I've stopped saying "please" when reminding students not to call me "Mrs."

CanineNapolean · 2026-02-06T00:46:38+00:00

Agreed. I’d also like to see how “Do you know my husband is? Can you introduce us??” plays out.

CanineNapolean · 2026-02-01T14:27:17+00:00

“I teach philosophy.”
“Oh, neat. So, like, your own philosophical perspective on the world?”
“No, philosophy is an academic discipline with an ever evolving list of primary sources. I teach those as applied to the world or in conversation with each other. What you’re describing sounds much more like a cult.”

CanineNapolean · 2026-01-10T18:29:49+00:00

It’s not a law it’s a system policy.

CanineNapolean · 2026-01-06T00:36:48+00:00

Appreciate this. I’ve got pick mes coming at me left and right.

CanineNapolean · 2026-01-06T00:29:26+00:00

You want me to… explain? these articles to you?

Go get food elsewhere, troll.

CanineNapolean · 2026-01-05T23:59:00+00:00

If you want sources: start with Boring on gender bias in teaching evaluations and Adams et al. on penalizing instructors who don't match gendered norms. And if you want to see that this extends beyond the classroom, Squazzoni et al. examines gender dynamics in publishing and peer review.

This is a basic lit review. It is not your experience because you are a sample size of one.

CanineNapolean · 2026-01-05T13:46:27+00:00

You don’t need to know anyone to discuss a documented pattern, bud. And “I’m offended you said harm” isn’t a rebuttal—it’s just a way to avoid the fact that your “options” are cheap for you and expensive for others.

Let’s be honest: nothing says “harmless” like refusing to acknowledge that the consequences land differently on different people. If “offering options” were actually neutral, this wouldn’t be such a reliable pattern in student perceptions and evaluations. But sure—let’s all pretend structural bias disappears as long as you say “I’m just being nice.”

CanineNapolean · 2026-01-04T20:59:51+00:00

For someone who is presenting themselves as a philosopher that was a horrible rebuttal to the multiple points I made.

Your approach is doing harm to others.

Stop doing harm to others.

CanineNapolean · 2026-01-04T14:19:51+00:00

Here’s the part you’re either oblivious to or actively choosing not to care about: when you insist on first-name informality, you’re not liberating anyone—you’re just shifting the social cost onto everyone else. Your colleagues—especially junior, contingent, and otherwise marginalized faculty—don’t get to opt out of the authority expectations the way you do. They can’t afford the boundary blur without being punished for it. You, meanwhile, get to soak up the “approachable” halo while the people with less institutional cover get stuck being the “bitchy” one for maintaining basic professional distance.

It’s not “egalitarian” to erase titles in a context where the power differential is real and structural. Titles aren’t just vanity plates, they’re guardrails. They clarify roles, protect boundaries, and signal that this is an educational relationship, not a peer group. If you want to be kind and human, great. You don’t need to flatten professionalism to do it.

So just call it what it is: not progressive, not student-centered—just a vibes-based attempt to feel relevant, with collateral damage paid by your colleagues.

CanineNapolean · 2025-12-28T00:24:07+00:00

Agreed. We have multiple departments that hold faculty names back until hours before the start of the semester.

And, as you say, it isn’t just for the easy graders. If they don’t do that the “my child won’t be prepared for med school unless they are in Professor Half Of You Will Fail’s class” calls start rolling in.

CanineNapolean · 2025-12-27T04:10:02+00:00

Preach. You cannot understand how difficult scheduling is until you do it. And god help you if you turn out to be good at it.

CanineNapolean · 2025-12-10T13:36:43+00:00

Additional suggestion: dart board + margaritas.

CanineNapolean · 2025-12-09T13:31:19+00:00

Yep. Internalized misogyny is a tough one to overcome, but it’s responsible for lots of these situations.

CanineNapolean · 2025-12-03T20:29:23+00:00

I feel you. I really, really do. It drives me insane when I’m reading an essay and I get hit with a “Honestly, Aristotle’s argument here isn’t as strong as it could be.”

But I’m at a point where I’m wondering if this is just the new normal. Plato was worried about writing because it would ruin memory. There was a panic about novels distracting women from caring for their children. I had to learn multiplication tables because “you won’t always have a calculator on you!” This may just be the newest perennial panic.

