A female prof just posted the following excerpt from a student evaluation:
I learned so much about research and writing in this class. However I have to say that as a man, I found her big boobs to be slightly distracting during lectures. Now I don’t mean this in a bad way, cause what straight man doesn’t love big boobs? Professor [comebacknikki] taught me that I should say things directly and assertively in order make a point, but to not be offensive. I hope this isn’t offensive, but rather an indication of my appreciation. I wouldn’t write this if it weren’t anonymous, so I guess I’m not as assertive as I think, but still… big boobs are both hot and distracting, FWIW
Would you like to guess what the post’s title is? It’s “Thanks… I think?” The comments people left for the post are of the “Congrats!” variety.
It’s sad to see that some people are so insecure and attention-starved that they would take something this offensive and disgusting as a compliment.
I hope my readers know me well enough by now to realize that it isn’t the reference to “hot big boobs” that I find offensive. If the student just stopped at that, I’d simply dismiss him as a stupid idiot. What I find really egregious is the attempt to manipulate a prof into accepting this piece of ridiculousness as an example of honest self-expression that this very teacher had tried to promote in the classroom.
It isn’t a good sign when students attempt to manipulate a prof in such a blatant way. If you can’t make yourself even marginally respected in the classroom, why teach at all? When students start to ridicule you in such a direct way, it’s a sign you should reevaluate your entire teaching philosophy.
Clarissa's Blog 
Not questioning that the wording was in poor taste and crude. But I wonder if its an attempt at manipulation or this guy just too stupid to realize that such commentary has no place in an evaluation (I presume this is a student evaluating a teacher at the end of a semester?).
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Actually let me take that back. I won’t jump to “too stupid” but rather “doesn’t realize” that such commentary has no place in an evaluation.
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This is a college student. If he really doesn’t realize that the discussion of boobs is not the kind of information that the course evaluations are trying to elicit, then what is he, other than stupid?
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To what “ridicule” do you refer?
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He’s obviously making fun of her with this entire “Oh, you wanted us to be honest about our opinions? Let’s see whether you can deal with that” thing.
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One of the reasons I decide not to teach in Western culture — I don’t want to be anybody’s toy or mummy object. Japanese feudalistic sensibilities, by contrast are A-OK. I’m happy to be anybody’s sensei.
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I heard that women are really subservient in the Japanese culture.
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Not teachers. Your teacher is G-d. If you are a male student, you show absolute respect to your teacher.
Same goes for older classmates, senpai, regardless of gender, they are highly respected by their underclassmen.
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So in Japan, you should respect bad teachers, that’s infantilizating!
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“It’s sad to see that some people are so insecure and attention-starved that they would take something this offensive and disgusting as a compliment.”
My impression is not so much that the teacher is starved for attention as she just doesn’t want to be mad at her student. When I see the title, I see a woman gritting her teeth and rolling her eyes. I know you think she should demand more respect, but I think she is afraid of being seen as overly sensitive if she reacts with anything approaching anger.
The people in the comments are being sarcastic since the student is clearly making an ass of himself.
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“I think she is afraid of being seen as overly sensitive if she reacts with anything approaching anger”
-If one is so terrified of expressing oneself honestly one one’s own blog, then that’s kind of sad. Why post anything at all on this subject, then?
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Well, it’s also possible that she’s more amused than angry. I was just thinking about how I would feel, and I’m not a professor.
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I agree with Djiril is that my impression is that I see a woman gritting her teeth and rolling her eyes in disbelief. I’d also agree that the student is saying more about themselves and how childish they are than anything else.
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Then why is the title ‘Thanks. . . I guess”? What is there to be thankful for?
And have you seen the comments?
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“Thanks… I guess.” Is generally used as a response to an underhanded compliment. It is not something people say when they are sincerely grateful.
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““Thanks… I guess.” Is generally used as a response to an underhanded compliment. It is not something people say when they are sincerely grateful.”
-I get that. But why not just say, “Go stuff yourself, you stupid creature”?
How can anybody legitimately complain about being a woman in academia and not being respected if one does absolutely nothing to enforce respect?
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They are, but that is not the dynamic at play when they learn from me. It’s very complicated, but they have a need to learn Western ways, which I can teach them, male or female.
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Yeah, that is close to what I experience.
