#college discourse

[formerly-windblume]

I’m Breaking Our Silence… Our Story Needs to be Told…

Note: Real names will NOT be used and the name of the school will NOT be mentioned for safety purposes.

I’m going to tell a story about a class, a class quite frankly no English Major should be taking as it’s truly a scam.

People like to throw around the notion that university is a scam, well, in this particular instance it is a scam. We were scammed in the worst way possible, taking a “required” course for our English Degrees that no other school in the country has to take. This class is called “Junior Seminar”, a class of anything but its branded title.

About The Class: Our Experience

It’s a “themed seminar class” (we use this term lightly) for English majors and must be a declared English major, Secondary-Education English major, or English minor.

Now this class was none of that, there was no “theme”- well, other than it being Hell I suppose there would be no other theme. This class was not what we were promised. We were promised a rich experience that would strengthen our comprehensive understanding of English and literary history as well as enriching us with the knowledge necessary for understanding complex literature. We received 12 weeks of rubbish, belittling, insulting, ridicule, and targeted harassment as well as off topic nonsense that would hinder our learning experience completely.

We received word last minute about the sudden change in professors around August 15th-18th due to our assigned professor going on maternity leave (congrats on the baby, Professor A!!) and being assigned a familiar face, Professor V. Now Professor V was actually a very welcome surprise for many of us as we had previous classes with her and we had zero issues, if anything we were happy and beyond excited to see her be our professor yet again. However, that quickly became a nightmare no one was expecting.

The class started off smoothly with a clear syllabus and with a somewhat clear outlook as to what we would do, nothing out of the ordinary, start off with Shakespeare’s The Tempest and move onto other titles like Jazz and Crazy Brave later on. However, we soon realized that this was not what the syllabus, the literal class outline, had at all for the week after we covered The Tempest. We watched a movie called Orlando, and truthfully, we are still baffled as to how that even happened as it was NOT on the syllabus- though, seeing as the professor is the biggest simp for Virginia Woolf this was bound to happen. We spent multiple three hour classes to watch the movie after a heavy political rant or the nonstop talk about how Professor V absolutely adores Virginia Woolf.

How long did we spend on Virginia Woolf? Oh about four weeks. Four painful weeks of utter rubbish.

We went multiple weeks following an entirely new syllabus that we never planned for nor were aware of. We were at Week 7-8 when we started talking about our important 15-20 page paper that is due at the end of week 12. We have every right to be angry, voice our frustration.

“Your paper seems rushed… yeah…” or “That’s not how Virginia Woolf is, I believe something different” mixed with comments about her biased narrative on said author and characters. No, the paper was not rushed, YOU graded it twenty minutes before class was to start and the student had turned it in days prior and put countless hours into the paper/review.

Whenever we would turn things in we would receive strange feedback, sometimes insulting feedback about how it did not fit “her narrative” or her “ideology” solely because of how an individual interpreted a character or a story. I’m partially convinced some of this harsh criticism was racially motivated or biased towards specific individuals and/or groups of students.

We were given multiple “Pop Up” projects where we had to present in front of the class over some random and unrelated topic and create slides, a pamphlet, a zine, or anything. It was ridiculous. We were given random movies to watch because she felt like it, she thought it would fit with the lesson that quite literally did not fit the class or a lesson plan that is intended for an upper division English course.

It’s Week 12, the class has technically finished and we are STILL writing our papers. We are STILL suffering, she made so many last minute changes to how she wants our paper that it’s pissing us off. “Highlight the topic sentence of each paragraph”, “underline the thesis so I don’t get confused”, “italicize this and bold that” it’s no longer MLA… she legit told us to our faces on Thursday during class that is MLA.

I’m an English major and the things she CLAIMS are MLA are NOT MLA. I want to know what the hell she is on because I am about to snap.

The Group Chat

Now, for complete transparency I will add that I did make a class Discord chat, I sent out invites to my classmates who I knew needed a place to vent frustrations, talk things over, or even request help if needed for an assignment. I wanted this space to be one where all of us could unwind and vent without needing to say so verbally. However, that all changed when a student let’s call her M tattled on us and said that there was a chat where people were “saying mean things”. I will be honest, while harsh, these were vents from students and myself. Venting is normal and it’s good for people to do. Especially students with a professor who is not teaching what she is supposed to.

