Stuff people eat

One day in my Personality Psychology class, I was talking about culture. I was talking about different foods that people from different cultures eat. So, I solicited from them examples of foods that they found strange in other cultures or foods that they knew people from other cultures found strange here.

A student, very seriously, raised her hand and said, "Well, when I was in France, I ate veal."

Okay, maybe you're thinking she was making some "it's alarming that people would promote the horrible treatment of calves" argument? No.

And they wonder why they fail

A student came to my office and asked me if he could retake a class of mine in the fall. He said, "Would it be a problem if I signed up for your class but had another class scheduled at the same time?"

Sounds like a joke. But it's not.

There are no stupid questions, only stupid people.

Students ask great questions. And by "great," I mean that they give me a lot to make fun of to my colleagues and friends. In all fairness, most students ask decent questions. However, it's the students who ask ridiculous questions that are most annoying in class and most entertaining out of class.

Here are two gems:

"Sometimes my leg goes completely numb, why is that?" Keep in mind, I am a psychology professor and this was asked in a psychology class. I guess I could have launched into some Freudian mumbo-jumbo about how the id was likely angry at his leg and the ego, in a protective maneuver, made the leg go numb so that the id would forget about it?

Talking about treatments for depression in class one day, I was describing the herbal remedy St. John's Wort (which has been shown to have some positive effects on people with depression). A student raises her hand and says, "Is that like aspirin?"

Yes, it's exactly like aspirin. That's why it has a different name, different use, and completely different chemical make-up.

Goes without saying...

I once had a student argue a grade that I gave him on a quiz by saying, "I didn’t write the answer you were looking for because I thought it went without saying."

I didn't write "you're a moron" on the top of his quiz because I thought that went without saying too.

When did a little sexual abuse ever hurt?

Here's a excerpt from a student's paper on pornography:

"Most of the women who pose obviously enjoy it or there wouldn't be so many women doing it. I think the article said something about women in pornography being victims of child sexual abuse and quoted like 65-75 percent of the women being abused as children. So what?"

Although this was from a few years ago, something tells me that I didn't give this student a very good grade on this paper.

What does it mean to pay attention?

I know I'm going to sound way older than I actually am, but this text-messaging business is the current bane of my teaching existence. The 2007-08 academic year, for the first time, saw me add an automatic point deduction policy to my syllabus for students who are caught text-messaging in class. This will not be the first (or best) text-messaging story. I had already sent a warning e-mail to this student about seeing her texting in class. Two weeks later, I saw the long looks into her lap all throughout class. (Yeah, yeah, we've all made the jokes about other things students could be doing with their hands in their laps.) I saw the cell phone in her lap as class ended. I went back to my office and sent her the penalty e-mail. A few hours later, I received an e-mail from the student insisting that she wasn't text-messaging and that she "pay[s] attention and take[s] notes throughout class." (She also added a less-than-advised, "I wish you would have noticed that instead of my phone" to the end of the message.) I replied with a request that she come talk to me in my office. When she came to my office, I told her that I would take her at her word that she was not texting in class and that she had taken my warning e-mail seriously. However, I told her I took issue with her saying that she pays attention and takes notes throughout class given that I also saw her with her head down and eyes closed on the day in question.

She said that she was unlikely in REM sleep and that she was probably mentally taking notes.

Fetus is just a funny word

Well, I can already see that my social anxiety is going to be a hindrance to the whole posting-stuff-for-public-scrutiny aspect of blogging. It's taking me way too long to think of a title for this first post. Like anyone cares what the title of this post is. Yeah, yeah, I could say some self-effacing crap at this point like, "that's assuming anyone even reads my blogs," but I'm going to force at least a few of my friends and relatives to read it. And now that I've drawn attention to how long it's taking me to think of a title for this post, that's making me realize that it's going to be worse when the title of this post is lame. Great.

I like this font, though. So I got that goin' for me...

I've started this blog mainly to muse about things that happen at work. I'm a psychology professor at a small liberal arts school. It seems like there isn't a day that goes by that a student doesn't do something to amuse and/or annoy me to the point that I want to share the story with others. As is true with most blogs, these stories may only resonate with me but I'm going to put them out there anyway. So, without further ado...

I was grading exams last night from my Intro Psych class. One of the short-answer questions was "What is womb envy?" If you're not familiar with the term, it was pretty much Karen Horney's response to Freud's idea of penis envy. She was annoyed, and rightfully so, with his suggestion that women were inferior to men because they didn't have penises so she suggested it was really men who were envious of women. She suggested that man's historical shit treatment of woman comes from his envy of her ability to have children. Okay, so now that you know the right answer to the question... a student responded: "Womb envy is when the fetus becomes kind of attached to being in the mother's womb and does not want to come out." I want to believe he was trying to be funny because he didn't know the answer, but scarily enough that could have been a sincere attempt at a right answer.

Btw, "Horney" is pronounced "Horn-eye." Imagine all the chuckles when I put her name up on the power point slide before pronouncing it aloud.