Nothing wrong with Sheep Dip.
If MHendo is actually a prof then he should be grading on the curve. Plus we all paid good money to be allowed to post here. I say, As all around!
And thus continues the glorious “dumbing down” of America.
As a resume counselor, I first need to know what you DO in these posts. Do you take a supervisory role, or are you on the lower rungs? Also, do you have any special talents that we could emphasize, because I just don’t find your skills all that intriguing.
E.
As an administrative assistant, I’ll give this to someone else to grade.
As a geologist I can find fault with all of you. Now while for most of you this might be normal, for Cerri it’s more likely strike-slip.
BTW, isn’t mhendo a student of history, not English?
As a mime, I have nothing to say about this.
As a concert promoter, I’d have the bartender underpour you and have the security guys glower menacingly at you.
SkipMagic, you rock.
As a Scientist, I will take all of the data presented here, write a paper about it, apply for a grant, publish it, and let the rest of you figure out what it means.
As a computer programmer, I’ll spend the next 8 months writing a program that automatically censors mhendo’s posts. I’ll spend 6 of those months posting on the SDMB, 7 weeks and 6 days writing code, half a day testing and documenting, and then half a day getting smashed to celebrate the first release version. The first minor release won’t run at all, because mhendo’s computer is set to EST, and my program assumed he’d be running CST. The second minor release will work, although it will occaisonally censor entire posts. The second version will feature negative reinforcement, and administer genital shocks in addition to censoring posts. Unfortunately, a bug in the first minor release of the second version will cause sterility, and the resulting lawsuit almost puts my employer out of business, until we point out that the EULA that mhendo accepted contains the standard EULA boilerplate line: “I swear to fucking Jesus Christ that by agreeing to this license I waive every single right granted to me as a human being by my city, county, state, country, and any international organizations.” Praise the EULA!!!
As a sidewalk artist I find this sketchy.
As an Artist, I’ll poop on it, hang it on a wall, and charge big bucks!
As a library cataloger, I give the poster for his behavior quoted in the OP a serial title with ten major title changes, subjects that could be classed five different ways, and an online version whose URL changes every three weeks. Catalog THAT!
As a law student, I give this a B.
On the curve, everyone gets Bs.
… except that one smarmy son of a bitch … :mad:
As a Frenchman I give in.
You know, there’s nothing I love as much as a pit thread where the OP goes through a heated, 7 page long thread, cherry picks single sentences (or even sentence fragments) out of multi-paragraph posts by one user, presents them with no context, and then acts like they’ve proven something.
As a quality assurance technician, I assure you that the OP in this thread is entirely lacking in quality.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! 
Well if it works, why worry about it? Actually, I heard this from a psycho psche nurse that was attending med school with my wife. Unfortunately, this woman probably practiced this corrective measures on patients.
The first rule of programmer club is no one talks about programmer club.
Naughty, naughty, metacom.
Wow, over 5,000 posts and my first pitting. I guess some might say that it’s long overdue. Of course, i would have made an earlier appearance had the OP actually placed a link in one of the other threads, as is common practice. Failure to follow Board protocol means that the best grade this rant can get is a B+
What’s even more surprising is that, of all my egregious behaviour cited in the OP, every instance except one comes from a single thread. Not sure, then, why a whole new pit thread was necessary. And any good student knows that failure to use a sufficient number of sources will lead to a reduced grade, so we’re down to a B-.
Also, as Comrade manhattan points out (do people still actually use the term “commie” with a straight face?), the Pit is exactly where this sort of stuff goes on. If being a smarmy or condescending IN THE PIT is now considered, in and of itself, a Pitworthy offence, then i’m not sure why we have the forum at all. You’re on the way into the C bracket.
And even if you felt that some of my comments were out of line, even in the Pit, it’s interesting that you give none of the broader context in which those comments were made. For example, when i made the comment
i was responding to this:
Poor citation form brings you down into D territory (and, on preview, what Miller said).
As for the assertion that i’m not a very good teacher, this relies on an assumption that there is a direct correlation between the way i act on this message boards and the way that i teach. It also assumes that some of the students i teach are as persistently and wilfully ignorant as some of the people on this message board. I’m sorry, i very rarely give out an F except for plagiarism, but it looks like you made the grade.
This message board is not my job, it’s where i hang out for a laugh and an argument. My demeanour in the classroom is very different and, contrary to your assumptions, i am in fact happy to have students disagree with me—i actually encourage it, and have never once put a student down in the classroom. I take seriously my responsibility to teach all students, and to help every one of them do the best they possibly can. I think my classroom evaluations generally bear this out, although of course not every student i’ve ever taught has had flattering things to say about me.
