I’ve been staring at this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed for twenty minutes trying to figure out if this is meant to be some sort of a parody or if it’s all for real:

You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. . . Then there is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s.” Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. (Not much of a surprise since the entirety of black studies today seems to rest on the premise that nothing much has changed in this country in the past half century when it comes to race. Shhhh. Don’t tell them about the black president!).

On the one hand, I don’t think it’s possible that Chronicle of Higher Ed would publish something this racist and egregiously stupid.  I mean, people who are at least marginally familiar with the academia have got to know that we, the scholars, study things that happened long before the 1970s and do consider them relevant today. Some of us even write dissertations on the Medieval Spain or the Ancient Greece because the study of the past is something we find to be useful and enlightening. And we do proceed on the assumption that things that happened a long time ago are still relevant today because the present is a result of everything that happened in the past. I feel like an idiot explaining all this because it’s very self-evident.

On the other hand, there is no indication that this article is supposed to be a joke. It is written in a very uneducated language of a person who cannot possibly be part of the academia. Has it been placed there to ridicule brainless uneducated people who criticize research they are not intellectually equipped to understand? Was this the goal of publishing the article?

I’m very exhausted from round-the-clock grading at this moment and I feel like I’m missing something important here. Has anybody been able to figure this out?

Other things that surprised me as a Soviet teenager in the UK in 1990 included:

– Tampons. When I discovered their existence, I realized that nothing and nobody would ever convince me that there is anything even remotely redeeming about Communism. And if you find this silly, it means you have never experienced menstruation in the Soviet Union. I will not go into unsavory details but I’ll just say that I sincerely thought of it as “the Curse” because that’s what it is when you have absolutely no hygienic means available to you. Seriously, you try doing it, and then we’ll talk.

– Men shook women’s hands. I’d never seen men and women greet each other by shaking hands, so I never knew what to do when men extended their hands towards me. At first, I thought they wanted gifts, so I’d start rummaging in my bag for souvenirs. The problem was that even after I’d stick a souvenir in their extended hands, they’d take it, express gratitude, and then stick out their hand at me once again. So I eventually realized that this was not a form of wheedling gifts out of me but a way of greeting me.

– There was a men’s only pub. “So do you see that building over there?” my host asked me. “This is a male-only pub. They don’t allow women in there.” “Why?” I asked, feeling completely mystified. “Because that’s a place where men go to be away from women.” “Why would they want to do something like that?” I asked in shock, but nobody could answer.

– Everybody was excruciatingly polite. When I heard a 10-year-old boy say to his sister, “Excuse me, would you mind passing me an orange? Thank you”, I almost fell off my chair. At first, I thought people were faking it to impress me, but then I started noticing complete strangers exchanging “Pardon me”s  and “I’m sorry to bother you”s, so I had to accept that this came naturally to them.

– The intonations people used were very expressive and emotional but people were not. In my culture, we have the opposite phenomenon: the language sounds very flat and inexpressive, but people are more emotional than people in many other cultures. I could see that everybody extremely kind but it was much easier for the British people to do kind things for you than to say kind words.

To give an example, there was a table in the hallway of my hosts’ house that was gradually filling with packages people left there. Neighbors and friends were curious to see a Soviet child, so they’d come by to meet me. Every one of them would quietly leave a package in the hallway. At the end of my stay, it turned out that those packages contained gifts for me. And those were very carefully selected and lovingly packaged gifts tailored to my personal needs and tastes. I found it unbelievable that people just left them quietly without waiting for me to thank them. We are also a gift-giving culture but we organize a production around every gift. Nobody does things in such a quite and unassuming way.

(To be continued. . .)

I just looked online and it says that the weather in London is at 7 degrees Celsius right now. And that it will not raise above 14 C all next week. Is that possible? Does such a paradise exist? Here we are at 32 C and it will only go up.

And it seems that in Berlin the weather isn’t going above 20 C next week.

I have a feeling that I will not be able to force myself to come back home after this trip. In this extremely hot climate, I will be in hell until October, locked up at home and terrified of going outside even to check the mail. In the meanwhile, some lucky people are enjoying 7 C weather.

To continue with the list of things that I found surprising when I first visited the UK in 1990:

• how little people drank. In my family, nobody drank alcohol. I knew, however, that we were exceptional in that sense. In works of English literature, the word “whiskey” appeared on every other page, so I expected all Brits to be heavy drinkers. When the girl from my host family came to visit us previous December, we gave her a bottle of vodka to take home as a gift for her father. That was actually the first bottle of vodka I had ever seen in my life. When I came to visit them in Birmingham in March, the girl’s father told me, “Thank you for this wonderful gift of vodka! I drink it all the time!” After which he took out the bottle of vodka that was still 2/3 full and showed me how he added a few drops of alcohol to a glass of orange juice. I had no idea that this way of imbibing alcohol even existed. As you can imagine, the story of an Englishman who spent months incapable of finishing one puny bottle of vodka was especially popular with Soviet people back home. I’m now guessing that my host probably had bottles with other alcoholic beverages at home. But at that time, I couldn’t have possibly conceived of a reality so complex that one would have different alcoholic beverages at home to choose from.
• the dearth of books. The family I stayed with did not have a single book at home. They had a huge house, two cars, big and beautiful TV sets but no bookshelves. In my social class back home, everybody had a home library. At least one (and normally more) room in the house would have its walls completely lined with books. So I was shocked to see that the middle class family I stayed with did not have a single book in the house.
• class divisions. I have no idea why class divisions (that I observed in my own country as well) surprised me so much. I stayed with a middle-class and what I think had to have been an upper middle-class family in the UK. I’m guessing they had to be upper middle class because they lived in a very huge house, one of them drove a Rolls-Royce, and they had two boys in public schools. The differences between these two families were huge. The upper middle-class family would sit down to dinner in the dining-room. And the table was laid according to all of the rules of the etiquette. The middle-class family had a beautiful dining room but it was reserved for special occasions. Normally, people just ate in the kitchen or in front of the TV. The middle-class family ate a lot of what they called “crisps” and drank soda. The other family looked horrified when I asked for a Coke and gave me some fresh juice instead. And they did have a home library. I also visited a police officer’s family (what are they supposed to be? Lower middle class?) And they were very different still. They were rowdy and emotional, like we are in Ukraine, so I felt the most comfortable with them. The three families were visibly uncomfortable around each other.

