Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will “name names.”
The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.
Maybe if you had been a decent teacher they would have been more receptive.
Jamie posted this at 12:07 PM EDT on Monday, May 5th, 2008 as Edjamacation
P.J. O’Rourke, a hero of ours, gives advice. My favorite bit:
3. Get politically uninvolved!
All politics stink. Even democracy stinks. Imagine if our clothes were selected by the majority of shoppers, which would be teenage girls. I’d be standing here with my bellybutton exposed. Imagine deciding the dinner menu by family secret ballot. I’ve got three kids and three dogs in my family. We’d be eating Froot Loops and rotten meat.
But let me make a distinction between politics and politicians. Some people are under the misapprehension that all politicians stink. Impeach George W. Bush, and everything will be fine. Nab Ted Kennedy on a DUI, and the nation’s problems will be solved.
But the problem isn’t politicians — it’s politics. Politics won’t allow for the truth. And we can’t blame the politicians for that. Imagine what even a little truth would sound like on today’s campaign trail:
“No, I can’t fix public education. The problem isn’t the teachers unions or a lack of funding for salaries, vouchers or more computer equipment The problem is your kids!”
I’m going to avoid saying anything witty because these just aren’t funny.
From the NYT, via Megan McArdle, we learn that the number of parents — generally, well-educated yuppie types — are choosing to not vaccinate their kids:
SAN DIEGO — In a highly unusual outbreak of measles here last month, 12 children fell ill; nine of them had not been inoculated against the virus because their parents objected, The parents who objected to their children being inoculated are among a small but growing number of vaccine skeptics in California and other states who take advantage of exemptions to laws requiring vaccinations for school-age children.
The exemptions have been growing since the early 1990s at a rate that many epidemiologists, public health officials and physicians find disturbing.
Children who are not vaccinated are unnecessarily susceptible to serious illnesses, they say, but also present a danger to children who have had their shots — the measles vaccine, for instance, is only 95 percent effective — and to those children too young to receive certain vaccines.
Measles, almost wholly eradicated in the United States through vaccines, can cause pneumonia and brain swelling, which in rare cases can lead to death. The measles outbreak here alarmed public health officials, sickened babies and sent one child to the hospital.
…
In 1991, less than 1 percent of children in the states with personal-belief exemptions went without vaccines based on the exemption; by 2004, the most recent year for which data are available, the percentage had increased to 2.54 percent, said Saad B. Omer, an assistant scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
And from ABC, via PZ Myers, we can watch Creationists seriously mess with the mids of their kids:
If you’re a pretentious jerk with too much money, too little learning, and lots of empty bookshelves, don’t despair. Thanks to Strand Bookstore’s Books-By-The-Foot Program, you can pretend to be the educated person you aren’t.
Governor Romney Kept Massachusetts Students Globally Competitive: He supported legislation that would bolster the amount of attention paid to math and science in Massachusetts high schools by adding 1,000 new math and science teachers, requiring math and science Advanced Placement classes, and providing laptop computers to all middle and high school students.
I mean, really. I’m 26 and in law school, and I found my laptop so distracting I stopped bringing it to class. 13 year-olds need laptops like they need mid-day kegstands. This is the sort of dumb, how-can-we-spend-moreism that has trashed our public education system. My school district spent millions of dollars buying computers for every classroom, and they just sat there and got obsolete. On the very rare occaisions when we did use them, it was always some useless activity with no educational purpose beyond allowing the school board to say they made us use computers. I’m not saying I had a great education, but to the extent at-school computers were involved they were a hindrance rather than an aid.