I have no idea how you can be a Professor of English and start your talk with the words “in today’s challenging times”. Or be a Professor of Journalism and start yours with “our job is to amplify voices.”
It’s 7:40 pm, I’ve been at work for exactly 12 hours straight, and these are the indignities to which I am subjected.
Reminds me of the barbaric European Middle Ages, where the Church would make blood libels and host desecration slanders every Pesach to justify making a pogrom and expelling Jews from their countries. LOL Everything in perspective.
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” start your talk with the words”
I would probably go rogue to make the bastards who made me attend pay:
“Webster’s Dictionary defines “teaching” as”the act, practice, or profession of a teacher” and it defines “teacher” as “one whose occupation is to instruct”…. and it defines ‘instruct’ as “to give knowledge to; to provide with authoritative information or advice”
I think that says it all, our occupation is to give knowledge to, which begs the question ‘who is this knowledge being given to?’ and more importantly ‘what is this knowledge that is being given to whoever it is being given to?” (and on an on until they dragged me away).
At least, nobody did dictionary definitions this time around. Thank God for small mercies. But we did have a student keynote speaker who read a speech that had clearly been prepared by AI. Every sentence of the speech had the word “excellence” in it. I spoke next, and my brain was completely blank. The only word I could rescue from the recesses of my mind was “excellence.” This shit is badly contagious.
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“excellence”
I would like to thank all the excellent faculty at this excellent institution who excellently excelled in helping me excell to achieve my own excellent excellence. Not even in my most excellent dreams of excelling excellece had I realized such excellenceship exists…. excellently!
It was a huge struggle not to say this after that keynote address.
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“nobody did dictionary definitions this time around. … The only word I could rescue from the recesses of my mind was “excellence.”
Webster’s defines ‘excellence’ as…
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Gosh, I should have totally led with that. Although I suspect nobody would understand that it was done sarcastically.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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