Sometimes it’s hard for me to preserve my faith in humanity.

In class, we are learning how to offer suggestions and give advice in Spanish. I created a list of emotionally complicated situations and asked students to offer suggestions to their participants. One of the situations was, “Adelina cheated on Pedro. Give advice to Pedro.”

As soon as I read out this situation, a male student fired off, “He should just slap her.”

And you know what? Everybody else either smiled or looked completely comfortable with the suggestion.

This is very disturbing.

To ensure that its stream of superficial, badly researched articles is as strong as ever, the NYTimes published a gushy piece on Mikhail Prokhorov, a “Russian billionaire who now leads a political party.” What the article forgets to mention is that Prokhorov is not really a billionaire and his “party” does not really exist.

Prokhorov is one of the figureheads used by the Kremlin to pretend that there is a free market in Russia and to fake the existence of a democracy. It won’t look good to put only Putin’s name on the ballot. But allowing real candidates to appear alongside Putin is too dangerous. So these completely fake “parties” are created to make an impression that there are alternatives to Putin and his party and that people vote for Putin after choosing him among other candidates. The system is very transparent but it obviously works. Americans look at this travesty and go, “Ah! Elections, parties, candidates! Good! There is real democracy in Russia.” This practice has been in place since the early 1990s, yet the trick works every single time there is a need to convince the West that real elections are really taking place in Russia.

The strategy also serves an important internal purpose. Fake politicians like Prokhorov are so inept and useless that they make Putin look good by their side. In the last presidential campaign, for instance, Prokhorov released a commercial that made him look completely ridiculous. He stood in front of the cameras and babbled incoherently for five minutes. The entire country laughed at the video for weeks. I hate Putin but I have to confess that after watching Prokhorov’s inarticulate braying in his own commercial I started feeling that Putin was not that bad of a candidate. At least, he could string along a few sentences that kind of made some sense.

Now, what I find really disturbing is that the NYTimes is incapable of uncovering all this and is discussing Prokhorov as if he were a real politician with a real electoral platform. Believe me, this stuff is not top secret. I don’t have a direct line to Putin or anything. A person with a very basic knowledge of Russian politics could find all of this very easily by accessing newspapers, radio shows, blogs, even Facebook pages of political commentators within the country. Anybody who sees Prokhorov famous video has to ask how come somebody who has access to billions of dollars failed to hire a campaign manager to prevent him from making a laughing stock out of himself. Why are the journalists who write for our most popular newspaper failing to conduct even this very superficial and basic research? If they can’t even do arm-chair journalism in a responsible way, how come we trust them to report on anything that might require them to get out of the arm-chair?

Gosh, if I did my job half as bad as these people do, I’d be out on my ass – and deservedly so – a long time ago. Journalism has become the most corrupt profession in the world if this kind of half-assed garbage is being published.

OK, so who used the chemical weapons in Syria? The government or the rebels? How likely is it that we are headed into yet another “We attacked a government for having WMDs but the WMDs are not there, oopsie daisy”?

I really hope we are not seeing the repetition of the Iraq invasion. Because how stupid will we be to fall for the same story about WMDs?

Whatever the answer is, however, it is disturbing to consider a possible US invasion of Syria at this point. If the United Nations really existed, it could handle such issues. What a beautiful idea the UN was and how pathetically it failed! It was the greatest, most pathetic failure of the post WWII era.

A blogger explains why he reads so much Young Adult literature:

YA almost never features 45-year-old men from Brooklyn having mid-life crises. This has been done to death, and I have no interest in reading it.

Oh, yes. This is the kind of books and movies that I can’t stand either. Contemporary European literature is obsessed with 45-year-old women in the throes of a mid-life crisis and contemporary US literature has the same unhealthy obsession with men going through their version of it. I don’t think one can even experience a midlife crisis any more without feeling like a plagiarist of the worst caliber.

“So why do people accept all these adjunct positions if the work conditions are so poor and these jobs never lead anywhere? How come they don’t see that this is not a smart thing to do? Like, what’s with the self-defeatism?” a woman asks her companion in the queue at Starbucks.

If it weren’t rude to butt into conversations (even ones between really obnoxious people), I could tell the condescending lady that people don’t leave because the work we do is completely addictive. Once you have experienced the joy of coming into a classroom, speaking at a conference, working on a research article, that’s it, you’ve been poisoned and will keep seeking out this potent drug for as long as you can crawl back onto campus.

I believe that the reason why we get so addicted to academia is that it provides access to the purest form of being human. What makes us human is our capacity to reason, to generate ideas, and to communicate them to other human beings who will then use them to generate ideas of their own. Seeing people get excited about knowledge, books, learning and being surrounded by those who know no greater joy than to fly away into the realm of ideas is an experience that redeems much of the humanity’s indisputable nastiness.

Yes, yes, I’m idealistic. And the academia is not perfect. Let’s try to move past stating the painfully obvious for a change.

Stupidity knows no boundaries. Look what Atheist Republic is publishing to illustrate “retarded idiocy from religious nuts” (this is a direct quote from comment #1 in the ensuing discussion):

The move to make virginity testing of high school girl students in Indonesia mandatory has drawn flak from activists, arguing it as discrimination against women and violation of human rights.

