abc

I read a study once that showed people enjoy watching something more a second time, but I've yet to see the research on why I've watched Scrooged on ten times every December for the past twenty years.

TFW you're watching a cute little sitcom about an alien that crashed in Colorado and then, wait a minute, is that Tommy Pico holding an umbilical cord?!

"i've recently been on pluribus tiktok"

that's the problem right there, bad decision-making

It fanned the flames as it went down in flames.

The season finale is straight garbage.

It looks like Jay Leno doing Elvia cosplay. I regret not buying it.

Picture of a beige hand-painted vintage pot with with a large brown guitar with Elvis's face on top.

I'm having trouble finding a suitable picture of myself for my faculty profile. Do you think this picture of an Elvis Presley planter would work instead?

I can't dance, but I'm here for the shoes.

As AI tools get smarter, they’re growing more covertly racist, experts find ChatGPT and Gemini discriminate against those who speak African American Vernacular English, report shows

I can't imagine why Trouillot wouldn't like this:

Dictator Gold

Pantone read the room and painted the room eugenics white.

Not this year. Student engagement has been poor for years. Thanks to never-ending austerity, we're being funneled more into gen ed courses that students hate and don't want to take. AI plagiarism often makes teaching feel hopeless.

If engagement improves in 2026, I might throw a ticker tape parade.

At one point, the student posted a picture of themselves dressed up as me online, saying they wanted to be me. The College just shrugged.

Years later, they apologized and said they'd been experiencing the first signs of mental illness--exactly what I had repeatedly told the College.

I identify most with the pig balloon.

The B-/C+ student is going extinct. It's all bimodal now.

With respect, your profile says you're at UC Berkeley. The post @ibogost.com quotes is written by a professor at Marshall.

I think it's safe to say that those of us at less prestigious public universities--which is to say most faculty--are facing different challenges that contribute to despair.

Yes, this happened to me and a couple of colleagues. A student decided that they wanted to destroy our careers. I told student services that I was afraid she would become violent and that she was obviously having a mental health crisis. They did nothing.

The same thing happened to me in a high school English class, except the word was "celerity."

I'm tired of working for a school that's pretending to be a university.

I always find these discussions of accommodations going too far weird, because on average, I have one or two students with accommodations per semester. Even then, many students often don't choose to use them, or they simply have to take exams at the writing center.

It's amazing how many people seem to think that being an English professor involves diagramming sentences.

That question always reminds me of when my four-year-old niece earnestly asked me what my favorite animal was. It's a perfectly good question coming from a pre-kindergartener, but not from an adult.

I started writing in games with enormous hesitation: I was an untenured faculty member during GG & all the attacks like it. I have watched colleagues lose their jobs. I took notes as Dorothy taught junior colleagues how to protect themselves. Not a day I write in public do I not imagine worst-cases.

I don't know what pedagogical training in psychology looks like, but in English it tends to idealize students and teaching, rather than address the realpolitik of everyday instruction.

Literally, my first semester as a 21-year-old instructor of record. The student wrote about how eating a lot of dairy is the best way to lose weight. I gave her a generous B-.

Luckily, her milk-soft bones prevented her from getting good lift, and the chair mostly skittered across the room.

A lot of the pedagogy I encountered back then focused on feminist, inclusive, "student-centered" teaching.

I quickly realized that, in practice, these approaches profoundly disempowered me as a young woman instructor. Students' opinions take a back seat when one tries to throw a chair at you.

I took 2 years of semester-long weekly pedagogical seminars when I was a grad student, including individual teaching freshman comp I, teaching freshman comp II, teaching grant writing, and teaching lit.

None of those classes covered material that would've helped me as a TA in a situation like this.

The TA didn't mess up. We can acknowledge that her handling of this falls within the norms of liberal arts teaching; that there are also other valid ways of doing it; and that the TA's behavior has nothing to do with the complaint--it's the fact that the TA merely exists as a trans person.

I'm curious about your civility statement. I've been thinking of adding one for professionalism. My syllabi currently note that students must follow the college's code of conduct, but admin increasingly want everything spelled out on the syllabus itself. It's stupid, but here we are.

I switched to in-class writing assignments only this year, and I incorporate writing instruction into classes, even though they aren't writing full research papers at home.

Grades went up significantly in part because students were no longer outright failing for AI plagiarism.

American universities already have services in place to accommodate disabilities. It's not a problem.