Posted on 11/05/2013 3:34:46 AM PST by Kaslin
I'm probably too young to have so many pet peeves. The list seems to get longer every year. So, naturally, the longer I teach, the longer my list of class rules seems to get. In addition to rules of class conduct, I also have to develop rules concerning over-disclosure of information in emails and office visits. Such over-disclosure is always geared towards one goal for the student: transforming personal deficiencies into legitimate disabilities in an effort to attenuate workload expectations.
Whenever I'm feeling overwhelmed by these excuses, I take time out in class to reiterate the rules concerning over-disclosure. Note that I always go over these rules at the beginning of the semester but I have to repeat the exercise at least twice during the semester. My two basic rules follow:
1. If you believe you have some kind of disability then go to disability services and let them decide if you are right. If this requires anything of me, they will let me know and I'll make whatever accommodations they require. No need to share the details concerning what your disability is or how it came to be. All I need is an official form with clear instructions.
2. If you experience other life difficulties that are temporary then there's no need to worry. I'll allow one week of absences and one make-up exam. No need to explain your emergency. Just use your week of free absences as you see fit. Again, there is no need for details. If one week is not enough then these are not really emergencies. In all likelihood your life is one long emergency and failing my class won't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Before the first half of the semester is over, I always get bombarded with demands for extra emergency time. Even after I reiterate the rules, I still have some who feel the need to challenge my overarching principle of keeping private (usual medical) information private. Here are some examples of challenges I have received in recent semesters:
- One student came by and began his plea by saying "I know you told us that if we had a disability, you don't need to hear the details. But I have two disabilities." Now this kid will make a great lawyer, won't he? I told students not to talk about a disability (singular). But technically I really didn't say anything about disabilities (plural). Clearly, this kid was born to litigate.
- Just one day after I demanded that students stop disclosing unnecessary medical information, I had a student send an email loaded with such information. But it wasn't his. Instead, it was his girlfriend's medical information. His argument was threefold: 1. She had a psychological disorder and couldn't drive. 2. He needed to drive her everywhere. 3. He needed extra absences. I’ve got to hand it to him. He found another loophole. I didn't say anything about disclosing other people's medical information. And victimhood should transfer from one person to the next, right? Clearly, this kid wants to be a lawyer, too.
- Slightly more than one hour after I told another class to lay off the unnecessary personal disclosure a student came to the office with a special plea. He claimed he lost his health insurance and could not afford his medication. So, in his eyes, he should be given a special exception. I mean, other people could just take their medication and shut up. But he couldn't do so if he didn't have health insurance, right? Wrong. I told him he shouldn't have voted for Obama and tossed him out of my office.
- Another student began to tell me about his disability right after he failed the first exam. Note that this was in a class where students took three book tests. I interrupted him and told him I understood that disabilities could slow reading but that the disability services office was in a better position to help him. He then informed me that he didn't actually read the book that was the subject of the last book test. In other words, the student wasn't even trying to link his disability to actual test performance. He was just talking about the disability in the hopes of getting generalized sympathy.
Weird isn't it? What makes it even weirder is that all four of the above requests were from male students. Our university student population is about 70% female and 30% male. But it seems that 70% of these disability victimhood pleas come from male students while about 30% come from females. So the question becomes twofold: 1) Where do people get the idea that they have some sort of a right to claim (and endlessly discuss) a disability? 2) Why has this idea become so contagious among young males?
The first question is easy to answer. For sixty years, the Marxist worldview has been dominant on our college campuses. And Marxists know only one way of restoring equality. It has nothing to do with teaching people who have nothing how to pull themselves up. They only teach how to take people who actually have something and bring them down via “redistribution.” In the context of economic redistribution, they force people to work for others rather than themselves. Human nature doesn't work like this. And so the standard of living for everyone plummets right along with so-called inequality.
This is the disability culture in a nutshell. Forget about raising yourself to a higher standard. Instead, claim a disability and pull the standard down to you. We've destroyed academic standards but at least there isn't any more inequality. Eventually, we all become average.
The second question is also easy to answer. It has everything to do with the feminization of the classroom. In recent decades, women have come to dominate the realm of primary and secondary education. Consequently, between the ages of 6 and 18, males are spending considerable time with women who are more inclined to allow them to indulge their weaknesses, rather than their strengths. Female teachers have a different view of boys’ competitive tendencies compared to the male teachers who used to supervise them. No one could seriously expect that spending twelve years under the daily authority of women would have no real impact on our young boys.
But despite the wishful thinking of Marxists, human nature never really goes away. Boys will still be boys. Even when they are taught that they have weaknesses and disabilities they will still try to compete. That is why I have to listen to so many "my disability is bigger than yours" stories. They seem to have replaced the spitting and urinating contests of the days of old.
Marxism may be an old and failed idea. But its subtle variations are robbing our children of the chance to excel by facing the prospect of failure. Ironically, when everyone becomes mediocre there won’t be any diversity left to celebrate
Thank-you!
“from each according to his ability, to each according to his Democrat Party status”
Unless he's thinking about single-sex religious schools, I don't know what he means. Women teachers have dominated public schools for generations. I think the key change was not having women teachers for boys, but having schooling take up so much time (in years and hours) and focus.
What we got here folks is a quintessentially American oddness. It is what happens when a Christian mindset gets spoiled. It is what happens when we try to keep on doing Christianity with no Christ.