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So, old Japanese people should be respected even if they’re blatant assholes! Again, that’s infantilizating!
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This is a college student. If he really doesn’t realize that the discussion of boobs is not the kind of information that the course evaluations are trying to elicit, then what is he, other than stupid?
I dialed it back because I didn’t want to drop a direct insult by calling him stupid. Even though his behavior is stupid I was trying not to call him stupid.
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Because of the emotional blackmail component, that someone was on the verge of explaining. If you are offended it means the other side has scored a victory. They are winnas!
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I don’t think I’ll ever understand this logic. Anger is a powerful and purifying emotion and repressing it only gives you high blood pressure. How is that winning?
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It goes deeper than that. It’s not just about sexual venting in a lot of cases, but about straightforward misogyny — wanting to keep women out of the public sphere.
The Western world has been in this state of war ever since the advent of Western feminism, I suppose. So, most of the time, it’s a declaration of war when someone deliberately breeches protocol in this way.
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While that’s a possibility that’s not always the case and think that its not that often enough that one just can’t declare that it is.
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Maybe this big-boobed teacher was too careless with her junk. Maybe she needed to hear this message…maybe…
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You cannot be fucking serious man.
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Let’s just hope that men’s being honest about their emotional reactions like this (yes, in an inappropriate way, to be sure) does not lead to a wave of pressure for women to wear burkas to prevent men from reacting this way. The truth is, straight men do often react this way. It is not a voluntary action, and has nothing to do with respect. Most of us just keep it secret.
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who forced him to write it? It may be a little difficult to notice her physical attributes but it is pretty easy to avoid writing them down.
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I think the whole point really is that evaluations from students are largely pointless. If they find the subject matter too hard they whine if you don’t baby them they whine if they don’t put the effort in to learn then they blame the lecturer.
We have had a few occurrences with these where the female lecturer has had really awful comments about the student wanting to have sex with her. We have had male lecturers getting pictures of penises drawn on them. The students are told they are anonymous but in fact when you have a bunch of exam papers to mark you can largely pick out who wrote them.
We now filter them before they are passed back to the lecturer but somebody still ends up reading the filth.
This is all driven by the change in business model that universities use which puts the students in a position of power that they should not have. They shouldn’t be able to whine about the difficulty of a course until over time it gets dumbed down to the extend that follow on courses must also be dumbed down to suit.
I say get rid of the pointless things or find a way they can be useful.
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I actually love my student evals. It’s always such a boost to get a bunch of really sweet, excited, praising comments at the end of the semester that I don’t want to go without it. 🙂
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“It may be a little difficult to notice her physical attributes but it is pretty easy to avoid writing them down.”
I don’t understand. How could it be difficult to notice her physical attributes? Are you assuming the student is blind?
We try to get students to express themselves freely. There are inevitably going to be rough edges here, as they work around their inhibitions.
Remarks such as these are often shared between men. Not every male student has learned the extent to which it is politically incorrect to say them to women, even anonymously.
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What bothers me about this analysis is the discussion of students and teachers as “men and women.” In the classroom, there are no men and women. I never look at my students as men or women. I look at them as individuals who are there to learn. And I expect them to see me not as a woman but as their educator. Anything else, in my opinion, is very strange.
This is not about it being “politically incorrect” to mention boobs to women. This is about a student being so traumatized by the idea that his prof is in charge of the classroom that he needs to position her as “a hot woman with boobs” in order to ease that trauma.
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“This is about a student being so traumatized by the idea that his prof is in charge of the classroom that he needs to position her as “a hot woman with boobs” in order to ease that trauma.”
I cannot see that there is any “trauma” involved. I had teachers on occasion when I was in high school and in college who were extremely attractive and thus somewhat distracting. I never expressed this to them, but that did not make it less real. I always thought I was just too inhibited to express the fact to them.
I cannot understand where you get any hint from the text of this student’s comment that he was traumatized.
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I meant “not to notice”
“Remarks such as these are often shared between men.”
Not the men I mix with, they might be made on occasion but certainly not shared. If you have male friends that do this too often you should ever tell them to desist or consider loosing them as friends.
“Not every male student has learned the extent to which it is politically incorrect to say them to women, even anonymously.”
These are not kindergarten children where did they learn it was appropriate in any context?
What is with the weasel words “politically incorrect”? It is plain wrong in any sense or context.
