“The difference between a Humanities program and a Business program,” my sister says, “is that in a Humanities classroom, you drop your pen, and the person sitting next to you picks it up and hands it over to you with a smile while in a Business classroom the person sitting next to you makes a nasty face and rolls his eyes at you.”

My sister graduated with a BComm and currently owns her company. She considers her business studies at Canada’s best university to be a sad waste of time.

The driving rules of the State of Illinois prohibit making “improper hand or facial gestures at other drivers.” I can think of a couple of improper hand gestures but what are improper facial gestures? Like making faces at people? What if that is my regular facial expression?

N really wanted to check out Breaking Bad just to see what the hype was about. So I agreed to watch one episode for his sake. Ten episodes later, I can tell you that it isn’t bad at all. We haven’t laughed this hard since we discovered 24 six years ago. I hate the middle-class midlife crisis genre but this show is a perfect parody of it.

So I changed my mind. Breaking Bad is a great show with enormous comedic potential. There was this episode where people passed “a talking pillow” to each other during a conversation, and I thought I would hurt myself laughing.

So apparently some stupid hell-hole called “Quest University” opened in Canada in 2007. While leading Canadian universities, such as McGill and University of Toronto, destroy their language programs, scam artists at Quest U decided to get fat on the mistakes of their betters. They have started circulating the following job announcement:

Foreign Languages, Quest University Canada
Quest University Canada invites applications for a full-time continuing faculty position in foreign
languages and the humanities. While the field and rank are open, the successful candidate must be able to
teach language courses, and should have expertise in a discipline within the humanities (e.g., literature,
history, art history, religion, etc.). The ideal candidate would be able to strengthen our current offerings in
French and/or Spanish, and would be able to give courses in an additional language.

Spanish + French + one more language + and history / art history / religion on top of that. I’m really sorry for the poor idiots who will pay their money to be ripped off by these scammers.

What I find especially appalling is that the Association of Canadian Hispanists is circulating this egregious ad as if it were a legitimate job offer. This must mean that the ACH endorses this kind of exploitation and doesn’t mind accepting fools from Quest U into the community of scholars. Shame on you, ACH!

The only good news is that Quest University is not receiving any federal or provincial aid. All it does is stiff the idiot students to the tune of $30,000 per year (this is tuition only). To compare, it costs $3,000 to go to McGill, which is still the best Canadian university and which still employs actual professors. I would really like to see at least one person who is stupid enough to pay this much to waste time at Quest U.

P.S. Commenters who want to excuse this kind of hiring practices should know: I consider you a stinky insect who doesn’t deserve to be spit on, let alone listened to. Still want to comment?

I hate “projects” and never assign them but this semester I teach with other people’s syllabi and have to sit through endless and boring “projects” while nothing gets learned by anybody.

One of the “projects” requires students to incorporate a song in Spanish that the class has to listen to while looking at the lyrics copy-pasted into a PowerPoint. I have no idea what the pedagogic value of this activity is supposed to be in a Spanish 101 course, but I can’t cancel the project at this late stage in the course.

So today a student showed us the lyrics of the song he had chosen, and we stared at them. Finally, one of the students exclaimed,

“I’m sorry, but I feel like I’m learning exactly nothing in this course. We are in November, and I don’t think I have learned any Spanish. I look at these lyrics and I don’t understand anything. It’s like they are in a completely different language!”

“Yes, this song is in Portuguese,” I said.

All we had time to do today in this course was listen to two of these “projects.” I have never felt this useless in my life. I mean, I’m getting paid to sit and stare at Portuguese song lyrics in a Spanish course and listen to students read out slides they copy-pasted from Wikipedia and don’t even begin to understand.

A student was making a presentation on Cuba and mentioned that Americans cannot travel to Cuba “because of that whole embargo thingy.”

I asked why there was an embargo. The student looked befuddled.

“Erm. . . Because of terrorists?” she suggested.

“Which terrorists?” I asked.

“Muslim terrorists?” the student ventured.

In Russia, there is a saying that if you don’t know the answer to a question, say Pushkin because in all probability the question had to do with Pushkin. Muslim terrorists are US’s Pushkin, it seems.

I’m the unlikeliest person to look kindly on somebody like Bill Ayers. I’m annoyed by spoiled Daddy’s boys from ultra-rich families who get bored with the “endless superficial pleasures” (Ayers 15) that are theirs by virtue of having been born into immense wealth. Their attempts to liberate the downtrodden they neither understand nor really like from a hunt for the superficial pleasures that the rich revolutionaries find boring are both sad and embarrassing.

