Please note that even Inside Higher Ed gives the following title to the story about Elizabeth’s Snyder’s unfair persecution: “Instructor of Stuttering Student Defends Conduct.”

In spite of Elizabeth Snyder’s explanations, the resource that is supposed to give a voice to educators still upholds the original accusation that the student unfairly leveled at her. He is still identified as a “stuttering student”, which shows that the authors of the article believe the student’s assertion that his stutter got him discriminated against rather than the teacher’s explanation that he was not called on for completely different reasons.

It is also quite interesting that an award-winning educator with decades of teaching experience has been reduced in this title to being “instructor of stuttering student.” As if her entire identity should be reduced to the misfortune of having this rude kid in her classroom.

Now let’s look at the second part of the article’s title. Elizabeth Snyder “defends conduct.” I find the word “conduct” to be offensive in this context. The instructor is not a wayward child who misbehaved. There is no “conduct” that needs defending in this situation. She made a professional decision that is now questioned by a bunch of teacher-hating ignoramuses. Sadly, Inside Higher Ed apparently supports this teacher-bashing.

Today in class, I had to shut down a discussion because we were running out of time and there was a lot of new material to cover. I usually encourage discussion as much as possible but it is simply not feasible to allow students to speak as much as they would sometimes like to do. I can only imagine what would happen if people tried to analyze this decision of mine vindictively.

How can one be expected to work at all if everything you do gets examined by people who were not even in your classroom and who are predisposed to see a teacher as an enemy of humanity irrespective of what s/he does?

Reader Jennifer Frances Armstrong says:

I have the impression that a lot of what is at the source of PUA problems is the fact that they (and many men) have been taught to desire something that isn’t sexually healthy. They’re not attracted to real women but to the unreal images that appear in adverts and on movie sets.

Reader llama responds:

Yes this whole sex as a commodity thing is the problem. The idea that it is better if the woman looks like a model is fucked.

What I have to add to this interesting exchange between our brilliant Australian participants is the following. Many people don’t derive any true pleasure from the actual sex act (because of their puritanic upbringing and attached feelings of guilt, for example). Any pleasure they get is subverted by guilt and shame. As a result, they begin to invest sex with other meanings. In order to have any kind of usefulness, sex for them needs to bring prestige or social recognition. Such people are often heavily homosocial. They are oriented towards gaining acceptance within their gender group while heterosexual sex partners are only needed as trophies to be demonstrated to the peer group.

Of course, such unhealthy attitudes to sex make these people very sexually unattractive. This is why they have to come up with convoluted strategies just to get anybody to talk to them.

All of this talk about how one should be patient and understanding with vicious jerks and aim at getting them to like you reminded me of this post I wrote a while ago.

The post had many comments when it was published but then Blogger crashed and ate them all up.

Jonathan writes:

Just reading those history books was a revelation. That’s the exact moment when I became an intellectual. Interesting that this is about (in other words, exactly) the same time I started to question religion. Just getting a larger perspective makes you question the provincial realities of your own time and place.

I know what Jonathan is talking about here. At about the same age, I started to feel too constricted by the  provincial realities of my time and place (what a beautiful, apt expression!). For me, this meant questioning atheism.

Everything is relative, people. When I was at school, the rebellious, anti-establishment thing to do was to protest the teaching of the evolution as the only explanation of how things came about.

As I mentioned before, we are having our offices renovated at work. All of the teaching faculty have been moved out of our offices and new furniture is getting installed gradually.

One of the instructors at our department is the wife of our Dean. Her office faces mine. And what I find to be very surprising is that the Dean’s wife is waiting for her turn to get her office back, just like we all do.

This would have never happened back in my country. There, the offices would have been renovated based on the hierarchy of who is more important. It would have never happened, like it has at my department here, that an adjunct would get her office back faster than the Chair.

Here, however, everybody has to wait for their turn. And that makes it a lot easier to deal with the inconvenience of not having an office. We are all in the same boat, there is no unfairness, nobody gets humiliated, and the resentments among colleagues do not appear.

And I really like that.

If you are wondering why I make time to attack aggressively the trolls who come to my blog, here is why:

It’s concerted, focused, and deliberate, the effort to silence people, especially women, but not always, as I can attest, and particularly feminists, though again, not always, as I can attest, online. The readers, the consumers, the fans, may not always notice it because people are silent about it. Because this is the strategy that has been adopted, to not feed the trolls, to grin and bear it, to shut up, to put your best foot forward and rise above it.

I don’t believe in being silent when attacked. A bully – be it an online or a real-life bully – needs to know that whenever s/he tries to get aggressive with people, they will push right back. Sitting there, taking aggression silently, and trying to be nice and martyr-like about it is not my style. Bullies and trolls need to be insulted and humiliated because that is what they deserve.

“Oh, you just make them more vicious when you attack them,” people say.

No. This is simply not true. I don’t make them anything. The trolls are vicious because this is the kind of shitty people they are. And if trolls are looking for silent patient victims of their bullying, they will have to look someplace else. Because here they will hear in great detail exactly what kind of nasty vile freaks they are. After which they will be shut up and sent to the trash bin for good.

Here is more from Mike on this subject. I agree with him wholeheartedly.

Rick Perry looked like a really viable Republican candidate for a while. He had a good lead and seemed like the only candidate who could threaten Obama’s chances for a reelection.

And then something happened, and Perry’s ratings evaporated. Now, we are back to Romney as the leading candidate. (Cain’s recent popularity is a fluke, in my opinion.)

I admit that I kind of snoozed in September and stopped following the election drama. Does anybody know what Perry did to destroy such a good lead so fast?

I was taking my regular walk last night when I saw the following Halloween decoration. The wind moves the sheets of the ghosts and it feels like they are dancing and holding hands.

What a brilliant idea for a Halloween setup! It is actually quite scary and very original.

Against all hope, I wanted to believe that the @Occupy protests did not congregate on Wall St. or in the financial districts because the mostly upper middle-class participants expected to get a handout from the reviled banksters.

But now that the discourse of “compassion” seems to have overrun the protest movement, I’m afraid that we all have to accept the sad reality that the entire #Occupy Movement is simply about well-off white Americans begging the even richer white Americans for a more sizeable handout.

Here you can see a post defending the right of the upper middle class people with expensive hairdos to get their share of “compassion” from the slightly richer folks. And this photo of a compassion-seeker with a beatific smile is now pretty much everywhere.

It is starting to seem like the only kind of protests that are viable in this country nowadays are the demand of the $1000K+ folks for compassion and the insistence of the $20K+ crowd on curtailing abortion rights and gay rights.

Reader Kinjal was traveling in Honduras when he snapped the following photo that he was kind enough to send to me:

“Clarisa” with one “s” is a very common Latin American name (see Isabel Allende’s work, for example.) What is surprising here is that the Americanized double “s” version of Clarissa appears here at a diner in Honduras.

As I mentioned before, ‘Clarissa’ is a nickname I chose for this blog to commemorate my grandmother who was one of the greatest female influences on my life. In a translation of a novel dedicated to her, I decided to transcribe her name as ‘Klarissa.’

Cyrillic characters obviously differ greatly from Latin characters.