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Why is it inappropriate “in any context” to express ones feelings honestly and in a non-hurtful way? It is not as though the student interrupted class to say this. Nor was he threatening in any way. I repeat: He merely honestly shared his feelings. It seems that men must never do this. I recently spoke to a female author whom I had never seen in person before and told her that one of her novels was my favorite book of all time. I think she was a bit disconcerted, but she thanked me. I think these situations are similar.
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“I recently spoke to a female author whom I had never seen in person before and told her that one of her novels was my favorite book of all time. I think she was a bit disconcerted, but she thanked me. I think these situations are similar.”
But did you tell her you had trouble reading the book because you couldn’t stop thinking about her body? Because that’s the only way the situations could in fact be similar.
“He merely honestly shared his feelings. It seems that men must never do this.”
Oh think of the mens! Why don’t ladies understand that telling a professional her cans are so great it’s tough to pay attention to her words and thoughts is just being honest??
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“I repeat: He merely honestly shared his feelings.”
-I don’t think it’s appropriate to inflict sharing of feelings on people who never in any way invited that sharing. Anybody who tries to share their feelings of any kind for me in a work environment is being wildly inappropriate.
In your example of a writer, a writer publishes books and normally expects reader feedback. A teaching eval usually specifies exactly what information it is trying to elicit. I’m sure that there was no question about boobs on that evaluation.
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Our teaching evaluation forms simply ask for “…any additional comments you care to make. Please shed light, not heat.” I have had comments from my students, both negative and positive, about my beard and long hair. Indeed, some studnets found them distracting.
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Sorry. Delete the word “very” from my comment below.
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if he was sure he was expressing his “feelings” in a non-hurtful way then why did he have to say “I hope this isn’t offensive”? If he wasn’t sure then he should have thought of something to say that he was sure was not offensive.
Did you also comment on some part of the authors anatomy? Probably not!
Students at universities should be behaving like adults in this type of situation. An evaluation of someones teaching ability should not include an evaluation of her boobs.
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I think you were simply normally socialized and knew which comments belonged in a particular context. There is a hierarchical structure to a classroom. An adult who hasn’t managed to realize that and can’t exist in formal, hierarchical environments is a sad picture to see.
A student recently failed to show up for class and then regaled me with an email detailing ( and I mean really detailing) her bowel movement that had prevented her from coming. This is another example of somebody who has not been socialized to comply with age-appropriate norms of behavior.
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Hierachy in University classroom? What?
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A teacher controls and moderates a classroom, gives out grades, decides who speaks and when, administers testing, creates the schedule. This is a hierarchy. Without it, a learning process is impossible. Imagine what would happen if instead of me distributing the syllabus at the beginning of the course, students would create their own versions of the course schedule.
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Hierarchy
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I like to be hopeful about the younger generation but it makes me sad to think that young people would think it’s acceptable to claim a teacher’s beard distracts them from studying math.
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I have had students say that math taught using greek symbols was way too hard. The next lecture I used pictures of cats, dogs and elephants to express differential equations. They found it no easier. But it made marking their assignments easier as they seem to do a much better job of drawing animals than writing greek symbols.
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And what about teachers who are annoyed by caps?
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I do not mind at all that they expressed their opinion about my appearance. The have to learn to deal with distraction. Most people, me included, are distracted by something or other.
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There’s no such thing as voluntary hierarchy.
“A teacher…. gives out grades, administers testing, creates the schedule.”
For these 3 things, no hierarchies are necessary. If a student doesn’t want to be evaluated in your manner, he can choose to not take your class. If the student doesn’t like your schedule, he can choose to not take your class too. And I saw many occasions when students have made successful pressures to change the schedule, because this schedule was ill-concieved (I ever heard about a case when 2 courses schedules have changed because many students would have 3 exams the same day!) at the start.
“controls and moderates a classroom, decides who speaks and when:”
I don’t see hierarchy here again because this is not only the responsibilty of the teacher, but also the students’ responsibility. If no student wants to follow the teacher in the class, that’s the students’ problem too, not only teacher’s. As a teacher assistant, any question is welcomed for me at any time in the class. Also, the best way for teachers to control and moderate his class isn’t hierarchy, but to be great and interesting for students.
“Imagine what would happen if instead of me distributing the syllabus at the beginning of the course, students would create their own versions of the course schedule.”
