Remember the Oppressed Tiffany, a very special snowflake whose “narrative was erased by the entire field of academia” when a hapless prof asked her to work on her writing?
The administration of her college is now going to humiliate the entire teaching faculty by forcing them to attend classes on microaggressions to appease the raging snowflake. Serves them right for not figuring out that their job is not to teach the snowflakes but to praise them slavishly and exuberantly without pause.
You can see some of the paper here:
The parts shown look like typical undergraduate boilerplate with some very ungrammatical and/or awkward and weird phrasing.
My new guess: She was nervous about turning in a piece of crap that was assembled willy nilly from a bunch of standard sources and so she heard normal correction as a personal attack: Millenialitis in action!
And she uses Latinx so that makes me kind of hate her (strong word, but I’m a guy with strong opinions)
And yes, I finally decided to change my avatar (after years of intending to).
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You changed your profile pic to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (or someone that looks like him)?
Weirdly, although I’ve gotten multiple congratulations on my spoken English, I’ve never received such plaudits in a written paper.
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/snark tag
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I’ve never actually seen District 9. Is it worth my time?
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That depends on a lot of factors,
How tolerant are you of SciFi in general?
How tolerant are you of ambiguous metaphor? (it’s obviously about migration/refugees but people disagree on the actual message… or if there is one).
How grossed out are you by giant air-breathing crustaceans? For the most part they are pretty effin’ gross.
I loved it but it was pretty uneven. I loved the earlier parts on the interactions between the immigration/police force and the prawns and Wikus’s slow metamorphis but I kind of checked out when it became a more conventional action flic.
And the character of Wikus is hilarious and horrifying yet oddly sympathetic all at the same time in a way that no other movie character I can think of is.
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“My new guess: She was nervous about turning in a piece of crap that was assembled willy nilly from a bunch of standard sources and so she heard normal correction as a personal attack:”
Detective Cliff on the case!
How is circling the word ‘Hence’ and commenting ‘This is not your word’ a normal correction? Is ‘Hence’ an advanced word for an undergraduate?
I don’t have any sympathy for special snowflakes myself, but the link you posted doesn’t seem to be similar to the situation Clarissa posted about.
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Oh wait, never mind. You posted the same link as Clarissa’s. My bad.
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“How is circling the word ‘Hence’ and commenting ‘This is not your word’ a normal correction? ”
I dunno. The normal thing would be to go to the instructor’s office hours and ask what they meant. La snowflakx didn’t do that.
“Born and raised in the Bronx” and afraid of confrontation? I ain’t buying it.
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I think this is an unfortunate case all around. I think the major issue is that the professor isn’t particularly skilled at commenting on student essays. The student is a clunky and awkward writer (though she clearly has some talent) and instead of identifying a larger pattern that the student could correct and work on, the professor instead accused the student of cheating.
The word “hence” tends to sound awkward and verbose. But the student is clearly trying to create her “academic voice”– and she does need the space to do that. It’s always a mistake to get hung up on an individual word or phrase when commenting on student papers.
So now the student is sort of puffed up and thinks that the correction was made because she is too GOOD of a writer–which isn’t the case at all. So the student utterly failed to develop and will probably start sprinkling words like “hence” all over future papers as signs of her incredible sophistication. Meanwhile the faculty member has to attend a microaggression clinic when what s/he really needs is some training on how to comment.
This whole case is a badly managed tempest in a teapot.
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100% in agreement with EA.
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“Please go back and indicate where you cut and paste” at the top of the paper sounds like an accusation of plagiarism, in a way that something like “fix your citations” wouldn’t be. It’s something you’d say to the freshman writing students and not senior seminar students who presumably know how to cite papers. Of course, professors don’t usually make official accusations of plagiarism unless it’s so obvious as to be insulting.
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The sad thing is that people are celebrating and praising this little idiot, inspiring all future snowflakes to claim their bad grades are a result of horrible oppression.
My thesis director wrote “crap, gobbledygook, awful writing, schizoid” and a lot else on my work. It was very unpleasant. But I found it in me to accept that the reason wasn’t that I’m an immigrant or a woman or poor but that my writing was, indeed, awful.
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Pedestrial… 😈
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Oops…pedestrian.
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I generally agree with your point of view here, Clarissa, regarding microaggressions, but need to add that this professor called her out as a plagiarist in front of their class, with no evidence. That is not OK.
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“this professor called her out as a plagiarist in front of their class, with no evidence.”
Do we know that? I’m skeptical.
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“My thesis director wrote “crap, gobbledygook, awful writing, schizoid” and a lot else on my work. It was very unpleasant.”
But the professor didn’t comment on the student’s work. S/he assumed dishonesty on the part of the student. And that’s insulting and bad pedagogy. (Though I share the doubt that the student was “called” a plagiarist in front of the class.)
Again, I think this incident was way overblown by the student (who seems to be a drama queen) and definitely mishandled by the admins. But I don’t think the professor is entirely blameless here. I think that to some extent this extends from the fact that university faculty receive almost no training in pedagogy. Even a rudimentary knowledge of “best practices” for commenting on student work would have avoided the incident.
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I’m not sure that being called a schizo is so much more pleasant than being asked to rewrite an essay that looks plagiarized. 😆😆
In any case, we don’t know the history between the professor and this student. I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt to my colleagues and assume they know what they are doing. Because I know that there is a million things I say and write that can be easily perverted the moment some aggrieved Tiffany decides she’s hugely victimized.
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From the student’s blog post: “This morning, my professor handed me back a paper (a literature review) in front of my entire class and exclaimed ‘this is not your language.’ ” I would tend to believe her, as if she needs them she has a bunch of witnesses in her classmates.
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“This is not your language” is not the same as “you are a plagiarist.” I would have never even interpreted it that way. If the professor wanted to accuse her of plagiarism, it might have made more sense to say, “You didn’t write this. ”
None of which is of any relevance because it’s the professor’s business how to deal with plagiarism in the classroom.
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Last week, a student used a particularly elegant expression in class, and I praised her. We don’t have Oppressed Tiffanys here, nobody is rich at my school, so I don’t have to worry. If we were a school for rich Tiffanys, though, I could be in trouble. Who knows what a student might have found in her family tree to make her suspect that my praise meant I never expected somebody of her origins to produce an elegant turn of phrase.
This was in moderation, seeing if I can take it out.
“How is circling the word ‘Hence’ and commenting ‘This is not your word’ a normal correction? ”
I dunno. The normal thing would be to go to the instructor’s office hours and ask what they meant. La snowflake didn’t do that.
“Born and raised in the Bronx” and afraid of confrontation? I ain’t buying it.
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I can’t get over the mental image of a raging snowflake. Imagine a snowflake, all cool and perfectly symmetric… But now with a furiously red face, flailing its arms, spouting profanities.
Heh-heh
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Is this a case of bad writing, or a case of plagiarism?
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[…] a blog post this morning called “A Raging Snowflake,” my good friend Clarissa […]
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[…] a blog post this morning called “A Raging Snowflake,” my good friend Clarissa […]
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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