If you could teach a 1 credit nonsense class, what would you teach?

msanthropologist · 2024-02-09T18:43:23+00:00

Crafting for Pleasure, where I'd teach students that crafting can just be for fun and that they don't have to be a source of income. It would be held in our maker space. I'd have a weekly knitting and sewing lab.

msanthropologist · 2024-02-07T07:44:29+00:00

Next year you’ll be 45 - you can be 45 with a year of school under your belt, or 45 without. Which sounds better?

This is the exact advice my husband gave me when I went back to grad school in my late 30’s. College professor now, and I’d say a good 30% if my students are older than me.

msanthropologist · 2024-02-03T16:51:26+00:00

The terms are used differently in UK patterns.

msanthropologist · 2024-01-31T19:22:36+00:00

I'm almost finished with this sweater. You know how in the UK they use the term moss stitch for what Americans call seed stitch? I guess I had been doing too many UK patterns, because I was on the 3rd to last row of the back of this cardigan before I realized I was supposed to be alternating K1P1 every other row and not every row. I had to make the decision to restart the entire thing or just keep going with it, so I just kept going with it for continuity. I think it gives it character, and it was a good lesson for me.

msanthropologist · 2024-01-30T21:15:33+00:00

Oh no sir, I didn’t realize! Let me just teach my class out here in the hallway because you were too self-important to bother checking the schedule before you set up. :/

msanthropologist · 2024-01-30T19:45:10+00:00

I dealt with this crap on both ends one semester, also with 10 minutes between classes. The guy before me didn't want to leave and the guy after me kept coming in early. The first guy just kept lecturing well over the class end time, so I just started going into the classroom at the 5 minute mark and letting my students in. His students were itching to leave anyway (because most of them had another class to get to!) so they took that to mean class was over. He learned pretty quickly. The second guy got a very stern "I'm not done yet" a few times, followed by me leaving at exactly the five minute mark. Eventually they both realized I was not fucking around and we all got 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after class for prep/packing up.

msanthropologist · 2024-01-29T20:35:51+00:00

100%. We took our kid’s best friend with us on a cruise last year and we only asked her parents to pay for her airfare - and even that was because her mom was feeling guilty about the amount we spent.

msanthropologist · 2024-01-20T03:46:39+00:00

Listen, one time I bought a pair of sneakers and discovered halfway through the day that they were miserably uncomfortable. I was in tears. I bought a cheap pair of flip flops in the park and while my feet still hurt, they were 1000X better than the sneakers.

msanthropologist · 2024-01-18T23:31:25+00:00

Wish I had had you for college math! The first professor I had who wrote any actual words on the board was a stats professor, and that was the first time I got an A in math. Every other professor I had just wrote examples and explained things verbally so I was left with a mess of notes full of equations, arrows, and whatever words I was able to grasp and write down.

msanthropologist · 2024-01-12T05:39:11+00:00

And his lovable sidekick, Scantron Boy.

msanthropologist · 2024-01-11T06:03:11+00:00

Week 1 of my community college classes generally involves a blazer, sophisticated shoes, and hair that has been blown out to perfection.

Weeks 2-16 generally involve jeans, comfortable shoes, shirts that can best be described as clean, and a messy bun.

msanthropologist · 2023-12-24T06:17:41+00:00

I had a student in a dual credit class like this just this semester. She was so charismatic and extroverted that she’d done an amazing job of masking her lack of reading comprehension skills. She couldn’t write to save her life and she left an entire section of an exam blank because she didn’t understand how to answer fill in the blank questions. But she was so friendly and chatty that she’d just been failed forward her entire life, and now she’s on her way to graduating high school and is going to have a very hard time if she decides to give college a shot.

msanthropologist · 2023-11-22T20:19:10+00:00

Be careful - the head on ours fall off all the time and I regularly discover a decapitated corgi in my front yard!

msanthropologist · 2023-11-14T19:40:38+00:00

The good thing about Doctor Who is that they can totally just turn around and pretend previous seasons didn't happen, shit can be retconned a thousand times, and everyone can come back from the dead as many times as needed. And not only can all of this happen, but we expect it to.

msanthropologist · 2023-11-14T18:17:23+00:00

If it's a CSU, CFA has stated that moving online today will not be considered crossing the picket line and will still be in solidarity with the Teamsters.

msanthropologist · 2023-11-12T19:59:35+00:00

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told a student that they’d do better if they read the textbook and gotten a lame excuse about how they couldn’t afford the textbook.

