I received your paper via email today. I’m very impressed that you turned it in on time. The clever little joke at the end about it going to be late, I have to admit, made me laugh. But let’s get down to business shall we.
I asked you to write an essay that related your experiences during spring break and to then evaluate those experiences within the broader context of what it means to be an American student. In regards to describing your spring break, you did a okay job. When I said feel free to use a little “truthiness” I certainly did not expect this level of “creativity” from you. Continue reading…
First, I’d like to apologize for my behavior in our last class before Spring Break. I know you’re just doing your job when you do stuff like assign a term paper just before we all go on vacation, so standing on my chair and making the “suck it” sign was not really as funny as it was supposed to be, especially since I hadn’t noticed that you no longer had your back to me.
I realize we may have not gotten off to a great start on the first day of classes, when I careened off the lecture hall doorway and face planted in front of your desk. There was a lot more blood and vomit then I like to shed on a first day. My frat brother Harpo told me, and I don’t recall this, mind you, but apparently I went on a six minute diatribe, churning with vulgarities and the occasional bizarre sexual reference, on my complete lack of respect for TA’s in general.
My point is, these days are behind us, and I believe you and I may be able to forge a fresh, dare I say, mutually respectful TA-student relationship.
It was good to see you in the university gym that was built for all students to use at their discretion. I love it when you sit in the weight machine that exercises your inner and outer thighs and talk to the Sigma Alpha Epsilon president about where you might go out that night and whether Brandon is going to be there because he was acting so weird the other night after you two made out at the Pimps ‘n’ Hoes party. I agree, it was so not a big deal and he should just get over himself. And you’re totally right that Lauren has no right to be jealous, she dumped him 3 weeks ago! Slut.
Anyway, I received your email asking me for a recommendation for graduate school. As I understand it, you’re planning to apply for a Master’s degree elementary education. That’s excellent. I think you’re the perfect candidate for teaching young minds how to keep up with the Kardashians. I’ve attached the letter below. I wish you way more than luck.
If you haven’t realized by now, you are not welcome in the student gym, the undergraduate libraries, or anywhere else on campus that I could possibly run into you.
When I go to the gym, the last person I want to see climbing the Stairmaster next to me is you. In fact, when I leave your class, I don’t want to see you until our next class together.
You should probably know (and spread the word to your other grad student friends, will you?) that hanging out at undergraduate spots is not okay. We don’t want you there.
Go home, write your thesis, and leave the undergrads alone (this means, don’t wave to me when we are passing each other on the street. I don’t want people to think I’m friends with a greying, sweater-wearing, messenger-bag-carrying, thesis-writing loser). I have a life.
Thanks,
Undergrad
P.S. Will you write my letter of recommendation for grad school?
Please refrain from sending such informal emails to me, your instructor. For your learning pleasure I’ve included your original email followed by an example of how it should have been composed. Enjoy. And Learn.
Subject: [withheld]
From: undergrad
Date: 9/9/09 10:51 AM
To: Graduate Student Instructor
I don’t want to be that one student who is a pain in your ass
constantly missing class and generally fucking shit up. I just
woke up. My rough draft is done. I will find one of my classmates
to do a peer review of it. I live literally 5 minutes from class.
I woke up when my roomate [sic] came in at 9:20 and then layed [sic] back down
for a second only to pass the fuck out. If you could please read
my paper for no other reason than personal enjoyment please do.
Its an analysis of a cosmo article and I tear this bitch up.
Please read it.
School’s in…for autumn. Get it? The opposite of “School’s out for summer.” Though I suppose autumn isn’t really the opposite of summer. And who says “autumn” other than English graduate students?
Did you read any good books over the summer? What classes are you taking?
Despite the hostility in our letters last spring, I miss you enormously and am eager to see you on campus once again. I can’t wait to hear about the summer job you had at Target. And how much you’re looking forward to this football season, and rush. I’m really, really looking forward to hearing all new excuses for not finishing the reading I will assign. Though I do hope you use this one again: “I had a chem test. It was way more important than your class.” That one is the best. It’s the worst.
No, but honestly, I do miss you. I miss your tired, droopy eyes at 9:35 A.M. I miss your unstapled papers. I miss the questions about how to cite a journal article with continuous pagination. I miss the midnight emails asking me to read your thesis statement and tell if you if it is good. It may seem like I’m complaining, but honestly I’m not. Without you, my life would be nothing but critiques of Marxism and seductions of Orientalism. Sound intriguing? It’s not. I wish it was.
So come quick. Run into my classroom without your rough draft for peer review. Tell me how the printers jammed in the student union. Plead with me for an extra day to finish your response journal. Look into my eyes and tell me that you need me…to look over your conclusion paragraph.
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.
Stop pretending. You aren’t interested in helping me. You didn’t make a lesson plan for today’s discussion section. You don’t care about this subject. And the stain on your shirt from “today’s” lunch that you jokingly apologize about—was there last week, too.
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.
But its 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.
Why? Is it so liberating being out of our shoes that you want to impose the same kind of mindless restrictions and requirements on our learning? Or is academia really about hoop jumping, groveling, and eating shit until you are published/tenured/die? Let me know.
