Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for February 24, 2020

My parents paid good money to get me in here — I deserve good grades!

Just yesterday my GF was speaking admiringly of a math professor she had in college who refused to give partial credit, explaining that when your bridge falls down, nobody will care that it was just an arithmetic error.

Don’t forget the days of textbooks printed in Texas with errors, omissions, and propaganda being used in many states just because they were the cheapest ones to buy. When checking homework I used to see where the book was printed. Would have been funny if it wasn’t real.

I’m sort of thinking this sort of thing is how Rome fell. The rise of the mediocrity for the sake of riches.

I’ve seen this up close and personal teaching physics in a university. I flunked a student, whose parents went right to the Provost; result, I was scolded by the head of our department. I heard that a professor at Duke resigned after a lawsuit from a student who got a low grade.

I guess it’s “die”, then. Poor guy has a self-prophesying name too…

die

I have the impression that we boomers were the ones who planted the seed of the poisonous idea that university students are ‘customers’, even though as Frazz has pointed out, they are the product.

No, adapt or starve to death

I have been here. I am a math teacher. I have been fired for this.

I have often looked from my porthole at the hydraulic tubing in an airplane wing, and “prayed” that those engineers were REALLY good ! (Also, that MY pilots were the luckiest pilots alive..)

I note the subtle “Some of us did” dig at the Dean.