Kids, don't ever challenge your English professor to a rap battle.
posted by timsteil on Feb 4, 2012 - 75 comments

Louis Menand of the New Yorker looks at the competing theories of education: that it is to create more well-rounded individuals vs. teaching someone what they need to know to get a job.
posted by reenum on Jun 13, 2011 - 68 comments

England viewed the colonies as nothing more than a back-talking teenager that needed smacked. The Japanese were put in concentration camps, so we could concentrate on them. During this time, Lespians came out of their nests. [more inside]
posted by katemonster on Jun 9, 2010 - 53 comments

In a lawsuit filed in Oregon, a local teacher with a permit to carry concealed is demanding the right to take her gun to school. The anonymous plaintiff's personal reasons claim a fear for her life from an abusive ex who works at the same school, however, as the argument takes a life of it's own, we can see echoes of Columbine(wikipedia link) and Virginia Tech. [more inside]
posted by softriver on Sep 19, 2007 - 16 comments

Love on Campus: Why We Should Encourage an Eroticism (of the Mind) Between Professor and Student. Yale English professor William Deresiewicz argues that the newly-emerged stereotype of professors as "pompous, lecherous, alcoholic failures" is in the main due to our culture's fear of and inability to understand the true intimacy between professor and student: that of the mind. Cf. controversial Hindu teacher-student relationships, the same in Christianity, or merely observe Oscar Wilde: "I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself."
posted by shivohum on Jul 13, 2007 - 50 comments