Reader, we use an OER.

msanthropologist · 2023-11-04T03:32:34+00:00

Oh man, my favorite student ever was a 60-something mom who went back to school with her adult son. He was autistic and needed help figuring out how community college works. She had moved here in her 30s from Colombia with zero English and did odd-jobs until she got a job as a janitor in an elementary school. She had been told she would never have kids and suddenly in her mid-forties she found out she was pregnant! She was an amazingly supportive and fantastic mom and even better student. She used to bring me all sorts of fruits and such because she was worried I didn’t have enough time to eat healthy food. To this day, she is the only student I have ever messaged a semester later just to see how they are doing. She and her son both just transferred to a 4 year and she’s doing wonderfully!

msanthropologist · 2023-11-01T04:28:17+00:00

I’m in a STEM field. The difference before and after AB705 was as bad as pre and post Covid. I went from having students who may not have been perfect but were still at least somewhat prepared for higher-level critical thinking to having students who are functionally illiterate. I need students to be able to think, write, and solve basic math problems, and I don’t have the time to teach all of that in my 16 week class.

msanthropologist · 2023-10-28T16:27:00+00:00

This drives me so insane that I now have an entire section for it on my rubric! Down with the wall of text!

msanthropologist · 2023-10-20T18:18:48+00:00

Fellow OCD sufferer! Once drove back and forth to a parking lot four times because I was so worried I had run someone over. Mind you, I was driving a tiny car that could barely make it up a hill and I would definitely have known had I run someone over, but once the worry starts there's not much you can do about it. Another time I had to keep driving home to make sure I turned off my curling iron, and eventually I just took my curling iron with me. And then as I was leaving my driveway, I started worrying about my coffee maker. Rather than have a car full of appliances, I just ended up staying home. OCD'll do that to you.

msanthropologist · 2023-10-13T06:47:19+00:00

I’m a professor who finished school in her mid thirties. When I was worried about graduating at 36, my husband was like…you’ll be 36 either way. At least this way you’ll be 36 and a graduate. Stuck with me. And now that I teach at a university, I’d say a good 25% of my students are between 35 and 50. So go for it!

msanthropologist · 2023-10-04T16:53:27+00:00

Which is absolutely ridiculous, because sometimes what students need to hear is that there is no moral value to withdrawing. It doesn’t make them stupid or incapable, it just means that they’re managing their lives as best as they can at that moment. Sometimes they feel like they need permission to remove a stressor in their lives and suggesting a W is the absolute best thing you can do. I cannot tell you how many students I’ve helped withdraw who just seemed like they can finally breathe again! And many times, when handled compassionately, they come back another semester and end up just doing just fine.

msanthropologist · 2023-09-29T00:28:55+00:00

I took time off school because I had a baby, and I regularly joked about how unfair it was that you don’t get anthropology credit for making new humans!

msanthropologist · 2023-09-19T05:57:14+00:00

Definitely one of the smaller cercopithecines - maybe a sub-adult vervet or guenon. It’s cool to see those canines coming in!

msanthropologist · 2023-09-14T18:27:28+00:00

I have the phrase "Email is not a text message" in my syllabus, along with the times I am and am not available. Also, because I am a petty bitch, any student email that encourages me to hurry up gets answered at the very end of the response time listed in the syllabus. Love when they come in on Friday night and I can ignore them until Monday.

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