(To be continued. . .)

Look what I just found at Twisted Spinster’s great blog. The Obama administration teaches school kids the following things about sex:

“Males and females are aroused at different levels of intimacy. Males are more sight orientated whereas females are more touch orientated.”

“This is why girls need to be careful with what they wear, because males are looking! The girl might be thinking fashion, while the boy is thinking sex. For this reason, girls have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn’t invite lustful thoughts.”

“When couples live together outside of marriage, the relationships are weaker, more violent, less [equal], and more likely to lead to divorce.”

Go visit the OP because there is more. I just copied as much as I could before my gag reflexes started getting too strong.

Before you have a vomiting jag of major proportions, I want to repeat: this is the kind of sex ed that Obama’s administration is promoting.

The last question on my Beginners Spanish final exam was: “How did you prepare for this exam?” The students had to answer the question in the past.

Some of them went over the grammar to prepare, some read the textbook, other looked at their notes. One student, however, wrote the following,”I didn’t really prepare. I just watched Latin American soap operas and El sabado gigante. And on my way to class, I listened to some Spanish music.”

Not only did this student do a lot better on the exam than everybody else, she also did a lot better than I expected her to.

Well, at least one person had taken my recommendations as to how to prepare for the exam seriously. The students seem to think that I’m trying to be funny when I say that the best way to prepare for a language exam is by watching TV and listening to music.

Is there anything about Mitt Romney that you find politically attractive?

We’ll have a similar thread on Barack Obama in a while, so everything is fair at Clarissa’s Blog.

People, did you see this super fun campaign tool that Obama’s presidential campaign came up with? It’s called “The Life of Julia” and it shows how one woman’s life would change for the worse if Romney were elected (which is very obviously not going to happen but, still, the tool is fun). There is nothing about how “In spite of being very careful, Julia falls pregnant and decides to manage her own body and terminate the unwanted pregnancy” , but we all know it should be there.

Here it is.

P.S. I did not know Obama’s healthcare plan provided for free prenatal care. Wow. That’s amazing. Now, who really cares about fetuses?

I also liked the assistance to small businesses because I’m a huge fan of them.

Finally, the Obama campaign is doing something right.

The last time I visited the UK was in March April of 1990. I was traveling with a group of students from my school as part of a student exchange program. We were still Soviet citizens, and traveling abroad – and to such an obviously capitalist country, too – was a big deal. After I came home from the trip, groups of people would come to our place for months to listen to my stories  about England and to ask questions. The questions were often very unexpected.

“Do they have curtains in England?”

“How big are the windows?”

“What do the heating radiators look like? What color are they?”

The things that impressed me the most in the UK were not the curtains or the radiators, however. I was 14, so I concentrated on very different aspects of my trip.

Here are the things that I found especially unusual in England:

• how little people ate. At that age, I still ate very little according to the standards of my own country. But the British people ate even less. For the very first time in my life, I felt perennially hungry. I was staying with two very well off families, so it wasn’t lack of money that prevented them from feeding me like I needed to be fed. It was a cultural difference. We are Northern people and our metabolism is different from that of the people in warmer climes. We need calories to warm our bodies in winter. Which is why I felt cosmically misunderstood when my hosts would ask me, “Are you hungry? Then should I boil you an egg?” And seeing my crestfallen face, they would add, “Two eggs, then? Or maybe you prefer an apple?” In Ukraine, we don’t consider an egg or an apple to be a meal, so I went hungry for the entire duration of the visit.
• how fixated everybody was on the weather. Never before had I witnessed people engage in an actual conversation about the weather, so I was completely unprepared to participate in such discussions. I could see that this was a subject that fascinated people but I had no idea what to contribute to the weather-related conversations.
• I wasn’t especially surprised by the abundance of consumer goods in the UK. This was a capitalist country, so, of course, it was supposed to be overflowing with goods. What I did find shocking was how a significant portion of the wares was placed outside of the stores on the pavements, with nobody supervising them. It was as if the goods were spilling out of the stores. “Don’t people steal these things?” I asked my hosts. “Yes, all the time,” they responded phlegmatically. I haven’t seen anything like this in the US and Canada, and I can’t wait to see if that is still done in the UK.

(To be continued. . .)

On the final exam, I write in capital letters “ANSWER IN COMPLETE SENTENCES” in every single assignment. I also repeat it verbally at the beginning of the exam. When the exam is about 50% done, I remind everybody to answer in complete sentences.

Then, it always turns out that about half of the students did not answer in complete sentences.

I know my students and I know that they are perfectly capable of creating complete sentences at this point. It is not the lack of knowledge that makes them do this. It’s the annoying carelessness and shoddiness that seem to be very pervasive.

Many people would be so much more successful in life if they learned to be a little more meticulous and detail-oriented.