This is why I was very surprised at how much I liked both Ayers’s most recent book Public Enemy and its author. The book tells of Ayers’s experiences at the center of the fury unleashed against him as Obama’s terrorist pal during the 2008 presidential campaign. The author also goes back to his life underground as a fugitive from the law in the 1970s. This was the part of the narrative that attracted me the most. After going underground, Ayers found himself living in a crummy little apartment in New York with a small baby and a wife who worked long hours. This ogre of a woman was the embodiment of a traditional husband in the worst sense of the word. Still, Ayers never has a single bad word to say about this scary person.

Somebody had to take care of the baby, and Ayers stayed home with his small son. Eventually, he managed to find a daycare for his son and got a part-time job working at this daycare. Many people would use this opportunity to engage in extensive whining, bemoaning their sad, miserable life with nothing but a miserable part-time job and no prospects. Ayers, however, used his work at the daycare to develop a very interesting system of early childhood education, got an MA, got a PhD, and became a specialist in pedagogy. I really admire people who use even the crappiest life circumstances to advance their personal growth. The joy that Ayers feels when writing about his discovery of pedagogy as a field of knowledge is contagious. Unlike most Liberals I have met, Ayers is not into apocalyptic scenarios and doesn’t engage in tales of gloom and doom. He is an essentially happy person who digs life and never stops learning.

This way of being often translates into the kind of writing that is a little too gushy for my liking.  He talks, for instance, of a “dazzling child-care center” and informs us that he was “paying laser-like attention” to his children. He is also really into alliteration, and I find that very distracting. In the space of only three pages, we encounter “bursting bliss,” “safe and solid,” “explore and experiment,” “feast and fatten,” and “the middle of the muddle of our mish-mash collection.”

Of course, I understand that Ayers’s unwavering optimism is the result of having extremely rich and very well-connected relatives always willing to come to his rescue. I mean, this is a guy who had Dr. Spock paying him house visits whenever his adoptive son got some minor ailment. How likely are you to have a world celebrity offer you pediatric services at home whenever your kid sneezes? I’m guessing not very likely. I have no idea what it might feel like to know that no matter what you do and no matter what trouble you get yourself into, a bunch of millionaire relatives will be there to set everything right. It must be both extremely comforting and horribly debilitating.

It is a miracle that Ayers didn’t live a completely meaningless life with his kind of origins. Usually, millionaire rebels descend into drugs and uselessness by the age of 30. Ayers, however, has done as much as anybody could hope to do to redeem himself from the sin of being a rich revolutionary. If one can do what he did, then anything is possible.

The book is funny, engaging, and I highly recommend it. Ayers is coming to St. Louis to present this book, and I’m definitely going to his presentation.

We are practicing the present perfect tense, and the students have to answer the question, “Have you ever traveled overseas?”

The answers are usually, “No”, “No,” “Mexico,” “Spain,” “Well, I’ve been to California, does that count?”

On student, however, gave a different answer.

“I’ve been to Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, South Africa, New Zealand, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, and Malaysia.”

I thought I was reasonably well-traveled but this list made me feel like a veritable country bumpkin. I stared at the student, and so did everybody else in the class.

“I visited these countries with my mission school,” she explained.

I don’t believe in advanced language courses. I’ve taught Advanced Spanish twice, and both times were a complete waste of time for me and for the students. It was especially annoying to have a bunch of native speakers who were understandably bored and who never missed a chance to make a show of their boredom.

I’m scheduled to teach this course next semester but I decided to have the courage of my convictions and not teach it. Instead, I will name it “Hispanic World in the XXI Century.” I will break it into segments: Spain, Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, and Hispanics in the US. The choice of countries is based solely on what interests me and what I’m prepared to teach. We will read 1-2 literary sources and 1-2 articles on politics, economy, etc for each segment.

This, I’m sure, will be a lot more useful than going over the subjunctive for the bizillionth time.

The second Advanced Spanish course I have to teach next semester will be Intro into Literary Theory.

. . . is swimming. There is nothing special to see or hear, so one is forced into the thinking mode. In an hour of swimming today, I came up with an idea for a new article, invented a way to avoid teaching language courses next semester, and designed a new course. I even compiled a bibliography for the new course in my mind.

If things continue this way, swimming will make me the most productive academic ever.