We’ve seen bad things happen to too many good teachers - adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on. Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). This isn’t an accident: I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. Now boat-rocking isn’t just dangerous - it’s suicidal That was the first, and so far only, formal complaint a student has ever filed against me. It disappeared forever no one cared about it beyond their contractual duties to document student concerns. I wrote up a short description of the past week’s class work, noting that we had looked at several examples of effective writing in various media and that I always made a good faith effort to include conservative narratives along with the liberal ones.Īlong with a carbon-copy form, my description was placed into a file that may or may not have existed. She knew the complaint was silly bullshit. I was shown an email, sender name redacted, alleging that I “possessed communistical sympathies and refused to tell more than one side of the story.” The story in question wasn’t described, but I suspect it had do to with whether or not the economic collapse was caused by poor black people. The next week, I got called into my director’s office. The rest of the discussion went on as usual. I gave a quick response about how most experts would disagree with that assumption, that it was actually an oversimplification, and pretty dishonest, and isn’t it good that someone made the video we just watched to try to clear things up? And, hey, let’s talk about whether that was effective, okay? If you don’t think it was, how could it have been? “Government kept giving homes to black people, to help out black people, white people didn’t get anything, and then they couldn’t pay for them. ”What about Fannie and Freddie?” he asked. The video stopped, and I asked whether the students thought it was effective. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all. My colleagues who let their students dictate what they teach are cowards. More on how professors react to their students Discussing infographics and data visualization, we watched a flash animation describing how Wall Street’s recklessness had destroyed the economy. In early 2009, I was an adjunct, teaching a freshman-level writing course at a community college. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best. Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me - particularly the liberal ones. Things have changed since I started teaching. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations.
I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I’m a professor at a midsize state school.
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