Those Who Can't Teach: Guest Post by Tamara Lunardo
I am beyond thrilled to have Tamara Lunardo as my guest blogger today. Where I sometimes get mired in the details, Tarama is a big picture kind of girl. Tamara’s writing is as fresh, edgy and vibrant as she is. Gentle and compassionate, Tamara (pronounced Ta-MAH-ra) is a wonderful read. Note: Just don’t mispronounce her name or call her Tammy or she’ll punch you in the throat.
Tamara has an essay featured in Alise Wright’s book Not Alone: Stories Of Living With Depression, a compilation of a wide range of experiences, voices, and opinions of individuals who have lived with and continue to live with depression. And whether she’s writing about depression or tattoos, Tamara makes you think. She makes this little Jewish girl think about Jesus a lot. And that’s something.
You can find Tamara at HERE or Twitterstalk her at @tamaraoutloud.
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Those Who Can’t Teach
It was my senior year of high school, and I was a frequent skipper of my coast-able classes, as bored, brainy teens are wont to be. One class in particular was on my skip list, partly because it was the last period of the day and partly because I felt I could gain nothing from it whatsoever: Yes, I hated English.
To be accurate, I loved English; I hated that English class. I hated hearing the assistant principal use the pseudo-word “irregardless” when he visited our classroom, and I hated seeing the teacher blink blankly as I railed against it in intellectual-teen angst. I hated her insecure explanations and her flimsy lessons. I hated being so ill instructed in a subject I so well loved. And so I opted out of attendance when I could, and I snapped out right answers when I couldn’t. I was not high in the running for teacher’s pet.
And then I had a change of heart.
I took my SATs and got a near-perfect score on the verbal portion, which resulted in letters of courting from various collegiate English departments. So I decided that this was the time and way to make amends, to offer this teacher evidence that perhaps I’d listened to and learned something from her after all, even though we both knew the truth. I approached her after class with uncharacteristic zeal and shared my exciting news.
“Yes,” she vocally shrugged, “that happens sometimes.”
• • •
I walked into a restaurant in my old hometown last year, and I saw that teacher eating alone at a table. She was thinner, fainter, and still as blank. My heart went out to her, and I had to say, “Hello.”
I reintroduced myself and let her know of my modest successes with the English language since my 12-year departure from her class. I offered my degree and freelance writing and editing career as evidence that perhaps I’d listened to and learned something from her after all, even though we both knew the truth. She blinked worn eyelids toward my contrite face and said without a shred of remembrance or interest, “Oh, that’s nice.”
And I walked away with uncharacteristic zeal because I thought, It really is.
And we both knew the truth.
Did you have a teacher you could’ve done without? Were you a class-skipper or a teacher’s pet? And on a scale of 1-10, how much does “irregardless” piss you off?
• • •
If you have writing chops and are interested in submitting a memory about a teacher you had and can explain how that person helped you (or really screwed things up for you), as well as the life lesson you took away from the interaction, I’d love to hear from you! Contact Me. Essays should be around 700-800 words.
If you write for me, I’ll put your name on my page of favorite bloggers!
irregardless – a one word redundancy( Pre planned is my favorite) Linguists insist that there is a difference between proper English, for instance and English language. It is language as long as the thought is communicated. So that makes it proper in the linguistic sense (You can argue that-my arguments got me an F in the course). I would present that irregardless is more dialect than improper. Likes in New Yorks were it ain’t disproper and people are not ascairds a sayin “irregardless”. PS Whew, Tamara’s quite the fox.
Yeah, I get what the linguists mean, but I’m a grammarian at heart. 😉
Tamara: Thank you for being here today! I know you have many projects going on simultaneously, not to mention the whole mommying twins thing!