I deleted the chat the second M decided to start acting strange, J said we needed to get the chat taken down, G, K and E agreed too. We all knew something was up as M never shows up to class and suddenly has this intense look of “I will do something to ruin you lot”.

The next week we started class and noticed the professor was angry, M sat across from us in the classroom with this evil smirk on her face that told that she did something and would enjoy what happened next. The professor was furious that we excluded her from the group chat and even said we were frustrated with how the class was going.

“This never would’ve happened if I was a man!” She said loudly.

“It was like… ruining my learning experience…” said another girl who never showed up to class nor joined the group chat. “The professor should have been involved in the chat.”

“If the professor was there wouldn’t that take away from freedom of speech?” Said J.

J stood up to the professor for calling people out for this and for saying a class group chat falls under freedom of speech and expression, legally, it does and is allowed as long as no illegal activity happens such as narcotics and other nastiness.

The professor claimed she went to the department head and turned us in but the second J said she would record everything and call in the department head to be witness to the professor’s outbursts the woman froze and you could tell she was scared. Which lead us to believe that the “telling the department” was a bluff and she never did. If she truly told the department about everything then why was she so scared of a student saying she wants to bring the department in as witness?

“You cant talk to the professor like that!” Said a student, however, J was being very civil and respectful but stern. J was not going to tolerate this woman disrespecting her in front of the entire class because she was angry.

Throughout the evening, M kept glaring at my friends and I on the opposite end of the room with a psychotic look that meant “I am watching you all”. She would get up and walk slowly behind K and G looking at their screens and even flipped me off on her way out of the room.

While we did apologize to the professor, who was very thankful for the apology and even wanted to start over again with us, we still kept a secret chat to vent as a small closed group of four. We weren’t going to let her or anyone else find out.

Shortly after class I received this message in my tumblr inbox directly after the class from who we now believe was from M:

Hello “Blume” or should I say [censored], yes, you were a breeze to find. I remember the zine you made in one class, I remember the cover you drew, I saw you working on editing your business page once by chance in the [censored] Cafe. I hope you enjoyed the show during class, I certainly did. Just know [censored], I will be monitoring you specifically.

It hit me, M was in my other classes from last semester and in the Zine Club I left. We also competed in a writing competition and I won third place while she placed somewhere else behind me. I knew M was the person who disrespected me in the publishing class in the Google Doc. It all made sense. M was angry and wanted to do something to me no matter what the consequences were.

After Halloween, I told the professor about the message and her response to me was “Well you can’t turn it in to the school as it has no name to the sender, just anonymous. You can’t tell the department either. You must remain silent.”

I told my friends and they were speechless, what professor says something like that?!

The next week or so I had a meeting with the professor and talked about the situation again, she HINTED heavily that M knows I told her. Meaning that the professor TOLD M everything.

“Well perhaps that student knows you spoke up and that’s a problem… yeah…”

M knew, I realized that a few classes later when she showed up unbelievably early when the classroom was empty and I was alone. M saw me in the window’s reflection and bursted in angrily. I swear the energy in the room changed and felt suffocating when she entered. M sat across the room from me and glared at me all hunched over as she typed away on her computer. I texted J immediately saying bi needed to leave the room, thankfully J was in the lobby down the hall so I could go there for safety.

I grabbed my coffee and left my bag with my laptop and iPad which are passcode locked in my bag on the floor strategically placed so I would know if it was moved or tampered with. I left with my phone, earbud case, and coffee. I wanted to make it look like I was going to pick something up outside and would be right back. M just glared evilly and kept her eyes on me. It was creepy.

Throughout class M never took her eyes off me, it scared me but I played it cool. I refused to let her scare me. I kept silent, not wanting to say or do anything.

When class finished I told my parents everything, I said I did not feel safe, my dad began to sit in the lobby when I was in class because he did not know what that psycho could do. I never felt more in danger than then.

How Did M Know?