Good read Kaslin.
> “- Slightly more than one hour after I told another class to lay off the unnecessary personal disclosure a student came to the office with a special plea. He claimed he lost his health insurance and could not afford his medication. So, in his eyes, he should be given a special exception. I mean, other people could just take their medication and shut up. But he couldn’t do so if he didn’t have health insurance, right? Wrong. I told him he shouldn’t have voted for Obama and tossed him out of my office.”
This part doesn’t have the ring of truth to it. In reality the teacher would have brought outa mat, placec it on the floor facing the WH and told the student to pray to the Allah proxy in the WH o heal him of his afflictions.../s
> “- Slightly more than one hour after I told another class to lay off the unnecessary personal disclosure a student came to the office with a special plea. He claimed he lost his health insurance and could not afford his medication. So, in his eyes, he should be given a special exception. I mean, other people could just take their medication and shut up. But he couldn’t do so if he didn’t have health insurance, right? Wrong. I told him he shouldn’t have voted for Obama and tossed him out of my office.”
This part doesn’t have the ring of truth to it. In reality the teacher would have brought out a mat, placed it on the floor facing the WH and told the student to pray to the Allah proxy in the WH to heal him of his afflictions.../s
Disabiblity has gotten down to if you are black, hispanic, illegal,muslim or any onther choise ethnic group and are unemployed or working a low paying job like mcdonalds you are classified under the new terminology as disabled. oh the humanity!
Mike Adams and Daniel Greenfield are two of my favorites.
For anyone just starting a career, America has become almost exactly like the old Soviet Union, where party status was all, and in order to be someone you had to join the party. Aspiring men wanted to join the party so they, too could participate in the meager droppings Communism produced in Russia.
There was a news item for a few days locally, when a student at a historically black university was suing a fraternity for not letting him join because he was gay.
I guess he couldn’t claim ‘victim’ status because of his color, so he had to go for his second ‘victim’ status.
Did he ever consider that he might not have a personality that fit with the particular fraternity?
The story-line fits the single-parent (usually Mom) demographic, doesn’t it? When my brothers or I wanted to get our way, we didn’t go to Dad, we went to Mom. And if she felf overwhelmed, she’d holler for Dad, and us boys would run for the hills. But nowadays, so many young men have never had to contend with the authority of Dad.
I've had my lower spine surgically repaired FOUR TIMES in the last twenty years. Each operation was considered major surgery, literally re-building parts of my lower back. One surgery had to repair a collapsed and fractured vertebrae. The damage from that collapsed and fractured vertebrae was so bad, I spent 6 months learning how to walk again. I also no longer have feeling in the bottoms and toes of either of my feet (Neuropathy from nerve root damage.)
I literally have to walk with feet that feel like they're "asleep" to a normal person.
I also have vision issues, having a slight double-vision with a dominant left-eye (even though I'm right-handed. Go figure that.)
I have Ankylosing Spondylitis that's tearing up my lower back both knees and left hip. I've had my right knee surgically repaired once. My left knee now needs to be repaired. I've had my left hip resurfaced once. It's wearing out, doctor says I'll likely need both knees replaced by the time I turn 60. If I'm lucky, my left hip will last a little longer than that.
And yet, every damn day I get my ass out of bed and go to work to take care of my family. Despite my physical condition, I'm able to drive myself to and from the local train station to catch the train into the city (Chicago) and then walk six blocks to and from my office.
Because I'm left-eye dominant and right handed, I've had to learn how to shoot left handed. I go deer hunting every year in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I walk myself down the logging trail of our property about 40 acres into the woods, and find my deer blind. I then wait for Bambi to come along. I'm a pretty good shot, I typically don't miss. When I bag a deer, I field dress it, hang it in a tree myself, then walk back to the house to get the ATV out to go bring my deer back.
Yes, I do all these things myself despite having a lower back that's been surgically repaired 4 times via 4 major surgeries, neuropathy in my feet, bad vision, and ankylosing spondylitis tearing up my lower back, knees and left hip.
By the way, I'm 50 years old. The next twenty years or so of the rest of my life don't look so good from a physical perspective. All the crap I have gets worse as time goes on.
So please pardon me while I tell these fat, lazy, government cheese eating sloths who've never produced a worthwhile thing in their entire government teat suckling lives to get off their asses and stop mooching off of me!
Lazy bastards!
That’s another very important element. Say 75 years ago, most boys probably had women schoolteachers. However, they didn’t spend nearly as much time in school (and related institutions like daycare, before-and-afterschool care, etc.) as they do today. They went to school, and then they were out. And when they were out, they could be around men in their families and communities, doing something useful, active, or both.
The isolation of children into warehousing-institutions isn’t good for either sex, but that’s what’s happened, and the trend is for more of it, rather than less.
The gent moved.
The young clerk smiled widely and thanked me.
Americans with Disabilities Act, from George Bush Sr.
I think it is all of the teachers who are either man-haters, childless or not raising a boy(s), or are just plain liberals.
I had little old Quaker ladies at my public school. Many we’re single and pacifists but they understood boys. They were even liberals but they new how to let us play and how to swing a paddle when the play got out of hand.
Then there was Mrs Heinline the imposing old widowed German lady. She expected us boys to be men.
So no, the problem isn’t women per se but women who have no idea what a man is supposed to be.
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