I hope your readers get to see a different side of you — (although every side is fabulous, and what part haven’t we seen?); and I hope my readers — the ones who don’t already know you — take a look at your blog page. Because you write somethin’ fierce. From the head and the heart, if you know what I mean. And I know you do. 😉
My last year in high school, I had a guidance counselor tell me I wasn’t college material. (Yeah, that was great for the ole self-esteem.) Anyway, I ran into him many years later at a bar. He was tanked. I introduced myself. He didn’t remember me. I pressed the point and reminded him that he’d told me that I would probably not succeed in college. I told him that I’d not only succeeded, but I’d graduated Phi Beta kappa and that I was a teacher now.
He burped.
I realized it was time to stop worrying about what some alcoholic guidance counselor thought about me in high school.
Thanks for having me, IYKWIM! I was PBK, too. 🙂
I didn’t even know what PBK was when they told me I had made it. 😉
Heh heh.
My parents had to explain it to me. That it was an honor.
So just when you think I’m a smarty-pants, I’m a twit again.
By the way, soooo good to have you! IYKWIM.
“Irregardless” makes me want to throw my own poop at the person. I had a former co-worker who sat near me use it CONSTANTLY and to actually CONDESCEND to our customers. I often entertained fantasies of going monkey-balls crazy in her cubicle, throwing junk and screeching, every time she used that word.
There are very few non-essential things I’m irrationally passionate about, and bad grammar used to belittle someone (at least belittle someone eloquently) is one of them.
The hierarchy of doughnuts is another.
This is a beautiful image of you, Jess. Makes me want to buy you a whole dozen hot Krispy Kremes.
Picking nits is a delicate business. I might tend to wince just a bit when I hear someone use irregardless in a conversation. I tend to get a bit more huffy however when I see it in writing, especially if it is either more formal or official in business. And yet, spell checker in these modern times lets it slide. Pooh!
Oh! And those pesky prepositions! I’m with Carl on this. It is difficult to argue with a thought well conveyed. There are plenty of examples of well written, grammatically correct sentences in life that can leave a reader scratching his or her head thinking, “what the hell was the writer trying to say?” Churchill, angered at an editor changing around one of his sentences to avoid having it end in a preposition scribbled a note back to his editor, “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” Ha!
Love that story. I also love to explain the etymology of the word “preposition” when people get bent out of shape about ending sentences with them.
Yes, I am a nerd.
Please do share the etymology of “preposition” with us, Tamara. I’m agog.
LOL!!! Oh wait, text-speak is bad grammar. Dammit!
Nothing would delight me more. “Preposition” comes from the Latin “praepositio,” meaning “to place before.” In Latin grammar the preposition was necessarily placed before the noun; English grammar does not have the same necessity. For example, “I don’t know where you came from” makes perfect sense and is grammatical.
So, although our word “preposition” comes from a language in which that part of speech really did need to be pre-positioned relative to a noun, we retain only the word itself and not the grammar to which it once belonged. (Or, “the grammar it once belonged to” if you prefer– still grammatical.)
Whew! You have no idea how much fun that was for me to write. I love talkin’ nerdy.
There is no required word order in Latin. It is written in capital letters with no spaces between words and no punctuation. The reader of ancient Latin was adroit enough to make sense out of a sentence regardless of word order. Modifications as you suggest may have been initiated in post Roman Empire Latin. If there is information that contradicts what I have presented, I certainly would be glad to learn that.
Ooh, fun! I’ll be back to talk Latin with you in a bit. 🙂
Right, this wouldn’t have been an issue in Classical Latin grammar and its non-existent (or nearly non-existent) word order. I was thinking of the way Latin attaches prepositions to verbs (not nouns, as I said earlier) so that they become one word, in which the preposition is necessarily pre-positioned.
It’s been so long since I’ve studied Latin, I’m not even going to try to play with the big boys on this– I actually learned this little etymological tale from an advanced English grammar course, so there are two possibilities: 1.) It was a construct of later Latin grammar, or 2.) It was an apocryphal story that my professor passed off as fact and that I am now guilty of repeating. Or, 3.) I remember wrong. 🙂
But these sources do indicate that, at some point, Latin prepositions were placed before nouns: A Practical Introduction to Latin Prose Composition (Thomas Kerchever Arnold) and A Latin Grammar: On the System of Crude Forms (Thomas Hewitt Key).