It may surprise some people to know this, but even if you believe that a large proportion of university folks tend to lean to the left or liberal side of the political spectrum (and i do believe this), it does not follow that we are all looking to turn our students into little clones of ourselves. The biggest battle facing the classroom teacher at university is not disagreement or conservatism, it’s plain old apathy. I’d take a class full of dedicated, interested Straussians every day over a class full of apathetic leftists who hadn’t done the reading.
A couple of years ago i was the only TA for a course in American Intellectual History. I did all the grading for the class, and the highest grades consistently went to a student whose politics i disagreed with strongly, but who supported her positions with clear and cogent arguments that demonstrated a close reading of the sources. The A she earned in that class helped her spend the summer as an intern in the Bush White House.
Conversely, this semester i gave a very poor grade to a student whose every word i agreed with, but who didn’t answer the question. His essay was a long editorial on the problems of conservatism and the current administration, but it completely failed to address the question he had been asked to answer, and it made virtually no reference to the class readings.
I’d like to address this issue, and in light of the specific thread from which most of the quotes in the OP were drawn.
Firstly, i make no claim that my writing is far above the level of other people’s understanding. I’m a historian, not a literary type (and i’m not a professor yet either. I’m still a graduate student). I fully concede that i’m not the world’s greatest writer. If you could see my academic writing, you might describe it as competent and workmanlike, generally free of grammatical errors, with pretty good sentence structure and logical argument. It’s not going to win any awards for style or literary flair, but it generally gets its point across.
Second, the problem in that thread was not that people disagreed with me. It was that they continued to argue as if certain points had not been made at all. Disagree with my position if you like, but when you continue an argument without addressing the very points that have been made in response to your earlier arguments, the whole exercise becomes difficult.
For example, a whole bunch of people in that thread continued to assert, over multiple pages, that requiring attendance in class was simply “coercion,” or some sort of sop to the professor’s ego. They refused even to deal with the argument, raised by me and a number of others, that a student’s attendance in a humanities discussion class is required because the student is meant to use that class time to demonstrate his or her level of knowledge and understanding, and that this is part of the teaching methods of the humanities. Continuing to insist that as long as a student can pass the tests s/he shouldn’t have to attend class ignores a key aspect of teaching and learning in certain subjects.
I mean, one person’s explanation for required attendance—which drew one of my more acerbic comments—was as follows:
When it has already been pointed out on multiple occasions that there are good pedagogoical reasons for requiring attendance, why just dive in with this crap? But of course, this didn’t stop others:
This is like the “la la, i can’t hear you” argument. These folks, rather than actually debating the educational merits of judging a student’s performance based partly on in-class discussion and participation, continued to accuse college teachers of requiring attendance simply as an ego trip. Sorry, but i’ll call bullshit on this type of argumentation every time. As aurelian remarked in response to the above-quoted comment:
The problem here was that people were simply choosing to ignore a significant aspect of my (and other people’s) argument in order to continually insist that requiring attendance was pointless. As contrapuntal said:
In that thread, of all the people arguning against the idea of attendance, i think it was treis who was the only one who took the time and effort to challenge that assumption intelligently and make an actual argument against it. Everyone else just ignored it and carried on as if it weren’t there.
And then, a couple of pages later, when people had stopped insisting that attendance was required simply to feed the teacher’s ego, we had Debaser march in with all his usual panache and state:
That was the cause of the final quoted comment in your OP. The second sentence might well have been true—i can’t claim to know anything about Debaser’s own college experience. But the comment about attendance as an “ability to brownnose the teacher in class discussion” was stupid, and had already been addressed multiple times by a number of people.
Much of the disagreement in that thread seemed to stem from an unwillingness to acknowledge the difference between different subject areas. I made quite clear that my own argument pertained only to the types of subject that i teach, and i acknowledged that things probably work differently in the sciences or in mathematics or whatever. But some other people came in from a science or math background, and automatically assumed that whatever happened in their own discipline should, by default, happen in all disciplines. Sorry, but your expertise in taking a math class doesn’t dictate how i or anyone else should teach and grade a humanities class.
The funny thing is, your own contribution to the thread in question sounded much more like Poster B than Poster A. You marched in, ignoring four or five pages of previous debate, and made an unfounded assertion that had already been refuted pages ago, without actually offering any reasoned argument of your own.
I know there are plenty of people on this board who can disagree with me and provide an interesting debate based on reason and logic. You just haven’t provided any evidence that you’re one of them.
mhendo: Bravo! (seriously)