FAQ For My Students: The Rapture

Brother-Unit Grader Boob forwarded this recent department-approved addendum to his syllabus for English Comp classes at Good Old University, where he quietly and courageously attacks the lethargy and heightened sense of entitlement afflicting today's youth. He must have begun the first summer session, because just a few weeks back he was getting misty-eyed over the end of spring semester:

Howdy--
Just wanted to drop you a line as the grading/cursing here comes near an end.
Have had one student say that I "fucked [her]" and that "[she didn't] care one bit for this shitty class." My response: a bland "Have a nice summer."
I just wished I'd said it sarcastically!
Where's Swift when you need him?
Mucho amore to all.
Grader Boob

From UC-Berkeley's Landscape Heritage Plan
Sather Gate, Wheeler Hall, and the Campanile beyond (ca. 1945). Note that at this time, the Gate
defined the campus entrance, and the adjacent Sproul Plaza was a city block.

FAQ for my Students: The Rapture
Q: With the rapture coming, should I bother working on my final paper?
A: Yes. The odds are you will not be judged worthy of ascent to heaven, in which case your grades will still be a basis of judgment for rewards in this earthly sphere.
Q: What if my instructor is raptured?
A: None of our instructors bear much chance of being judged worthy. However, on the off chance your instructor is chosen, an army of unemployed secular Marxists is waiting to take his/her place.
Q: If my mother/father/grandfather/grandmother/favorite aunt/etc. is chosen, will I be excused from the final so that I may mourn his/her loss?
A: No. They have not died, but been granted eternal life, thus this does not count as a case of a death in the family.
Q: If my instructor is not raptured, is he really fit to judge me?
A: Yes, seeing as you were not raptured, you are still subject to the earthly judgment of the unsaved. If/when you are redeemed, a change of grade form will be automatically processed by heavenly authorities if they decide your grade was unfairly given by one of the damned.
Q: If my computer crashes and my printer breaks and there is no email on account of the rapture, will I be able to get an extension on the paper?
A: Everyone in tech and IT departments is of Satan’s party, so the internet, your computer, and your printer should continue to work the way they always have: sporadically.
Q: How will the rapture affect your curving, particularly if raptured students are exempt from final tests/papers?
A: Final grades are not curved, but students who are taken up in the rapture will be given incompletes, just in case.

Tin Soldiers

News from the indentured servant Brother-Unit down Florida way. He's stuck grading papers tonight, poor boob.

His university freshmen composition class was given a wide array of "protest songs" to analyze -- an assignment that he hoped would stoke the fires of creative lucidity. Instead:

I'm grading some papers dealing with the protest songs, and I figured we could both use some levity on this election day.

Apparently, a student writing about "Ohio" noted that she didn't think that those students, and students in general, should have been/should be shot. Bravo! I'm all for that, even though Florida law now allows me to carry a gun in the trunk of my car! So now I guess I should buy a gun and don some National Guard paraphernalia. And then I can keep both in the trunk of my aging Echo!


Just a few weeks back, he waxed nostalgic about his own writing prowess as a Freshman math major:

[The article you forwarded] reminds me of a line I wrote in my first year of college, and which I use as a warning to those hooked on the dictionary and the thesaurus:

The canine traversed the thoroughfare.

The professor circled the line and added the following:
Who talks like that?

Who indeed?

With love,
Grader Boob


I loves my brothers, I does.

Critical Mass or Freshman Comp

A close relative of mine is an English professor at a university that I've never been able to locate on a map. This semester he has been stuck with some Freshman Comp courses, designed to instill good writing and research skills, as well as a measure of critical thinking.

Last week he assigned a critical and rhetorical analysis of some famous protest songs and first drafts are beginning to trickle in. He began the initial evaluation of these gestational pieces today.

It is a bad sign that I should receive an email about their content so soon.

My dear brother writes:

I'm spending the morning looking at first drafts of the song project; things aren't looking too good. I give them minimal guidance for the first drafts, hoping to see just how they've interpreted the assignment. Apparently, the idea of a thesis merging literary and rhetorical analysis escapes most of my writers. (Although I must admit, it is an odd notion indeed, smacking of a grad school assignment adapted for freshmen.)

So they tell me in very broad terms about the singer ("Marley was a Jamican who sometimes visited the island of Hadee"--No, I'm not kidding) or about the hippies roaming free during the 60s or about how Donovan wouldn't dare sing "Universal Soldier" to an audience of American patriots because as "[t]he movie 'The Punisher' said it best: 'if you want peace, prepare for war.'"

War indeed. Where do I begin?