Regardless, it’s a false rule that English grammar demands prepositions be placed in front of other parts of speech. But it sure would be great if I could remember the connection to Latin. It’s a language I’m fond of. <– 😀
In light of the Latin grammar lesson, and as regards “irregardless,” I think it apropos to bring this to the (virtual) table:
“De gustibus non disputandem est.”
(Which, if translated directly into English without changing word order, would sound as Yoda always intended).
Thanks for engaging response. Of course later Latin approached today’s textbook forms in the way it appears. Oh believe me , I am not a big boy on this. Got straight D’s in Latin but history was a major so remember from historical not linguistic studies. Yes, your #1 up there is probably true and spaces between words and punctuation and upper/lower case all added to “modern” Latin. With Latin and Spanish I could never memorize verb declensions. History- Roman Britain and post Christ Rome east/west are my favs except love Elizabethan England and Puritanism. At least Rene will be proud of us because we both used regardless instead if “irregardless”.
And I love it when you talk nerdy to me, baby! 😉
I’ve butted heads with my fair share of teachers growing up and I can relate to the frustration of being in a class where you feel like you weren’t being taught the best information. I look back and feel bad for them and the situation we were all in. Much like your story, I’d enjoy being able to see them again and let them know I did learn something afterall…
I just don’t get why people become teachers if they don’t really want to teach well– and I’m so grateful for the ones who do, like Renee!
Totally agree – I have faced this more than I care to with 5 kids. Kids know when teachers don’t like their jobs. It’s hard to disguise. Great post. I am going through a similar situation with a son in his English class right now….
Reminds me of the principal that I saw several times, many years after being tutelaged by him (yeah, that’s not a word…), and always was afraid to speak to him because I assumed he wouldn’t remember me. Finally, however, my lack of self confidence faded into absolute idiocy on one occasion, so I greeted him and introduced my family.
And I’m pretty sure he STILL doesn’t know who the heck I am.
That was pretty darn disappointing.
Aw! I’m impressed that your principal had any influence on you at all– other than our AP’s occasional classroom visits to bleat fake words at us, we had almost no interaction with the administration.
Small private school. Small Christian private school. My relationship with the man was always a bit odd. Looking back, he seemed particularly nervous about me in general, I THINK because he knew my Mom disagreed strongly with the school on a key point of doctrine, but it could just be that he is a bit strange. I’ll go with strange.
Good story, Tamara. My pet peeve is when folks use “supposably” rather than “supposedly”. It was common in the little town I lived in for awhile.
Actually, I think “irregardless” is small potatoes when compared to “should have went”, “should have came”, etc. Argh.
Oh gosh. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an adult say “supposably.” I’m pretty sure I’d vomit.
I’ve heard “supposably” from a couple of co-workers, but they were foreign nationals (Chinese) that were speaking English as a second language, so I had to cut them some slack.
One phrase cracked me up from one of those guys…. He would explain something and finish the sentence with “and da da da”, and I had no clue what he meant. I finally figured out that he was trying to speak those extra periods trailing off the end of sentence. You know, the kind I use all the time, like this….
Instead of saying “et cetera”, he was saying “and dot dot dot”, but it sounded like “and da da da”. Once I figured it out, I cracked up. I’m not making fun of the guy either — he’s a great guy, a good friend, just has some limitations in his english-speaking abilities. As I fellow math geek, I’m certainly not one to judge him on that basis.
“Irregardless” pisses me off at about a 7, I think. “I could care less” in place of “I couldn’t care less” is the one that really gets me.
Mr. Bible (his real name) was the teacher I could have done without. He made us write out essay answers for each unit in our history book. We found proof that the book was fatally flawed (it asked questions about subjects that were not anywhere in the book), but he forced us to keep answering. And he swore that he read all the answers. So right in the middle of a paragraph I would write, “Blue dogs and pink cats have green feathers.” He never noticed. I almost failed his class because I stopped doing that stupid work. He gave me a chance to make it up, and kept saying, “It isn’t going to hurt me if you fail. I’ll be in administration next year.” It was a legend at our school that Mr. Bible had been saying “I’ll be in administration next year” since anyone could remember. Years after I graduated, he was still not in administration. But I bet he was still using that dumb book.
