This and That

I had the day off today because yesterday was a full day of parent-teacher conferences. We worked till 8 PM, so we got the day off today. Parent-teacher conferences went very well, though it was a long day. I have great students (for the most part) this year, so I had no problem parents to deal with.

Then, after the conferences ended, I performed my first duty as the new chair of the social committee at school. I was nominated by several people (I guess the people know I like to get people together for fun) and so I took on this job. I guess it is nice to be chosen since I am only in my third year at this school. Anyway, I organized a post-conferences shindig, and it went very well. Lots of teachers showed up and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.

Elsewhere, in my grad class this week, my ding dong professor showed off his racism a bit:

Prof: It is important to recognize cultural diversity in your classes. For example, I once had a class with several Orientals [We were all taken aback by this very inappropriate term.] When you have Orientals, you have to remember that in Oriental culture, they are are very smart, but Oriental girls are not supposed to speak.

At this point, once of my classmates said, "Were they Chinese, Japanese, Korean . . .?"

And three of us added at the same time, "Or were they rugs?"

And when he handed our reflections back--remember he told us we could not start any sentences with pronouns--several students protested the red marks on their papers. For example, one student had written "This idea becomes clearer . . . " and the word This was circled. She said, "Why is this word circled?" and he said, "This is a pronoun." So I said, "In that sentence, this is a demonstrative adjective, not a pronoun. It describes which idea." And he said nothing.