1. Why the fuck is it still in the high eighties in Washington? It's October and I'm tired of being so warm all the time.
2. One of my professors said "A lot of law professor questions take the following form: 'I'm thinking of a color' Don't worry about it, just raise your hand and suggest a color and he will keep calling on people until somebody says the right one."
This is the most useful thing anybody has said to me in the last five weeks.
That said, intellectually I get that I'm not alone, so why do I feel like the only colorblind person in the class?
3. How is it that a religious person with a deep fondness for her fellow humans and typically great tolerance for other people's foibles can grow to genuinely hate someone in five minutes just because she would not stop asking the professor the same question over and over again and thus prevented my question from being asked at all?*
4. Sigh.
CC
*It was literally like:
Person: Can you give us a more complete sample of what you want?
Professor: No, I don't think it would help you as much as you think.
Person: Why do you do it this way when a sample would be so useful?
Professor: Well, partially because I don't want you just working off my sample.
Person: But you gave us a sample for certian parts of the paper? Why can't we have a sample of the whole paper?
Professor: Well, those are the parts that you should be focusing on anyway.
Person: But If I could have a sample that included the introductory paragraph...
Professor: You could make an introductory paragraph by looking at the topics you're going to address and explaining what you're going to talk about. Try reading the first sentence of each paragraph.
Person: But if I had a sample of the paper...
(CC begins to ponder banging her head into the desk until she loses conciousness.)
15 comments:
Green?
Have you learned yet to play "turkey bingo"?
You and your friends make up bingo cards with the names of all the most annoying turkeys in the class. You mark off a name each time one of them kisses the professor's ass. Once you get "bingo" on your card, you signal the other players by answering a question using the words "turkey" and "bingo" in the same sentence -- as in, "The M'Naghten case may have been a turkey on the facts, but bingo, the House of Lords managed to get the law right."
Try it. It's fun. If the cultural conditions of the classroom allow, you can also play the racier variant, "asshole bingo."
mmfldRobin, I don't think you understand how bingo is played. You don't carry the card around for your entire life, gleefully waiting for people to screw up so you can mark them off forever. You play for a little while, then you wipe the card clean and start over.
Fausto, I haven't made the right friends yet, but I'm working on it and I do have a few candidates.
Also, I can honestly say that thus far the night program is living up to its reputation for maturity and reasonableness and I don't know that there are enough turkeys to fill a bingo card yet, even in my classes with 140 people.
That said, I was amazed at how furious I became at that woman last night. There's a certain Lord-of-the-Flies/Stanford-prison-experiment vibe to law school that may well bring out greater turkieshness in people as the semester progresses.
I have assigned Jana-who-creates to monitor my humanity and make sure I don't turn evil. This has a disturbing parallel there to how for my late teens and early twenties my smart friend Pam was assigned to tell me if I seemed to be developing schizophrenia.
But I never developed schizophrenia, so wish me luck on the evil.
CC
Why the fuck is it still in the high eighties in Washington?
Because Republicans stole the 2000 election from Al Gore, and put Dick Cheney in charge of national energy policy.
I knew somebody would go there.
CC
I knew somebody would go there.
Well, you did ask the question, and the answer is that chaotic weather patterns are part of "global warming". And global warming is caused by humans doing unnatural things.
I read a scientific article about weather cycles -- yes, there are natural weather cycles: they have to do with how far the earth is from the sun, etc. -- and all three cycles are currently leading us into an ice age; that is, if we weren't warming the earth severely, we would be cooling severely.
Ah, gunner bingo. However, it seemed to rely on using AIM in class, and I continue to recommend that you not be online in class, because inevitably when someone asks a stupid useless question and you tune out to read email or whatever, the professor will have said something important before you tune back in.
As long as you're following the three basic rules, I wouldn't worry about what other people think.
Heh.
You could live in Alabama, where it will remain in the 80s for another two weeks at least.
At least it snows on a regular basis up in your neck of the woods.
Regarding your classroom experience: some people just won't give up.
I had a person like that in one of my classes in undergraduate. It got old very quickly.
The online-in-class thing is an issue. I am guilty sometimes, but I try not to be.
I will only play bingo in class if BINGO must be worked into a question or comment. That has style.
CC
I don't think I've achieved Fonzie status yet, PG, but I do keep in mind the general "Ummm... This man went to Princeton and U Chicago and has been teaching property law for decades. He knows what he's talking about," while other people are seriously arguing with the professor. (Which doesn't happen as often as one would expect, but does happen sometimes.)
I talk in class less than I used to, but often enough to keep the professor from feeling he must call on me to hear from me. Actually, I haven't been called on at all yet, though I've spoken in every class.
CC
You might consider a little Miss Manners polite brusqueness with whatsherface if she keeps that crap up.
Let her repeat it a couple times, so that it's clear to the professor that she's playing Groundhog Day.
Then you interrupt. "Excuse me? Professor?"
"I'm sorry for interrupting, but... (your question here)?"
Groundhog will be pissed, but she's clearly not smart enough to understand that she's badgering the judge... which isn't productive. The prof, on the other hand, has by that time gotten to the Oh god, are you really not getting it? stage when you interrupt with a useful question... so you may even get brownie points for saving the professor from a fate worse than muzak.
Consider it. Politeness is a good thing, but it presumes that others are playing too. If someone is hogging the time and pissing it away... they're past the bounds. Wrap the mailed fist in the velvet of sweet civility, and deck 'em.
Or hell, go for the jugular with "Objection! Your honor, the question has been answered already."
:1. Why the fuck is it still in the high eighties in Washington? It's October and I'm tired of being so warm all the time.
Well you could try snuggling up to some corpse-cold Unitarians or something. . .
Did you know someone would go there CC? ;-)
In property, I talked in class prophylactically during the first few weeks (i.e. I raised my hand a lot and talked a lot so the prof wouldn't cold call me later and so I got marked down as having talked enough for my classroom participation points). Then I kind of ignored the rest of the semester and blogged instead. This is why I say, stay off the internet! because now I know so little property law that when trying to buy a condo with my fiance, I was momentarily confused as to which was "tenancy in common," which was "joint tenancy with right of survivorship," and which was "tenancy by the entirety." Good thing he paid a lot more attention and got a much better grade than I.
There are rumours that bingo is being banned in the US, is that true?
In the UK, bingo has suffered in recent months due to the ban on smoking in public places, causing smoking customers to either go outside for a cig and face the harsh cold (not a good move for the aged) or stay at home and not play, thus reducing the Bingo Cash prizes and the money for charity. But banning bingo completely is ridiculous! It is a very mind form of gambling at the most! If you’re going to ban bingo then the lottery has to go too surely? Isn’t that gambling?
Bingo is a number game, based on pure luck, so really it’s not even similar to other gambling games such as poker and sports betting. It’s just like buying a lottery ticket just you have to get more numbers! So then why is it such a problem? Its just takes away the older generations entertainment while the younger generations indulge in perfectly “legal” things like DRUGS! Can they not see which the bigger problem is?
Post a Comment