We are pleased to report that in conjunction with VH-1 and The History Channel, the Association for Tenured Education & Instrumental Reason has just launched a new website, RateMyStudents.com. Undergraduates at colleges all across the United States will be assessed by their professors according to a "hotness" index comprising of four parameters -- looks, clothes, type of phone used & number of books by Nietzsche that have actually been read (as opposed to simply cracked open) by the student or someone the student knows. Since the website is not carrying photographs of the students -- obviously this would be in very poor taste -- photographs of their cell phones will be posted, where available.
In a related development, Professor Charles Obscure of Fairweather College, Modesto, has just published a study which sheds light on an age-old conflict in the history of ideas. Dr. Obscure (assistant professor of communications, psychology & the humanities) has examined over two thousand student evaluations recently unearthed at the University of Berlin. Hitherto it had been thought that poor attendance at the lectures of the young A. Schopenhauer in 1820 had been due to the fact that he deliberately scheduled them at the same time as the world-famous philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, even though his work was deeply Kantian, anti-Hegelian & hardly known by anyone. However, it seems that this is only half the story. According to the new study, Hegel had scored very high on the "hotness" index then used (looks, clothes, number of words ending in -geist used per lecture, type of quill pen deployed), whereas Schopenhauer did rather poorly, due to having an outlandish hairstyle (see above) & visible holes in his britches.
7 comments:
I take the bait. I learn that Melinda is hot and I am not. But I am stunned to learn that you are not *understood to be hot* by the student raters though your glow is actually intense enough to light Santa's way.
If a foggy Christmas Eve should, in fact, eventuate.
By the way, in this age of irony, is what you have written true? The "geist" ending thing suggests not, but I've been caught out before.
Re-read. Got it.
I actually have never looked at any of those sites & I disapprove of them, very strongly. Students who participate in them are shooting themselves in the foot by demeaning the institution & devaluing their own degree. How dumb is that? But I don't even read the official evals. I think the system is corrupt & I tell the students so, and how. Now there's a perfect PoP blog...
Like so many things, such sites tell ... something. I'm not sure what. I rather think they are a magnet for the students who hate you and the students who want you. Hey, make them feel something, right?
They do make a lovely hook for a reporting class story on the flaws in such evaulations. We are always looking for a wedge into a story.
this is not the place to ask you this but what the hell ...
andrew, have you picked up the new issue of MOJO? the one with zep on the cover? if you've got it, may i borrow it? if you don't have it, i'll get it and pass it along when i'm finished.
David, I will pick up Mojo later this week. Also we should look out for Erik Davis, reviewing LZ's Mothership, forthcoming in Blender.
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