Holy crowly, Carolyn! Tamara isn’t here yet, but that is an awesome story. What a bitter dude. Some people should not be in the classroom. I sincerely hope he is gone. And not in administration either. Glurg!
What a tool! At least his antics make for some good storytelling. 😉
I had the same math teacher all 3 years in middle school. We never really got along. Now, she comes to my restaurant every Wednesday for happy hour. She doesn’t really remember me from my middle school years, though she kind of pretends to. When she first started coming on Wednesdays and I said hello and reminded her that I was once her student, she mumbled something about how I only work in a restaurant. I just smiled and said, “It’s nice to see you again.” I really wanted to say… “I don’t just work here, bitch. I run this place. And, I probably make more than you do.”
What?! It would’ve taken all my restraint not to tell her that I was doing the best I could with my shoddy math education. 😛
Regardless of the official standing of the word, I like the way “irregardless” rolls off my tongue. (And no, I don’t have synesthesia. More’s the pity). Irregardless, it’s them as knows the rules as can break them with impunity. 😉
Irregardless.
You better check yo self before you wreck yo self.
I wasn’t always outgoing. Believe it or not I was very timid and shy in the early grades at school. However everything changed in third grade. I had a teacher named Mrs. Conboy. …………..
for some reason she adored me. I wanted that so badly and she provided it for me. She always complimented me on my work and inspired me to do better. She never said negative things to me. I adored her. Yes! I became a teacher’s pet.
Aw, that sounds like a teacher worth being teacher’s pet for. I had a lot of those good ones, too.
Irregardless, bugs the crap out of me. I taught under a principal who butchered the English language with a dull hatchet! My favorite faux pas of his was “windshield factor.” Example: “Because it’s snowing and the windshield factor is below zero, we will have no recess today.” He also couldn’t use a proper verb tense to save his life.
I really like Tamara’s post. It sound like that teacher was less than thrilled to be in the classroom and was probably riding the wave to retirement. My brother had a geometry teacher who told him that he should never even consider a job involving numbers. My brother had a very successful carreer in banking and recently made a change to a department of defense job that involves nothing but higher level math. I love most teachers, but some are just dead wrong!
“Windshield factor”– that is hilarious!
On a scale of 1 to 10 … irregardless annoys me to an ’11’. In fact, why is there not a red line under the word irregardless as I type it? It is not a word!! Do the webmasters within WP know this fact? There should be a red line indicating irregardless is not a word. Let me see if the red line is working…. esy yes, it is. 🙂
This story makes me sad, because I’m guessing your teacher was sad. Regardless of her lack of zest, I am glad you succeeded and kept your interest in English strong.
I do think she was sad, and that’s why, even as an angsty teen, my heart went out to her.
And I am with you on the spell checker. This is problematic. Sad, even. 🙂
I hate “irregardless” as much as I hate “reverse back.” *rips out hair*
I hear ya. Pointless redundancies are so pointless. 😀
My best friend’s husband rails against people who use “irregardless.” It’s pretty funny to watch. Tamara, your teacher reminds me of one of my science teachers. He seemed so browbeaten by life and it greatly impacted his ability to teach. But he was tenured and so we were forced to endure boring lectures and uninspired experiments. I didn’t like science class to begin with so that made it that much worse for me. Plus, I had him both freshman and sophomore years! The agony. Now I wonder what happened to him, whether he found a spark. I hope that he found happiness somehow.
I’m married to a teacher, so I have some insight into that world. I think a lot of what causes uninspired, uninspiring, and ridiculously sad but tenured teachers is the never ending progression of students who don’t want to be educated in any fashion. The continual refusal to accept authority or to stir themselves to be better. The continual feeling that teaching science, or English, or history, is doing absolutely nothing to better these kids lives; it only serves to put money on the teachers table, and thus he is better off to not emotionally invest himself too much. It’s much like a police officer or a fireman needing to disconnect from the pain of their victims – if they let themselves be empathetic, they cease to be functional at all. There’s too much pain to stand. Likewise, in education. After 30 years of hearing the backtalk from 16 year olds about how history is stupid and there’s no need to study it, how can we expect the teacher to be really excited about the material and the joys of teaching it to kids who hate it?