Muhammad Rasyid, chief of education in south Sumatra’s Prabumulih district . . . was quoted as saying that the virginity test was proposed for the good of the children. He also added that virginity is a right of every woman and students are not expected to commit negative acts.

As per the requirement of the test, female school students in the age group of 16 to 19 years would have to undergo hymen examination every year till they completed their graduation. On the other hand, boys would not be examined to know whether they had sex or not.

Yes, this is barbarity, and I’m more appalled by it than you can ever be because I was subjected to this kind of practice starting at an age younger than 16. Care to guess where that happened? Yes, in the completely and officially atheist USSR.

It would be really cool if, before pointing fingers, atheists learned at least some very basic facts about the history of atheism. Of course, religions often control and persecute women. But the removal of religion does not automatically cancel woman-hating practices. The hatred of women is not caused by religion. It exists in and of itself and will use any means, including religion, atheism, agnosticism, or anything else, to self-perpetuate.

When explaining the cases that might warrant the use of the formal “you” (usted) in Spanish, I made the mistake of saying, “Or when you meet people who command respect because of their job, like the President of the United States.”

I must be getting old to step into this kind of mess in a Spanish 101 class. It took a while to settle the students down to a discussion of the gender of Spanish nouns after this. I should have chosen somebody who has been dead for at least a couple of centuries to illustrate my point.

OK, I understand that students can’t get over the temptation to address me with the high school “Miiiiieeeeeess!” but doesn’t it feel just a little counter-intuitive to use this appellation on a person with a humongously pregnant belly?

“It is juvenile of Harris-Perry to claim that Snowden should come home and face the music. He would be silenced and imprisoned for years if he did that, as would Assange.  Who in their right mind would court such a fate?  So, years later, he could emerge from prison a broken man to be adulated, like Nelson Mandela or something?” I agree completely. It is really wrong to demand this kind of heroism from people when you are completely safe from any harm.

Should people stop writing? A publisher’s point of view. I think the publisher who wrote this is a snooty jerk but I do agree with the main point he is making: graphomania is on the rise.

OK, I feel bad about linking to such an unintelligent blog but I find it unbelievable that the majority of colleges would assign this piece of tripe as “common reading” for 2012-2013. First we condescend to students by offering them crap to read, and the we complain that students are not smart enough. Why not just give them the 50 Shades trilogy and be done with the whole higher education project?

Assange will not rest until he discredits the very concept of whistle-blowing completely.

Americans get scandalized about every tiny little thing that smells of sex but remain completely oblivious to outrageous and embarrassing racism right in front of them. I saw this video and was horrified by how racist it was. Other people saw it and got traumatized by its parody of vaguely sexual gestures.

A brainless jerkwad who has the gall to call all Muslims stupid is so idiotic that he doesn’t even know the difference between ethnicity and religion. This is as blatant a case of projection as I have ever seen. And I’m sorry for linking to yet another idiot but the world has got to know its bigots.

Do you need reasons to hate Canada’s Prime Minister Harper? If so, then I have to ask where it is that you have been hiding this entire time. Still, here is a good explanation of why he is horrible.

A homophobic pastor publicly shares his fantasies about gay sex.

“Women who use ‘pull out’ birth control method at greater risk of unintended pregnancy.” OK, I don’t get this at all. What is it that women pull out of when they use this method? Or are we talking about a method that is only used by men and that gives women zero control over whether they get pregnant or not? Note that this piece of complete cluelessness as to gender issues is brought to us courtesy of the most tolerable feminist blog in existence. The rest is worse.

Last semester I had to evaluate the teaching of a new instructor. When I saw how she organized her class, it became clear that I was supposed to give her a very bad evaluation. The instructor was doing the exact opposite of what we all do and what the official teaching method adopted by our department mandates: her class was completely teacher-centered, she sat facing the class the entire time, there were no group activities, a lot of translation was used, etc.

Still, I gave her a stellar evaluation for one simple reason: whatever she was doing really worked. The students obviously loved her, loved the class, and were wildly enthusiastic about learning Spanish. We should all be so lucky as to summon this level of student engagement as effortlessly as this instructor did.

A teacher’s main tool is that teacher’s personality. We teach not so much with what we know but with who we are. I can forget to bring a textbook, my handouts or my lecture notes (if I had them which I never do), but as long as I bring myself and my way of being within Hispanic language and culture, the students will learn.

This is precisely why teaching methods are not transferable. Activities that work for my colleague are useless to me and vice versa. We can share experience and give suggestions to each other but, more often than not, these suggestions don’t work. For instance, a colleague at my penultimate university was shocked to see that my students never just barged into my office and, instead, formed a neat, quiet line outside of my office even though I never asked them to do that. Somehow, the students knew that this was the correct way to relate to me. And the same thing happened when I was teaching at-risk kids many of whom had a history of arrests and gang affiliations. Their school teacher complained that she could barely manage to keep them from turning every class hour into a huge brawl. I, on the other hand, got them to listen and talk about the Spanish Baroque without feeling like I was making an effort. Of course, I come from a long line of female teachers who taught much more problematic students effortlessly and successfully.

I now have to go teach but when I come back I will offer a list of personal characteristics that help one be a good teacher.