I spent the morning and early afternoon curled in a leather armchair in the back corner of Diesel, reading the novel of the moment and sipping my habitual iced coffee with cream. It is the first weekend that the crowd has included undergrads, and the air reverberated with their early gripes about Virgil and Intro to Electrical Engineering and their hushed gossip. When I rode my bike back home in the mid-afternoon heat, a warm breeze ruffled my skirt and tickled my thighs, yet something felt distinctly different this afternoon from others. It is the feeling of summer's end.
Reading this post was like deja vu for me! I took a class just like this as an undergrad... (surprise, surprise) in the education department. I made it through that semester by taking solace in two facts: (a) I was also taking The Sociology of Education in the soc department, with a professor who actually taught the material and (b) most of us in my little liberal arts bubble wouldn't end up teachers, thus wouldn't have an opportunity to inflict such pedagogical torture on kids who needed to actually learn stuff. It would appear that Newoldschoolteacher has neither of those to help her out. God save her. The professor in my class repeatedly insisted that we were a "democratic classroom" and that she wasn't any more of an expert on the material than us. WHAT? I paid good money for that course, money that employed her to teach me. I hope that she was more expert on the material than I was! Also, when I "took responsibility for myself" and said that ...
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