“…a lot of what causes uninspired, uninspiring, and ridiculously sad but tenured teachers is the never ending progression of students who don’t want to be educated in any fashion.”
Couldn’t agree with this statement more. One of my strongest talents (apparently, at least according to all those tests one has to take in school and church groups to discover one’s gifts) is teaching. However, I would be loathe to teach in the school systems in North America for precisely the reason Bernard has pointed out.
I am hoping, however, to use these teaching gifts in a less wealthy area, perhaps in Africa even, where teaching is valued and the students are hungry for knowledge and skills.
As far as teaching nightmares, the worst example I can think of didn’t happen to me, but to my little brother. Aside from a speech impediment due to not being able to hear very well when he was little, he was (and is) a very smart kid. The elementary school we attended had this split classes where half the students were in grade 2 (for example) and the other half were grade 3. His grade 2 teacher saw how bright he was and he was eager to learn so she recommended to the principal who met with my mum to tell her that they would put him in a 3/4 split the following year and phase him through both grades so he could “skip” ahead to grade 5 at the end of the school year.
The downfall was the grade 3/4 teacher, Ms. W. My brother would come home from school angry and crying. After a few weeks, we discovered that Ms. W. made my brother sit at a table that was empty most of the time because it was reserved for the special needs children who spent limited time in the classroom to prevent over-stimulation. He was called “stupid” in front of the class and Ms. W. made no efforts to understand him.
She undid every good experience he had ever had at school. He went from eager to learn to unhappy and bitter. He eventually dropped out (as many boys with a genius, or close-to, IQ tend to do).
My mum thought it was an isolated incident until quite a few years later, she was at a store and overheard a lady who had just moved to town lamenting at the sudden change in behaviour her daughter had towards school. When this lady mentioned the school, which was the same one Ms. W. taught at, my mum just had to ask if Ms. W. was the teacher.
When this woman replied that Ms. W. was indeed the teacher, my mum advised her to get her daughter out of that woman’s class, no matter what she had to do.
You know the sad thing about Ms. W.? She was young. She’d only been teaching for four years when my brother was in her class. She hadn’t really been teaching for nearly as long as many other horrifically jaded teachers…
How terrible for your brother!
I hope that if you feel passionate about teaching you will pursue it!
Yes, that would be so hard to be faced year after year with students who didn’t care about what you were so passionate about. I can see how that would wear a teacher down. Sad.
I think I would like this guy. The friend’s husband, not the boring teacher. Heh.
Oh goodness, this warms the cockles of my heart! I went to Catholic school most of my life where the only subject the nuns really knew was English. So imagine my horror when I settled into a rural town where “supposably” is considered an example of fine grammar! Typically I hear phrases thrown around like “I ain’t got no money” and “She don’t know nothing”. My college English major self just winces, as I’ve given up on trying to correct people! They usually just give me a blank stare.
So glad I follow Tamara so I can now follow Renee! You ladies rock!
I don’t know how you survive, but I’m glad you’re not exhausting yourself trying to fix an entire town’s grammar. You can just keep coming to hang out with me and now Renee too!
Yeah! Wooh hoo! We like to hang out and we try to stay quiet when folks be goofin’ up. 😉
I had a few teachers that were a bit damaging– but I had more than a few who were amazing! I have always loved learning and often been a poor student who was lazy and got bored very easily. In highschool I would skip doing my english homework on a quasi-regular basis. “Why?” you ask. I had managed to get myself a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, duh… that stuff doesn’t read itself and I clearly didn’t have time to do my homework and actually read something great. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for many of my teachers.
Also, I hate that dictionaries have become descriptive rather than prescriptive. Irregardless… ? Really? I do love that my spell check highlights it but says, “no guesses.”