If a student doesn’t like your syllabus, he can choose to not take your class. Moreover, I saw many occasions when students have made successful pressures to change some topics (but not the course content, in general) in the syllabus, like exams dates, number of exams, weight of exams and homework assignments in the final grade, etc.
At the University at least (and for me, It should apply in every school, there’s no hierarchy at Summerhill, for example), there’s no need for hierarchy in the class, not like the coercive hierarchy created by those high school and primary school fucktards! Be a great and interesting teacher for your (the “your” is impersonal here) students, and hierarchy will be pointless because your students will follow you. Students should be treated like clients, not like slaves!
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“If a student doesn’t like your syllabus, he can choose to not take your class. ”
-Of course. but after they do decide to remain in the class, whatever I say goes.
“Be a great and interesting teacher for your (the “your” is impersonal here) students, and hierarchy will be pointless because your students will follow you. Students should be treated like clients, not like slaves!”
-I agree completely.
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At university the students that want to do further studies have the lecturers as clients, how do you think they get advisers/supervisors for post graduate research degrees?
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And what’s the link with hierarchies here?
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That’s what I call a hierarchy. In managing a large group, a hierarchy is indispensable.
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Sorry, but my thesis advisor doesn’t make orders at me, and I follow carefully his tips and suggestions because it’s in my interest.
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You are lucky, David, to have this kind of adviser. Unfortunately, there are other kinds, too. 😦 This is my own personal trauma speaking, of course.
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“Of course. but after they do decide to remain in the class, whatever I say goes. ”
Normally yes, but in my university, some syllabus topics could be changed with the unanimity (which I support) of students after the first class. I attend a course this semester when all students decide to change an exam date (I was the last to sign the form because I disagreed with that, but I respect this democratic right, so…) and the teacher had no problem with that.
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I do this, too. I seek feedback from students on how each aspect of the course can be modified. But those discussions always originate with me and the final decision is also always mine. A student can’t come in and announce, “I have decided that the quiz will take place later than originally planned.” This is always my role.
Yesterday, a student suggested, for example, that we do multiple choice rather than analytical questions. I refused and explained my reasons for that.
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@David are you studying anything that requires a continuity throughout your whole degree?
What about Engineering or Law where in order to practice as a professional you need to have covered a particular set of material? Would you be happy for the engineer responsible for the design of your car to have picked more interesting topics than brake design? Would you be happy for your lawyer to have swapped out the bit where she learned how to manage your money in her trust account?
I agree timings of exams etc can be negotiated but course content is somewhat fixed.
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I just discovered that one of my sections thinks th Cuban Revolution is boooooring. Of course, this is not preventing me from still teaching it to them.
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Wow. I don’t understand for one second how ANYONE could see that as a compliment. Yikes. Totally offensive on so many levels.
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It’s an inappropriate compliment, maybe, but certainly not offensive!
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If somebody tries to manipulate me, they must think they are smarter than I am. And that’s offensive. 🙂
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The student basically told her that “You told me to speak my mind. What’s on my mind are your boobs. So much so that I can’t concentrate on what you are trying to teach me LOL!”
The comment shows that the student puts more worth in the instructor’s body than her abilities as an instructor, or at least that he thinks it’s cute and funny to make the suggestion. It is not cute and funny. It is inappropriate to the student-teacher relationship, and offensive to any woman who thinks of herself as more than her body.
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Thank you for saying this because I really fail to understand why more people don’t see this as offensive.
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The answer is that you have a surplus of the stupid posting on your blog tonight. 🙂
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That’s offensive in the manipulating sense, I agree. But not in the “great boobs” sense.
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And that’s exactly what I said in the post. 🙂
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“What about Engineering or Law where in order to practice as a professional you need to have covered a particular set of material? Would you be happy for the engineer responsible for the design of your car to have picked more interesting topics than brake design? Would you be happy for your lawyer to have swapped out the bit where she learned how to manage your money in her trust account?
I agree timings of exams etc can be negotiated but course content is somewhat fixed.”
I never questioned the teacher’s responsibility for contents. And in fact, many teachers do not need students to brake this academic continuity…
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“A student can’t come in and announce, “I have decided that the quiz will take place later than originally planned.” This is always my role.”
I agree but if ALL students wants to change it, you should accept it.
