Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/09/professor-tells-student-aust.html
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9 Likes
When in doubt, double down. Holy shit, that’s one clueless “professor.” Fucking geography, how does it work?
41 Likes
Mmm … I’m with the professor on this one. I mean, they call themselves a country, but really Australia? Really?
here’s an aide memoire:
- Austria is a country, but not a continent
- Australia is a continent, with delusions of grandeur
29 Likes
Potatoe. You just need the authority to make it stick.
19 Likes
Warning, PHD is no garentee of intelligence.
39 Likes
The Vatican is a city, not a country!
New York is a city, not a state!
Los Angeles is a county, not a city!
38 Likes
Of course the Commonwealth of Australia only dates back to 1901. Before that there were a number of colonies on the continent.
10 Likes
PhD sometimes stands for “Piled higher and Deeper”
22 Likes
Tough break for the prof, but I hear that there are openings in the US State Department for people of such caliber.
66 Likes
THIS. it is exactly why my spouse stopped teaching at the collegiate level and focused solely on being a psychologist. She found that students were god awful in their practices and commitments to their own education, but worse yet fellow faculty members were worse. They routinely passed what she considered to be failing work. They curved course grades to ensure all students would pass when some should have definitely failed. And encouraged just “get them through and out of our hair”.
She found it atrocious.
Good on SNHU for supporting their student.
22 Likes
…and their reputation.
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The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
[…]
Whenever I analyzed the blue-collar workers I found that the fraction σ of them were stupid. As σ’s value was higher than I expected (First Law), paying my tribute to fashion I thought at first that segregation, poverty, lack of education were to be blamed. But moving up the social ladder I found that the same ratio was prevalent among the white-collar employees and among the students. More impressive still were the results among the professors. Whether I considered a large university or a small college, a famous institution or an obscure one, I found that the same fraction σ of the professors are stupid. So bewildered was I by the results, that I made a special point to extend my research to a specially selected group, to a real elite, the Nobel laureates. The result confirmed Nature’s supreme powers: σ fraction of the Nobel laureates are stupid.
http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/
11 Likes
SNHU is a college, not a university.
(It used to be a perfectly reasonable little for-profit accounting college, but has strived to become the Phoenix University of Higher Education. One way you do that is staff your courses with unqualified contingent hires instead of tenure track faculty with degrees in the subject.)
29 Likes
Oh I’ll bet the professor is sorry alright!
Oh man that is just so embarrassing. I mean we’ve all been stupid wrong and convinced we were right. Just convinced, based on something we heard or read long ago that just entered into our fabric and wove stuff around it.
8 Likes
Reminds me of the argument I had with my Japanese roommate in college. He simply would not budge on the idea that Japan was a continent. We had a lot of strange arguments. I think he also argued in this debate that Japanese didn’t count as Asian.
13 Likes
I’ve been to Australia. Pretty sure its fake.
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I say the following as a professor myself, in regards to this professor:
Christ, what an asshole.
15 Likes
There’s a long tradition of theorising about the supposed uniqueness of Japan and the Japanese people.
12 Likes
Maybe the professor in question didn’t get the memo.
I had a physics lecturer who spouted this religious stuff during lectures. He would claim that the second law of thermodynamics invalidates evolution, because evolution reverses entropy.
8 Likes
From all the horror stories circulating about expensive online degrees, it seems surprising she was able to get any personalized interaction with her professor whatsoever.
Perhaps knowing how to negotiate with obstinate bureaucrats is the most valuable lesson of all.
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