Posted on 11/05/2011 2:57:26 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Drama queens afraid to learn anything but what they want to know.
Considering Bush never vetoed any spending and brought us the horrible Medicare drug coverage expense, this guy must not be much of an economist.
This would be a godsend to a professor, if he was judicious about how he did it.
First, require that students turn off any electronic devices for the duration of his lecture. As well, that students should not take notes, and to put all writing materials on the floor, “because”, he continues, that he intends that they put all their concentration on what he is saying, rather than writing it down and figuring it out later from their notes.
Then, he should spend the day with long, drawn out, yet colorful anecdotes about economics and economists. Larded with details and minutiae, referring to lots and lots of material not part of the coursework.
The zinger is that *none* of it will be on the exam, a detail he should NOT mention. Instead it will be voluminous b.s., utterly unmemorable and arcane, worthless crapola with the appearance of knowledge.
The fun begins in earnest when the absent students ask one of the students who attended what the professor talked about that day.
“A bunch of stuff”.
Well, did you record it?
“No, he wouldn’t let us do that.”
Could I see your notes?
“He told us to not take notes.”
(At this point, if the absent students are not scared half to death, they truly are stupid.)
It gets better and better. Undoubtedly *some* student will have recorded it. So the absent students get a recording of a huge pile of b.s., which they then “have” to study and try to understand. Days or weeks of hard work.
If the professor really wants to twist the dagger, he should then casually mention how the *next* exam is very important to student class standings.
And even if some of the students have “pull” with the administration, the professor can laugh it off and say that since so many students were not in attendance that day, he did not think it fair to give out course materials, so just talked about broad concepts in economics that will not be tested on.
This will not make it better.
how fashionable!
dumb a##es will get what they deserve from the very people they support today. Useful idiots.
“The Ivy League is far from a joke and at most of the schools you can still get a fantastic education, if you stay clear of the PC nonsense.”
Staying clear of the “PC nonsense” is an impossibility. Even in science and math courses there are some elements of it, and there are general education requirements that involve toxic doses of leftist drivel. But more important, the social life, orientation sessions, and extracurricular activities are generally suffused with postmodern/gramscian ideology.
None of the public universities are any better in this respect. There are variations among public universities in this respect, of course, just as there are among the Ivies, but it is still there.
What the Ivy League (and schools like the University of Chicago, Stanford, MIT, Rice, Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd, etc.) has going for it is not the quality of the curriculum or the presence of some “star” quality professors (that you tend not to see), but the quality of the the student bodies as measured by conventional academic metrics. No public university comes close.
This doesn’t mean that students come out of Harvard, for example, having gotten a lot of “intellectual value-added” from 4 years at Harvard. In fact, they may regress or stagnate intellectually in certain respects. Nevertheless, the “brand” does tell organizations and employers that the graduate is bright, ambitious, and at least to some degree hard working (AA admits excepted, although they are preferred as AA hires for much the same reasons relative to the overall AA hire pool).
Walk out on a Class you’ve already paid to attend is gonna hurt those evil bastards!!!! whooo..whoo
Jeez, I had an econ professor just like that. The first day, there were charts and diagrams and a horrendous amount of material. The next class, a dozen or so folks dropped the class. Hell, even the text book made no sense....
We never cracked a a book and just bullshitted the next several weeks and had to do an “oral report” for the final grade. He then asked each of us, what grade we should receive and he mulled things over a bit and gave us a grade. I think I asked and received a B+ in the class.
He used to hang across the street from his class room in a little eatery there that served beer and would show up with seconds to spare to hold sway in the class.
Those were the days!
Back when I went to school (of course, Earth's crust was still elastic then) walking out on a class was considered the same as dropping it. And no refund.
Believe or not, my professor had a similar background. He received his education in Yugoslavia, and some of his graduate work in Moscow in the early 1970s. And, like your prof, he had nothing but contempt for communism.
I loved the guy. A lot of students avoided his class, but I learned more in one semester with him than just about any other professor I had in college.
He is no conservative. He is a "new Keynesian" and an advisor to Romney. He is conservative like Romney is conservative. Establishment RINOs think they can fool us all the time.
I doubt the professor cares. The kids have already paid for the class. By all means, walk out. Smaller classes are easier anyway. I’d just smile and wave at them as they left.
“As I stated Penn, Columbia, and Brown are VASTLY overrated...”
Here I disagree - you left out Cornell ;-)
“...a large percentage of the student body at Berkeley, Michigan, Texas, and Virginia (just to mention a few) are every bit as good of students coming in as those in most of the Ivy League.”
While there are more than a few students at these schools that are as good as you find in the Ivies, even the weaker Ivies have much stronger students on average. Stanford, Chicago, MIT, and CalTech have student bodies as strong academically as any of the Ivies. Rice and Harvey Mudd are very close. Moreover, some of these non-Ivy schools actually do add value intellectually far more consistently than any of the Ivies.
I agree, however, that our most selective schools (Ivies plus some others) are vastly overrated as institutions. Because they are ideology ridden and don’t add much value intellectually.
In specific graduate fields, there are many top programs outside the Ivies, of course.
Yep flunk them all!
I thought Stanford was an Ivy, as well.
Perhaps you can enlightenment me, but what exactly is an "Ivy League" school (as opposed to a top-tier private university)? Which schools (besides Harvard, Yale, Princeton) fall into that category?
Well...the Ivy League is just a sports league among Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, and Cornell. The “little Ivies” are Amherst, Williams, and Weslyan.... a sports league of schools with an academic profile similar to the “big Ivies”, but which are too small to compete with them athletically (just as Harvard shouldn’t play Ohio State in football).
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