“Yesterday, a student suggested, for example, that we do multiple choice rather than analytical questions. I refused and explained my reasons for that.”
I agree, teacher are responsible for the course contents. If he wants multiple choices, he should not have to take your course and he should take courses that does that shit, there are too many of these, in fact!
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I think it’ my responsibility to enter into a dialogue and offer reasons for what I’m doing. and it always works because students are mostly very reasonable.
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of course!
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EXACTLY. (To both Clarissa and Helena.)
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It’s offensive in both ways. When I teach, I want to be seen as a professional who is good at her job. My job does not include anything that relates to my boobs, or anything sexual/romantic for that matter. When students hit on me, it shows me that they don’t see me as a professional at all. It’s really very hurtful.
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So why she show them?
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shows
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Even a burqa can’t really conceal a truly noticeable chest. 🙂
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You mean why didn’t she get breast reduction surgery? There could be a million reasons. It’s really expensive, a lot of people don’t want to undergo surgery unless it’s medically necessary, maybe she doesn’t like the idea of someone cutting into her body and removing part of her, maybe she just likes having big boobs. There are probably lots of other possible reasons too.
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While not a professor, I am a nurse and have cleavage even in the scrub tops which I am required to wear. My job also does not include anything that relates to my breasts, or any sexual/romantic anything. Even the very ill psychiatric patients I worked with in the past understood that — including people who had decreased self control, such as people with Alzheimer’s or Downs’ Syndrome.
That student should have been able to understand this as well. The fact that he did not understand that (or chose too ignore it) speaks to either his immaturity or some deeper problem.
Really, that is not OK. And it simply doesn’t compare to the beard comment; that is apples and oranges. Had the student complained about her hair, then comparing it to a distracting beard is appropriate.
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A women colleague of mine finds “sexy” a teacher’s voice, so she’s a jerk even if she doesn’t write it in an evaluation?
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Does she tell the teacher that his (her?) sexy voice makes it hard for her to learn? Then she’s a jerk. If she expressed such thoughts to you privately, then I’m sure it’s fine. I find teachers sexy sometimes too. Doesn’t mean I would ever tell them, anonymously or otherwise. I value them as teachers far, far above any of their physical attributes. I would die of mortification if I gave them reason to think I was some horndog who can’t pay attention because of all the sexiness.
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In fact, this sexy attitude help her to concentrate. 🙂
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privately
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The first time a woman teacher gets an overly personal anonymous student comment (“positive” or “negative”), she rolls her eyes or fumes. The next time it happens, she ignores the comment (ho-hum) unless it is a good candidate for the “ridiculous things that students say or write” lists that teachers tend to circulate among themselves.
My first instinct on the comment mentioned at the start of the article: “Dear Anonymous Student, Formal communications should not contain slang. Instead of using the word “boobs”, you should have used “breasts”; instead of writing “hot”, you should have written “erotic”.”
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I concur.
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Commenting on the fly so apologies if I repeat anything other people have mentioned.
1) I took her tone as sarcastic; it depends upon your workplace but often reacting angrily to this stuff is taken as ‘evidence’ that you are over emotional and irrational. Sarcasm thus becomes your default mode when this kind of thing happens.
2) I would also be inclined to sarcasm at the sheer entitlement of the student’s response – instead of evaluating the material and course, he takes this opportunity to make it all about him, his feelings, his dick’s feelings and his inability to manage his own physiological /emotional responses. He’s using an intellectual exercise as emotional validation. It’s utterly inappropriate and if he’s serious, the epitome of that dread word, entitled. Complete eyeroll territory.
3) I suspect that what it actually is, is an attempt at putting down the teacher. He attempts to reduce everything about her to the shape of her body and then hides behind a facile screen of deniability at the end.
4) I don’t think it says much about her that he wrote this; it says a lot about him though. Doesn’t matter how good a teacher you are, you’re not going to wipe a life time of attitude from a student in one semester, and if he’s in an environment where this sort of stunt goes unpunished by the senior administration then as soon as she’s not in what he perceives to be a position to retaliate (e.g. grades) he’s going to take advantage of it.
5) It’s not to my eye manipulative; it’s too transparent for that. He knows and she knows that the subtext of this ‘evaluation’ is that she’s just t & a to him and he doesn’t care if she knows it; but he’s careful to play it off in a ‘just joking’ manner while making it egregious enough that she can’t fail to get the message.
