to.
Nimune, if all that is true, why did you call him a suck up? I am not trying to single you out, it is just your post had the most-quotable example of hte attitude I am talking about. Speaking as someone who can get pretty passionate about literature, I want to suggest that either a) that guy assumed that everyone else had read all those books, becuase why would you be taking a lit course if you didn’t love literature enough to have done all that outside reading? and/or b) past a certain point it is diffucult not to tie books in with each other. That interaction between works is what the study of literature is all about, and the reason you have to take all those classes about all those different authors is so that you can learn all these works. Part of the problem is that in a lit clas you will have people just starting their upper level work and people finishing it. You can’t expect the people who are finishing to act as if what they have learned in all thier other classes is irrelevant.
Just in case someone might be interested in the POV of the teacher in such a class. I teach elementary school during the day, a class in children’s literature as a night class once a week, and two classes (children’s lit, and young adult lit) each summer.
My classes tend to be filled with a mixture of English, Elementary Ed, and other majors taking the course to fill their general ed. core lit requirement. This results in a class that has both seniors ready to graduate and freshmen taking their first lit course.
There are three types of students who annoy the hell out of me. I call them Hijackers, Exhibitionists, and Cruisers.
Exhibitionists are those who have done the work, but are not satisfied unless they can show off in class, and thus try to answer every question, blurt out answers, nit-pick other students’ answers, etc.
Hijackers usually have done at least some of the work, and may have done all of it. They try to dominate the discussion by taking it into their own particular areas of interest, whatever the topic may be.
Cruisers usually have done little or none of the reading, and expect to just get by. They contribute nothing to clas, and sometimes will disrupt it out of boredom. Many of these students take my class because they expect “children’s literature” to be easier than other classes, or require less reading. It isn’t, and it doesn’t.
If I allow any of these people to interfere with the education of those students who genuinely do want to learn, and who do the work, the fault is mine. The teacher of a college course has the obligation to provide for the needs of all of his students.
In the case of Hijackers and Exhibitionists, I don’t think they intend to be malicious. In most cases, they simply have a deep-seated need to justify all of the work that went into preparing for a class. I think these behaviors are a hard-wired part of their personalities. It’s the instructor’s job to rein them in.
I deal with the situation by calling on every student to answer a question or provide a comment several times every class session. This gives everyone a chance to contribute, brings out the quiet students who do the work but are content to remain quiet, and embarasses the hell out of the cruisers.
Cruisers seldom last long. Many drop after the first class period when they find out how much work is involved (8 novels, 50 picture books, 150 poems, and reading from the textbook). The rest tend to drop after they take a test over the first novel assigned. In my classes, students take the test before class discussion. This ensures that only the students who actually read the book will pass the test, and prevents cruisers from picking up enough in class discussion to pass the test.
I don’t tell them this at the time they take the test, but the test I give over the first novel is the same one that my 5th graders take over the same novel. Well, not until after they take it, and those who didn’t read the book fail the test. Imagine how embarassing it must be to fail a test that an average 10-year-old can pass. Damn, its fun humiliating slackers who do nothing but take up space in my classroom and annoy the real students.
But in the case of those who try to dominate the discussion, it’s the instructor’s job to lead the discussion and ensure the opportunity for all to participate. Every class is going to have students who try to dominate it; if they do, the instructor is responsible for allowing it to happen.
Everybody reading this thread who would like to read that text please raise your hand. <drop raises his>
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That is rather deliciously evil!
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Life is built of small joys.