Don't Stand So, Don't Stand So

A friend of mine coordinates English Composition courses for a college in a Midwestern state not far from here.  Every now and then, I get a copy of a student message worth consideration, much as we used to bark about students when we were both teachers here in Milwaukee.

Got this from female students this week:

Mr. [redacted], I was wondering who I should talk to regarding my current professor, [also redacted]. I am not satisfied with his teaching at all, he shows no respect for the students. If anyone walks in late he rolls his eyes at them every time. I got marked off on a rough draft because I didn’t have any resources, but no where in the requirements did it say that I needed any outside sources. I talked to him after a class and asked him and he then just told me that I need one. I was trying to understand and it felt like he was just shooing me away. I haven’t learned anything in his class because he uses examples from the 1990’s and doesn’t explain things very well, getting off topic in class sometimes. Then in a class period a couple weeks ago he was showing us a pepsi commercial from when he was a kid and when the clip was done on YouTube it showed suggestions for other related searches. There was a video of commercials that have been banned from TV and it was a girl eating a hot dog seductively making it look like something sexual. He then points it out to the class and laughs. I was disturbed at this, he then clicks on [another ad] because he was curious, the video then was a bunch of women eating different foods very seductively. It was very unprofessional and it should get brought to someones attention. Just wondering what I should do or who I should talk to?

I also have had meetings with other female students re: his showing of videos. One said "I felt that his desires [for the women in the ads] were on display for the whole class to see."
ME: "You mean that he was, um, 'interested' in the images?"
HER: "Oh, yeah.  he was totally creeping out on them."   
I have two more meetings scheduled today and tomorrow with yet other female students about, I am guessing, his porning out in class.   

This is followed by the firm but forgiving message he'd sent to the teacher in question.  But the "examples from the 1990's" stuck with me.  I felt the need to write a response in the character of the writing instructor in question, creating him out of the student's message and also getting in an old shot at the curse of the 3-Paragraph Theme, because there are some things of which I can never let go.

Britney,

Your three paragraph theme regarding how much Rebecca Solnit hates the gym has led me to respond at length in writing of my own, not least because without proper context you might later off yourself like that one guest who was bullied so horribly on the Jenny Jones talk show.  Remember Jenny Jones?  She looked a little like Debra Norville, but was far sexier, particularly if you’ve seen her as I have, on internet video, taking down a footlong meatball sub.

In any case, I suppose I can’t fault the structure of your essay, in which you charge Solnit with first hating technology, then cars with a bit more specificity, and ultimately the modern practice of driving one’s car to a health club in order to walk on a treadmill.  Do they still call them Nordic Tracks, or perhaps Tracs, as we did in the 1990’s?  (By the way, is it just me or does that decade seem like only a few years back, rather than 20 years ago now?)  While your essay’s content may be questionable, your efforts to first introduce your topics, then enumerate them in order and in distinct paragraphs all to their own, and then succinctly summarize all you have to say in a one-sentence bang-and-done final sentence is, as we once said, pretty rad. 

Structure-wise, you’ve constructed a taught triple-decker BLT sandwich whose content looks larger and more glistening in your hands than it might otherwise. If we can remember the movie titled “Almost Heroes,” which nominally starred the late Chris Farley and the pre-post-Friends Matthew Perry, we might remember that something that seems like it might be good on paper will actually come out sort of bloated and half-dead.  While your paper goes only onto the top of a second page, I still had to take several breaks to watch an image gif of Ginger Spice licking a lollipop just to invigorate me to press on. I mean, your second paragraph was shorter than Urkel!  Some ideas need time and length — say, that of Arsenio Hall’s fingers — to develop. (Maybe it’s the word “develop” that reminds me, but do you know if any footage exists of Anna Nicole Smith visiting a Hardee’s?)

If I were to rate your paper between 1 and 10, with 1 being Janet Reno chewing a Chicket and 10 being Heather Lockyear sucking a bratwurst out of a bun, I’d put your essay at about a 4.  In other words, Courtney Love and rope licorice.

Please see me for conferences in the darkened basement hallway of the engineering building.  Also, I just want all the student’s to know that I’ll be providing Nathan’s Hot Dogs as a free snack to whomever’s interested.  (Have you seen the SBTB episode where Screech joins a competitive eating contest? That was a good one, right?)

Your Mack Daddy Composition Instructor,
Brian Hindshank