I love that you read Shakespeare in favor of doing homework. Man after my own heart.
It makes me sad and angry when I hear about terrible teachers. My mother is a teacher and spends almost all her time at home correcting papers and trying to think of new ways to introduce a subject. She talks endlessly about her students and really adores her job. I would love to one day be an English teacher but the market is so full of teachers right now that my feeble attempts at finding a teaching job have failed. (I’m not certified and I have a silly Psychology degree.) It maddens me to think of those teachers who don’t care about their students or their subject matter. I assume they only wanted their jobs so they would have their summers off.
I know what you mean. My mom is also a teacher, and I admire the passion she has for her craft. What a shame that any teaching position should be filled with anything less.
“Irregardless” ticks me off almost as much as “I could care less”.
I was definitely not the class skipper… I was really shy and afraid to do anything wrong, got good grades just by doing was was asked.
As far as good teacher/bad teacher stories, I’ve got both wrapped up in one person. Coach K. (not the Duke coach) taught history/social studies, was an assistant football coach, and had been recon Green Beret in Vietnam, so he had tons of stories. He also tried to grade his courses more like college — the exams were take home essay questions, and they were by far the most difficult tests I had in high school — he wanted good writing and well thought out answers, and it was difficult to get an A. The girls also thought he was hot…. probably would’ve been your fave class, Tamara!
Great teacher, right? Yes and no. Because he had so many stories, eventually the kids learned how to get him off track and talking about Vietnam or something else. 11th grade history wasn’t so bad, but our senior year, we had him for Honors Government, and everyone that loved Coach tried to get in the class…. and everyone kept him off track nearly all the time. We barely learned anything…. had lots of great discussions on a wide variety of topics, but I learned absolutely nothing about our US Government (he tried to focus on ancient Greek government as a model for US Govt, but never got anywhere.)
I wouldn’t have minded not learning anything in that class — it was fun and interesting afterall — except it was still very tough to get an A, and we had very little objective work to base the grade on. Coach ended up giving me a B both semesters my senior year, probably costing me either valedictorian or salutatorian (my only other grade blemishes came when I had chickenpox and missed two of the first 6 weeks of high school.) The thing I resented…. I think he gave me B’s because I wasn’t vocal in the discussions, I mostly hung back and listened, since I was so stinking shy.
Oh well… I was so shy, it would have been difficult for me to do a speech as valedictorian or salutatorian… maybe Coach K. gave me those B’s for that reason? Who knows….
Best teacher, worst teacher. Same guy……
Man! I leave a comment for an English major guest posting for a teacher, and it’s riddled with errors. Where’s the edit button when you need it?
A former Green Beret who taught history?! Yeah, you know me– I’d have been all over that class!
He was a really smart dude, too. Scored over 1400 on SAT, enrolled in Army, then after 1 day of boot camp and getting stuck with KP and peeling potatoes all night, he went in and requested Officer Training School…..
See… I remember the stories better than the curriculum!
Yes, I most definitely had a teacher I could live without. She was my first grade teacher and she was the first person to give me an ulcer. I was 7.
See, I was a smart kid and the school tried to do the right thing by putting me in a class with a more challenging teacher and smarter students. But somewhere along the line, my mom missed the memo where she was supposed to teach me to read over the summer. I started 1st grade knowing pretty much just what I learned in kindergarten. Besides the two required special ed kids in the class, I was the only one who couldn’t read. And my teacher never let me forget it.
I won’t go into all the details – the number of days my mom picked me up from school in tears with massive stomach aches, the amount of work she put into to teaching me to love reading, or how much I hated that teacher every day for 9 long months, but I will say this: I graduated high school with a 4.0 GPA, accepted an academic scholarship, gained a masters degree, taught reading for a living, and am now a librarian.
Some days I really wish I could meet that teacher again and tell her all of this. Tell her that no matter how much she belittled me in front of the class, no matter how awful she made me feel, that twice as smart as she ever told me my mom I was and that I love reading so much that I made a career out of it.
