Dear Undergrad: An Exchange
Dear Undergrad,
You are correct, my young padawan. The Force is strong with you. It obviously took all of your reasoning and logic skills to figure out that the reason I decided to screen Fahrenheit 911 was because I had not prepared a lesson for the week. No, I don’t actually think you will learn anything you don’t already know from the movie. But it will, nonetheless, provide me with some much needed relief from having to prepare lessons and grade papers for at least three class periods: two to watch, one for debate (i.e. I sit at the desk and pretend to listen to you prats argue back and forth about what you perceive to be well-reasoned arguments but are in actual fact long held prejudices handed down from your parents and/or peers).
It is obvious, however, that you weren’t paying attention on the day I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt and try to teach you something. That would be the lesson on Logical Fallacies. You wrote (p.s. I’ve edited your post for grammar and style issues. Forgive me, force of habit):
Simply, I’m not sure I can respect you. For one, your entire community seems to be divided into two equally unappealing camps:
1) People with knowledge, ambition, and sensitivity—who are painfully awkward and have physical deformities that will sabotage the attention of a lecture hall for eternity (female mustache, dental work that deserves its own multi-disciplinary study, bookshelf-sized booty);.
2) The funny, outgoing, individuals who lack a working knowledge of anything, but still try and speak with authority in front of sort-of-impressionable students. In some alternate universe, I’d call you “cool” or facebook friend you. Even if we shared a sizable wall-to-wall, it couldn’t justify taking your suggestions to heart.
What you have exhibited above is called the “False Dichotomy,” or sometimes called the “either-or” fallacy. It is characterized by the presentation of merely two options or solutions to a problem or condition. Often, one of the options is overwhelmingly undesirable, so we are really only being presented with one option. At first glance, you seem to genuinely provide us with two options, both equally undesirable. But you continue:
But its it’s what your camps share that’s the most upsetting. As academia’s freshest faces, you should be able to connect with us, or at least impart some kind of understanding and optimism about our experiences. Instead, you seem no more human than our god-complex professors and cracked-out advisors.
You have cleverly disguised your single gripe as two equally undesirable categories, attempting to fool me into choosing the lesser of two evils, when in fact, in your parochial worldview there is only one type of graduate student: one who is “no more human than [your] god-complex professors and cracked-out advisors.”
I sympathize with you. No, actually, I empathize with you. For you see, I have been in your position. I have had that graduate student instructor who seemingly doesn’t care or doesn’t know. But now I am a graduate student and I can emphatically tell you this: I am both, I am neither, I am someone you have not even bothered to think of with your selfish, unseeing blob of gray matter you call a brain.
Most of the time I know what I’m talking about. Some of the time I don’t care about what I am supposed to be teaching you. And certainly, on occasion I have no idea what I’m talking about. I do wish and hope you think I’m “cool” or “with it,” as it can only add to my credibility as instructor and purveyor of knowledge. But if you plagiarize, cheat, or blatantly display a lack of interest in my class or subject, I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think of me.
But let me answer your final question, my eager apprentice. For in posing your final question, you inspire in me the possibility that you did listen as I explained the finer points of Post-structuralism as exhibited in the Architect/Neo conversation scene in The Matrix: Reloaded (this is an example of that fresh-faced enthusiasm that you crave); that we are constantly being fooled into thinking we have only one or two choices, when in fact we have an infinite number of choices to choose from in any given situation, for any given problem. Those graduate students who you perceive to have lost their humanity have indeed given up and are “hoop jumping, groveling, and eating shit until [they] are published/tenured/die.” But there are those of us who still believe that we have choices other than those few that are presented to us. And we try hard to negotiate the restrictive course descriptions, grading policies, and course content requirements to make the course we teach certainly more interesting and rewarding for you, the undergraduate, but we also do it for our own sanity. And every time you copy and paste shit from wikipedia into your rhetorical analysis paper, the light grows a little dimmer, we lose a little more hope, we become slightly less human. And so I’ll ask this of you–the same thing I ask all of my students at the beginning of each term:
1) At the very least, pretend to be interested in my class, you will get a higher participation grade, and I will be less suicidal.
2) Don’t plagiarize. It’s tiring to deal with. And if you are, put a little more work into it and don’t just copy and paste something from one of the top ten Google search results regarding your paper topic. It will at least lead me to believe that you respect my intelligence and years of schooling slightly more than your advisor who has already had to answer, “Is there any way I can get out of this writing credit?” approximately 473,562 times before you arrived on campus wearing your COLLEGE t-shirt. On second thought, don’t go through that much effort, it’s a waste of time, for you and for me.
What it really comes down to is that you musn’t forget the “student” part of Graduate Student Instructor. We’re taking classes, writing theses and dissertations. And the only way we can afford to come to graduate school is to take the measly 10 grand a year for 9 months of lesson planning, teaching, and grading. They don’t offer us scholarships for showing our prize pig at the local 4-H Fair.
Yours with Eager Anticipation,
Graduate Student
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Undergrads, write to your graduate students here.
Grad students, write to your teacher’s pets here.
All venting is anonymous.
Related posts:
- Dear Undergrad: An Exchange
- Dear Undergrad: An Exchange
- Dear Graduate Student: An Exchange
- Dear Undergrad: An Exchange
- Dear Undergrad: An Exchange