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This stuff is pretty good right here.
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Melissa, I never talked about breast reduction surgery.
Clarissa, I don’t think that this teacher wears a burqa or something like it, otherwise this guy would not wrote this. Manipulation goes both ways here, I think.
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“Manipulation goes both ways here, I think.”
Are … you saying that the instructor somehow manipulated the student into staring at her rack?
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At least, I think it’s possible.
She said this:
“It was either the guy who invited me to a house party at the end of our final class or the lesbian who constantly flirted (both were quite charming). “
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Assuming this student is of the typical age range for an under-grad (18-22), he probably couldn’t help but be distracted by his prof’s “rack.” A man at his age is so hormonal (if I remember my own late teens to early 20s correctly), you could bury a “rack” under 6 feet of earth, encase it in concrete, and plant flowers over top of it, and it would still be a distraction. But common courtesy and an even mildly normal upbringing would dictate that you wouldn’t mention it in an evaluation. It’s called MANNERS!
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“But common courtesy and an even mildly normal upbringing would dictate that you wouldn’t mention it in an evaluation. It’s called MANNERS!”
-Exactly.
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Well it probably wasn’t the lesbian because the quoted evaluation has the student referring to himself “as a man”. And maybe it’s sexist of me but I like to think most lesbians would know better than to express their attraction to a teacher in such a crude way.
Anyway. I don’t think it’s fair to even imply that she might have been soliciting this sort of attention from her students based on her “charming” comment. Some women respond to crude “compliments” with anger, others with eyerolling bemusement. It looks like the latter to me.
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How would she “not show them” without getting breast reduction surgery? Binding only does so much…
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(not to mention binding is damn uncomfortable!)
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She found him “charming”, though. I agree that he should not mention it, however.
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Okay, let’s return to way more offensive stuff: Penn State’s coaches!
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Or Penis State? 😉
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“And maybe it’s sexist of me but I like to think most lesbians would know better than to express their attraction to a teacher in such a crude way.”
I agree.
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It’s the patriarchal double bind. Whatever you do, you lose.
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‘It’s the patriarchal double bind. Whatever you do, you lose.”
-I don’t know. I can highly recommend being an angry woman prone to fits of rage. 🙂 🙂
On a serious side, blogging has been proven to reduce high blood pressure. Studies keep coming out about how there are many more female than male bloggers. I guess this makes sense since women have more pent-up rage to express and can’t find any other legitimate venue for venting that rage. Of course, I’m not talking about my own culture here. There, things are reversed.
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I have pent up rage and at present it is “all over the house – and campus.”
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Physiologically, I am built to have much more aggression than most women, according to what I have observed so far. I do need my outlets, but above all, I need to avoid situations where I cannot be free to be myself. For instance, I release a lot of stress by joking around. If the environment is patriarchal and puritanical, I cannot do this and the stress builds up.
Also, I realise my sense of humour isn’t the same as people who have been brought up in a widely different culture, so I avoid those kinds of people who simply cannot get it.
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“Often reacting angrily to this stuff is taken as ‘evidence’ that you are over emotional and irrational”
-I keep hearing this a lot and I’m sure that if so many people notice it, it must be real. But I don’t get it at all. I think that eye-rolling is an appropriate reaction of demonstrating frustration in a teenager. An adult, however, is surely empowered enough to react forcefully to not being treated right.
On this blog, I posted several stories of female academics who are insulted at work, pretend like nothing happened, and then post anonymous stories about how these events hurt them. I find that something is decidedly wrong with this reaction. I find that when somebody says something offensive or demeaning, a simple loud “Hey!” and a glare make the person start apologizing.
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Maybe the tide is turning.
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I think that’s what it is. I think those people (full professors in sciences, if I remember right) are using best practices that really were best practices at one time.
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Your concern for the Japanese is very touching. Certainly, you should do your part to overthrow tyranny wherever you see it. Assholes are never pleasant.
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A old jerk is a jerk and he should not be respected.
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You seem to have anticipated the situation quite well. Is it from experience or from the assumption that anything you are not already familiar with is necessarily wrong and reflects assholes (in your own terms)?
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Ever since we got beyond the Bush era (and in Australia, the John Howard era) the right wing denizens seem to have let up with their heavy handed abuse.
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