Category: morthos

More important than performing my own material before an audience of two hundred students is finding a legitimate reason to play a full ‘They Might Be Giants’ song in class. Tomorrow my triumph is complete; ‘Wearing a Raincoat’ from the album ‘The Spine’ makes it appearance in the class on necessary and sufficient conditions.

I hope I’m not the only one excited by this.

‘If there are “Jews for Jesus” are there “Jews for Judas?”‘

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‘I’m so bored and lonely these days that I’ve taken up writing Ashlee Simpson slash fic.’

‘Ashlee on Lindsay on Hilary is the shit, man.’

‘Mmmh. Sounds perversely erotic.’

‘Yeah. Want to read something I wrote last night?’

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‘No man can be a king unless he is born to it. Any man can be a queen as long as he dressed properly.’

I’m in the close of my tertiary education career. Here follow some points of interest to me.

Mispronunciations

It’s incredibly passe to write on the nature of spelling in the works of students (and also foolish; if I complain about the issue someone will point out a number of mistakes in this post alone). The same goes for grammar. Speech, however, is another matter.

‘Somethink’ has become an increasingly common replacement for ‘something.’ ‘Mattrix’ has replaced ‘matrix’ and, well, the world is your oyster when you are looking for these things. Part of me tells me that this is not a worry; languages change and evolve and our pronunciation today was somebody’s headache yesteryear. I am guilty of a whole host of these gaffes, although I have a great and glorious excuse which explains why I can’t read things phonetically. Learning Ancient Greek was a bitch.

Miniskirts

They are everywhere. God bless you. God bless you all.

Daleks

If I had impersonated a Dalek in class one year ago today almost all of my students would have had no idea what I was referring to. Today, however, almost all of them did. Everything old is new again; hurrah. Even ‘Hitchhikers Guide’ references are now contemporary (there is an entire post that should be written on this; I can date my teaching epochs by whether PHIL100 (Introduction to Metaphysics) tutorials know the Majikthise and Vroomfondel scene). I’m no longer odd, just vaguely eccentric in my pedagogy.

Inverting the Cliche

Whenever a class or lecture appears in a film or in an episode of TV you always get what I call ‘The Last Five Minutes.’ Fictionally, whenever you see a pedagogue on TV they are giving some impassioned speech about the value of their subject to the way the world works. The fiction ignores the umpteen boring hours prior to that moment, which, in all probability, is the last thing those students will hear before heading to their final assignment in the course/class. Prior to the last five minutes the teacher is a boring prat incapable of keeping the students’ attention for more than a few seconds.

Still, there are pedagogues who rise to the mantle of walking cliche. This is a good thing; it is one of the few times where the cliche isn’t an accurate picture of the world at all. I’d like to think that my team in PHIL105 have become the caricatures that the students wanted but never expected.

‘The Last Five Minutes’ has lasted seventeen hours thus far this semester. Seven more to go. After that… Maybe never again.

Intelligence and Education

When I started in this gig I thought that education was the most important aspect of a person’s self-development. University education was essential in the formation of good people. I no longer believe that.

Education does not make you better. Education is not essential to the furtherment of the species. Humans need sex and they need food; everything after that is just… luxury. Intelligence… Maybe I’m jaded because I teach people far smarter than myself, far more capable. My tutors know the material better than I do. I excel because of style, not because of substance. Intelligence no longer impresses me. Perhaps I’m jealous; I suspect intelligence only makes you feel better when you think you lord it over everyone else. There’s a curious pleasure in the notion of sinking into a horde of similarly average intellects come next year. No more games of one-up-manship. No more living fear of being caught in the lie.

Perhaps education does you make you better. Perhaps intelligence is important. I think I just stumbled at the last hurdle.

Still, I’ve still got my pompous and overbearing personality. It makes me happy.

Intelligent Design

I think I’ve managed to get three people to give up on ID this semester. I hope Darwin was right, otherwise I and three others have just been condemned to Hell…

Click its panelled magnificence to visit its home…

My students love me. And some of them love me.

(Click to embiggen.)

“I’m going to blow my horn whilst slitting my own throat.”

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“The deep dark secret of being a teacher is that it makes no real difference what you teach them. The deep dark secret of their being students is that they don’t believe you anyway.”

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“My children will be born dead.”

“My children will be conceived dead.”

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“We’re paid to teach; we’re not paid to make them learn.”

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“It’s the lack of suitable genetic material that makes me rethink my position on marriage.”

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“We should change the name of the Department to ‘Big Thinking.’ ‘Critical Thinking’ can become ‘Good Thinking,’ ‘Ethics’ can become ‘Happy Thinking,’ and that proposed subject ‘The Philosophy of Sport’ can be ‘Kicking around a few Thoughts.'”

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“I’m your Venus, you’re my anus…”