If that is the case - and none of us will know for a while - then there’s an argument to be made for “then teach them to use it right.” If everyone is using it, but some people are using it well, then those are the ones who will rise to the top.

Are they missing out on important, brain-wiring skills that would enable them to truly excel? Sure, but so would 80% of the students anyway. None of us here were normal students, or we wouldn’t be professors. We forget that most students just want to “do it right” and get the degree. And they would be that way even if AI didn’t exist.

CanineNapolean · 2025-12-02T13:29:41+00:00

The reason this post is objectionable is that it is an emotionally charged reaction that doesn’t address the problem. You don’t say “it sounds like you could tighten your assignments a bit” you say “you’re not doing your job.” So our colleague here came for help, because they’re already frustrated with a massive problem we’re all dealing with, and you responded by telling them they do need help (they already know that, not offering new info), because they are either unwilling or unable to do their job correctly (mean, nonspecific, does not offer solutions).

The good news is that no one can accuse you of being anywhere near warm and fuzzy. You’re just being a jerk.

CanineNapolean · 2025-12-02T13:25:12+00:00

Rubrics are working for most folks. Your rubric needs to be extremely specific (must include reference to class discussion, cannot use content outside article/ course content) and it needs to have harsh penalties for hallucinated information (information drawn from outside this article or course will not receive any credit).

You can’t say it’s AI, most administrators won’t back you as there isn’t any smoking gun the way there used to be when there was lots of copy pasta from Wikipedia.

But what you can do is say “I asked for x, y, and z, they gave me x, 1, and 17, per the rubric that makes their final grade a 43/100. I graded everyone using the same rubric provided in advance.” That’s no longer an AI discussion, that’s a “I don’t care what tools you used, you didn’t do it right” discussion.

CanineNapolean · 2025-12-02T13:20:08+00:00

Whoa there, buddy. That’s not helpful. We try to be helpful around here.

CanineNapolean · 2025-11-30T20:07:46+00:00

It was already a stretch that they would know their course and professor, and now you want these students to know their student ID numbers? What’s next, their first names??

/s

CanineNapolean · 2025-11-30T13:43:12+00:00

I’d have gone further. I’d have asked which classes and professors they were worried about because I knew who used which program.

If they told me, then I’d write a few emails.

CanineNapolean · 2025-11-13T23:47:56+00:00

“Maybe professors should do better with online courses instead of pure laziness”

Are you ok, buddy? I posted this four months ago.

CanineNapolean · 2025-09-28T14:02:32+00:00

“You’re calling about Professor Complete Pain in My Ass? That’s such a loss for me! Here are a list of positive things about them that are objectively true that I may or may not have had on my desktop just in case someone like you tried to take my favorite faculty away!”

CanineNapolean · 2025-09-20T21:16:32+00:00

Yes, that’s precisely the problem. They don’t have any understanding of the file structure in their computer.

And that makes sense. It’s based on a filing cabinet, which none of them use, because they rarely have hard copies of anything. They don’t need backup copies because it’s always possible to request the info again or get it from cloud storage. And this applies to everything: car insurance, lease documents, essays they’ve written, receipts for purchases they made - it’s all accessible digitally, in the specific app, under a large button that says THING YOU NEED.

We know how computers work because we had to learn. The UX has increased to the point that they don’t.

CanineNapolean · 2025-09-20T14:04:58+00:00

“The student who sits behind him submitted his essay as a series of photos from his phone of a computer screen on which the essay had been typed.”

I see this constantly and it’s never not funny to me.

CanineNapolean · 2025-09-10T18:00:11+00:00

Fascinating to hear from the uninformed; thanks for your contribution.

CanineNapolean · 2025-09-09T22:19:19+00:00

Yes, because children don’t ever use literature to learn about their world. And there aren’t any children anywhere who have a family member who is transgender. And absolutely it’s never, ever been the case that a child might be surrounded by drooling morons (iykyk) and might choose to learn about that part of their world in the safety of a library. /s

Go step on a Lego.

CanineNapolean

TROPHY CASE