The good news is they are allowing her to drop the course, past the official date, without penalty. The bad news is she will be replacing it with a course in Japanese Anime.
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My wifeâs dad brought her to her first job interview after graduating, and sat in the waiting room just outside the interviewerâs office during the interview. She didnât get the job.
Honestly, I donât see that as good news.
Part of college is learning about real-world consequences for your (lack of) actions.
If the admin cave here, what message does that send?
I honestly believe the right thing is to force her to choose: Drop with a 0, or suck it up and finish the course.
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My wife teaches a film class that most of the college takes, as it counts for an art-related elective. Every semester she gets students who think itâll be watching movies and thatâs about it. During the first class she reviews the syllabus, discusses the papers, mentions theyâll be watching 7 movies over the entire 14 week course and expected to engage in class discussions, and that grammar in papers will be deducted.
The smart students are the ones who drop after the syllabus discussion, but she always has stragglers who get to the end of the year test not knowing their mise-en-scène from their sound design and suddenly declare that this wasnât what they signed up for. Sheâs handed out so many fails but is always saddened to see those same students again the next semester and she has to fail them again.
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Yeah, I kinda donât think of that as the same thing. Thereâs a difference between reading material for a class and some other ârite of passageâ imposed on a student through peer pressure that sounds like itâs intended to cause the student some discomfort - not intellectual discomfort with ideas, but personal discomfort from shame. Iâd say the student in your story didnât do anything wrong, and that her parents were in the right, if misguided, as well.
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Tara Shultz sounds like she does not belong at University at all. Perhaps sheâd be happier shoveling horse manure, staffing a 7-11 checkout counter, or some similar abdication of intellect and reason.
I find it especially disturbing how her parent says âwe wouldnât haveâ (taken the college course), like itâs their sensibilities at stake. Whoops, maybe that was too telling on their part.
Expel the student for failing to meet academic standards of open-mindedness in keeping with university intellectual tradition, nullify their course credits, and let them live fearfully in their small shallow world.
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Dear Ms. Shultz:
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Yep, between Corinthian tying up mostly nude young men and eating their eyeballs, Fun Land assaulting Rose and the panel of Nimrod dismembering a body, The Dollâs House can be a tad disturbing.
I admit that when I encourage people to pick up Sandman (mostly ânon-comic readingâ people Iâm trying to convert), a little part of me wishes that Preludes and Nocturnes and Dollâs House werenât the very first volumes, because they can get pretty gnarly. But I insist they soldier on if they get bothered; it is well worth it.
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Wait, when did you sign up? Recently, or when you were born. Because if youâre an immigrant, how can you not know weâre a land of morons. I thought everyone else around the world knew that⌠weâre the country of loveable morons, with lots of guns.
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A bit sheltered eh? Average german school curricula probably blows your mind then ⌠I was bombarded with a constant barrage of this stuff 6th grade and upwards.
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Which is particularly funny when you think of the large number of biblical references in Shakespeareâs works.
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How sheltered does one have to be to honestly have issues like this? My first thought when reading this was to ask if she was home schooled and if her parents looked into becoming their own accredited collage before relenting and allowing their snowflake go to college with the general public.
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Wasnât this posted to Boing Boing last week by Xeni?
Not to mention the actual pornography!
Just wait until she finds out that they teach about the Bible in mythology class.
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Iâm reminded of a bit in The Iron Dragonâs Daughter, in which the main character is a university student, studying magic, and canât figure out how to solve a particular problem, so she goes to her professor to ask for some help. The professor apparently doesnât answer the question, but goes off on some story about a sexual relationship sheâd been in. The main character eventually realizes that it wasnât irrelevant, but that the solution to the problem involved sex magic, which was strictly forbidden by university rules â but was also an indispensable part of magical practice, so students learned to break the rules and learn to use it anyway, sooner or later.
Iâd had a pretty sheltered experience growing up, with little social contact with peers outside the context of school â the regimented environment of a public high school I actually found liberating, at the time. So I was quite overwhelmed by university life. I often felt like there was a lot of subtext that I was expected to understand, that I didnât. After my first sexual experience â which was rather later than usual â I was in an English class, and the instructor gave, as an example of perspective, how differently the world would appear to a young person in love. How the plants would seem to be almost bursting with sap. And I thought, this literally wouldnât have made sense to me a few days ago. I had to wonder how many other discussions Iâd listened to that I hadnât really understood.
As some people have suggested, thereâs an assumption that college students are adults. And thereâs a whole lot of poorly-articulated expectations about what that actually means.
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I wouldnât even do that. Preludes and Nocturnes is a pretty terrible starting point; itâs good, but not nearly as good as what comes after, and large chunks of it donât make any sense if youâre not familiar with 50 years of DC Comics history. (I seriously have no idea what Gaiman was thinking there.) When someone turned me on to Sandman as a teen, he handed me Season of Mists, which stands alone pretty well and is a good test for whether youâll like the series as a whole. Once theyâre hooked, then you can start them at the beginning.
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Somewhere I read Gaiman say that, basically, he hadnât worked out where he wanted to go with the character until the last story in that first volume.
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Shakespeare is pretty filthy, and a lot of people seem to miss it because they think the flowery language means itâs âintellectualâ. Forgetting, of course, that Shakespeare was writing for a people who were maybe 50% literate. Taming of the Shrew is pretty much a 2-hour dirty joke, for goodnessâ sake.
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