My supervisor calls the section of his syllabus on rules his "Don't-Mess-With-Me rhetoric", and it gets progressively more fierce every year -- and he gets more unhappy about its fierceness every time. But somehow, when teaching especially the large lecture classes, his students keep finding new ways to be difficult. Not so much with in-class behaviour as with their attempts to avoid writing tests, handing in assignments, or getting low marks.
I've just copied whole sections of his syllabuses onto mine (with permission, of course) -- he's put so much thought and time into crafting precise and eloquent verbiage, it seems a waste of time to try to better it!
Good luck with the cat training, by the way -- probably not too hard, though. Putting a hamster in front of the cats is probably all that would be needed...
My sympathies on the syllabi-crafting: I get impatient with students trying to argue that if something isn't forbidden, thus it must be permitted. I have a link to the university's policy page to cover a multitude of such sins.
I wish that I'd had more professors like you when I was in college. I had a couple, but there are far too few with your wit and good attitude.
Speaking of other people discovering interesting things, and sharing them with you: unless I missed it -- and I might have -- you really haven't mentioned the holiday release of the Narnia movie, and the mild controversy which has accompanied it. (more heavy handed Mel Gibson?) I have discovered the following link and feel strongly that no one should attempt a serious comment on this movie before at least consulting it: http://www.youtube.com/watch.php...p?
v=IggTu7kV7No
An apartment complex I was in once held a tenants' meeting to announce a new rule: no riding bicycles up and down the stairs.
They explained that the only reason they hadn't already had such a rule was that it had never occurred to them that anyone WOULD want to ride their bicycles up and down the stairs.......
(These were outdoor stairs, and some bored elementary-school boys had discovered just how much noise they could make and annoyance they could generate.....)
Pictures? She taunts us with promises of training the kittens to hunt hamsters but provides no incentives. I'm finding that it is aggravating my chilblains.
Every time I go back to school and read the latest editions of the syllabi, I have a good chuckle. This, of course, only points out that once again, I am the oldest person in the room. This statement is excepted by my experience last semester where the teacher was actually much older than I.
Well, I saw the Narnia movie and found it very disturbing. I'm not sure if the worst part was the battle scene between goodness and evil, or if it was having Santa Claus hand out weapons to children.
On the other hand, I loved the Passion movie. The battle between good and evil is something that is done individually within oneself. Narnia had it cooked up as an external battle, a crusade. Is this the kind of stuff our ancestors were raised on? No wonder we are mired in war forever.
I'm sure that Jesus is rolling over in, well, heaven. After seeing the movie and complaining constantly about it to my friends for 48 hours, I borrowed the short children's book Narnia was based on, read it, and found it just as distasteful.
Carl
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