And then I would tell her to shove it.
Know what, babe? She doesn’t deserve to know how well it turned out for you because she did nothing to help make it happen. That was all you. xo
Amen! And good for you Elizabeth!
I’m so glad I clicked that little link and headed over here! As someone who not only had a whole slew of teachers — of varying abilities and desires — but who also WAS an English teacher for 9 years, I’m loving this conversation.
Thankfully, I had many more good teachers than bad. Mrs. Parsons taught my 12th grade AP English class. We read Plato and Calvin & Hobbes together, she let us put on an impromptu performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead one afternoon, and she made us memorize portions of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. It was a lovely year.
I took a linguistics class in college (a conservative, Christian college), and my professor fit the nerdy English professor stereotype to a T — right on down to the wire-rimmed glasses and tweed jackets with elbow patches. I walked in, figured I’d hate every minute of the class, and prepared to tune out.
Then one day he set out to explain to us the ways that modern English has evolved. He walked to the far side of the room and wrote “KJV” on the board and then asked us to identify the ways that the King James Version of the Bible referred to sex. The best we could come up with was “to lie with” or “to know.” He then crossed to the other side of the board and wrote “Today” at the top. We then made a list of contemporary verbs and phrases that we use to refer to the sex act. We started out hesitant, but when he told us not to stop until we had them all, you can imagine how much fun we had! We had over 20 when we were done. I pointed out that it looked for all the world like a to-do list . . . and watched him laugh until he cried. I later did a research project on the true origins of the F-word for that class, which he actually thanked me for. What I’d intended to be rebellious and heretical, he saw as being gutsy and informative.
Yet another reason I decided to teach. If the system had allowed me to be that kind of teacher, I’d have stayed.
That is *fantastic.* I would have loved to have taken that class!
I can do that kind of thing — but I teach at the college level.
I don’t know.
It doesn’t really fit into the Course Outcomes for Comp. 101 very well.
Tamara, we could NOT have sat next to each other in that class! 😉
Can you imagine? We’d get kicked out! Ah, it would be so much fun!
Looks like nerd hour broke out up there in the comments. Latin too? Sheesh. Irregardless, you’ve written good. And I just remembered I haven’t checked RateMyProfessor in a while.
I think I lost my red hot peppers, and I’m a little bitter about that.
What would make them take away my hotness?
Wait. Do not answer that. 😉
I spiced things up over there for both of you. You know I’m a sucker for good professors. 😀
You know how I like to get down-n-nerdy. 😉
I am please to be able to say that I really don’t think I had any bad teachers! At least if I did, they were so ineffective, they didn’t leave any impression and I’ve forgotten them. To this day, I’m certain that if I went back home and ran into them, they’d instantly remember me. I’ve run into a few virtually (on FB), most recently my 6th grade teacher, and even with my married name showing up, she recognized my face.
I will say that I once worked with a man who graduated from the same college as I did, who would occasionally get huffy about us having degrees but not getting promotions, ranting about us being smarter, being able to interact with people better because of our education. If that’s not ridiculous enough, as he was ranting, he would OFTEN use words like irregardless and many non-existent words, or would use real words but that didn’t mean what he thought they did. I was always embarrassed for him.
I am NOT a gifted grammar geek like those posting before me, so please don’t rip apart this post! lol….
Oy. I knew someone like that with the words-that-don’t-mean-what-you-think-they-do. Made me cringe!
When I wrote my own rant mentioning “irregardless”,
http://kitchenmudge.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/a-good-whine-i-believe-ill-have-another/
I assumed it lives on only as a deliberate malapropism. Are you all telling me there are people who still use it and think it’s a regular word?
The comment about “Tammy” made me laugh–I’m exactly the same way about “Debbie”! If someone is more than ten years of age, they have no business calling me Debbie.
That there’s cause for throat-punching, for sure.
In my early life, I was a teacher’s pet. Later, I came to see I could get about the same results without caring, so I opted for that.
I’m pleased to report I do not apply this attitude to all of life anymore. 🙂