OK, people, foreigner in need of help here. I have a question for you : do people negotiate furniture prices at furniture stores like Ashley Furniture, Pier 1, Pottery Barn, etc.? Is that something that’s done? Or not? N. and I have been debating this for hours.

I often avoid doing things because I have no idea how they are supposed to be done. But this time I’m set on buying a buffet this Saturday, and I will buy one no matter what.

I encounter the following beliefs so often among my students that I’ve grown sick and tired of offering explanations how things really work:

• Communism and fascism are the same thing.
• All government is bad all taxes are evil.
• Unlike citizens, illegal immigrants in this country are entitled to free medical care.
• Until 30 years ago or thereabouts, women never worked.
• “Columbus was a hero, almost like Jesus or something.” That’s a direct quote, by the way.
• Voting is useless because all politicians lie anyways.
• You cannot be a college professor in the US if you are not a US citizen.
• Trying hard should be enough to succeed. Especially if your Mommy can testify that you did try hard.
• People who receive emails have a magic way of finding out who the sender of the message is. This makes signing or addressing emails redundant.
• Punctuation is vastly overrated. Nobody really needs to use it.
• People who break up a text in paragraphs do that because they are weird.
• Analyzing a text or a painting means saying whatever you want about them without offering an ounce of proof. If the professor objects, just tell them indignantly that this was your opinion and you thought the point was to share opinions.
• There isn’t a whole lot of a difference between “Essay is due on Friday at 5 pm” and “Essay is due up to a week after Friday at 5 pm.”
• Saying “Reading is booooring!” will make a literature professor adore you.
• It makes total sense to take an intensive online course if you have no access to the Internet.
• Cold War was a war between the Soviet Union and the Nazis. (I’m always afraid to ask who won.)
• Emails need to be checked once a week, at most. Facebook, on the other hand, has to be updated every 10 minutes.
• Latin America is a country. So is Africa.

And my favorite: “Oh, so Hitler is dead?? Really?? That’s fantastic!” I mean, I’m always ready to brighten up somebody’s day, so yeah, the jerk has been dead for decades.

This is an intensive course I’m teaching right now, people, so I need to vent often. Especially now that the course is drawing to an end. I promise to stop bitching soon and start writing happy posts.

I’m sorry, everybody, I need to keep sharing this.

A student: So you are saying that Jews were persecuted both in Medieval Spain and in Nazi Germany? Wow, that’s quite a coincidence! I mean, these were completely different cultures and completely different historic eras, yet they both chose the Jews to persecute? How weird.

This is progress, though, after those students who had never even heard the word “Jews.”

My summer course is going to be over soon, so please bear with me. I need to unload all this on the blog in order to be patient and kind with students.

I’m not a climate change denier, believe me. Neither am I indifferent towards environmental issues. But there has got to be a limit to how often people bring up climate change in completely irrelevant contexts.

You know that stereotype of beauty contests where a contestant always ends her response with, “. . . and world peace!”? This is what happens in my class discussions. Whenever we start enumerating the problems faced by medieval Spanish Kingdoms, the Aztec Empire, the colonial Latin American societies of the XVIIth centuries, Argentina in the 1860s or Cuba in 1898, there is always a student who adds, “And climate change!”

“And pollution!” another student immediately chimes in.

“And toxic waste!” somebody immediately adds.

I’m waking up at night in cold sweat because I dream of somebody interrupting my lecture on Lope de Vega to say, “And there was toxic waste lying all over the place, polluting and causing climate change!”

If a student handed in the following essay to you, what would you think?

Cervantes is a Spanish writer of the late XVIth – early XVIIth centuries. Wikipedia defines a writer as a person who produces literature or nonfiction, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, essays, articles, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images. Cervantes was very good at portraying ideas and images. An idea is a concept or mental impression. And an image is an artifact that depicts or records visual perception, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject–usually a physical object or a person, thus providing a depiction of it. Cervantes did not paint pictures but he wrote beautiful texts. A text is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. Cervantes transmitted many important messages in his art.

This is, obviously, not the text of the essay, but it’s exactly what the essay is like.

N. is convinced that the student is being facetious and I should be appreciative of the student’s great sense of irony. I suspect the student is condescending to me because I’m an immigrant who speaks English with an accent. I have to grade eight pages of the text where every other sentence is a dictionary definition. And I’m getting progressively annoyed with every sentence. How would you feel if you were a literary critic and a student started offering you Wikipedia definitions of the words “writer” and “text”?