Simple, M and Professor V seem to have this strange bond, it’s almost as if M has her wrapped around her finger. M follows her out to her car and chats, pulls her to the hallway to chat and even plays the innocent sweetheart card to look like the ideal person. Professor V is blind to that and would likely tell M anything if M asked. Professor V would likely let anything slip because she has sort of claimed M as a favourite of sorts, even spending the last class talking with M the most all buddy-buddy as if they get coffee every Saturday morning together.

It would not surprise me if Professor V told M about how she saw the message M sent me and how I am onto her. I would not be surprised in the slightest….

Conclusion…

In the end we will all be talking to the department head when our grades drop, we are done. We went through hell.

This story will continue when we talk to the department head. I will share what happens next. This story is far from over…

- Windblume

[starry-ace]

“The Barbie movie is like basic gender studies 101. It’s like the bare minimum for feminism”

YEAH SOME PEOPLE HAVENT TAKEN GENDER STUDIES 101 AND WOULDNT YOU AGREE WE ARE CURRENTLY AT LESS THAN THE BARE MINIMUM FOR FEMINISM?

things do not need to be perfect to be good. You cannot teach someone intersectionality if that person has not heard of bare minimum feminism. You might be on step 100 but just because you started earlier does not mean that everyone can jump to your level. They have to climb the stairs too. And the people at the top yelling down to the people at the bottom that being at the bottom is bad, they need to be at the top, IT DOES NOT ENCOURAGE THEM TO CLIMB UP.

[tevanbuckley]

okay I know ppl are getting tired of crossposting from twitter but this felt too good not to share.

these kids are really about to get hit in the face with the fact that the online bubble they’ve spent the summer in is not representative of the real world.

[swordscleric]

I can't stop thinking about the post from a few days ago about how Critical Role has been great at doing personal faith but didn't put the necessary work in to discuss the religious/god angle of c3 in-depth. Like the fact that Cardinal Respa was linked to both the Dawnfather and the Chained Oblivion is, on a personal level, very interesting (fallen/corrupted priest goes hard) but like does that mean that there's a Papacy somewhere in Exandria dedicated to the Dawnfather? If so, are there more cardinals who ordain the bishops of the Dawnfather? Are there Conclave-level intrigues going on in the Dawnfather's Sistine Chapel? Why is the Dawnfather so Christianity-coded in vibes alone if there's no actual outline of his religious organisations? With Downfall the Dawnchild/Dawnfather thing makes the allusions to Christ as Son of God co-existing with the Father textual - was there a Dawnfather Schism around whether the Dawnchild was a separate mortal? Was there a Reformation about how the Dawnfather's Pope kept selling indulgences? Is that why the priest of the Dawnfather Grog & Pike offer a drink to doesn't partake because of a cultural shift between Protestant-Temperance-League-coded and Catholic-coded Dawnfather congregations? Why do I have so many questions about the religious organisation of one of the most important Prime Deities in Exandria and to Critical Role's 3 campaigns? How on earth were the cast (and us as the viewers!) meant to care about the gods if all they had were "really tall kings" instead of interrogating how religious organisations provide both a place of healing and community to a wide range of people and also a place of horrific harm and abuse for a wide range of people?

[dead-inside-demiboy]

Everytime I see people get upset about any form of media, especially indie/youtube stuff because the creators werent "inclusive" enough or "did it wrong" I just remember my irl friend, a cishet white guy who is fully an ally and friends with many poc, queer, and trans people telling me how he ran a dnd campaign with a group of characters that were each a color, and how his players were disappointed cause he made the only female one pink and the only non binary one the robot, and how the two of us had a good laugh about it.

Like give these people a break sometimes, we are all human, and especially if you aren't a part of a minority, sometimes you just want to tell a story and aren't thinking of how many brownie points you can slip in. Also, we are all dumbasses! Irl we let the people in our life be stupid sometimes, lets extend the same kindness online please.

Yes, inclusivity is great and we should be asking larger companies to tell more stories with different perspectives, but also lets not harass people and indie storytellers for these same things please? We are all stupid humans and a lot of people don't have the big eye of the internet to give them the "correct" beliefs.

[samwinchesterism]

my tweets from a few days ago when this who knows dean better discourse hit twitter being immediately proven right by the deangirls and deancas fools in the notes of that stupid poll i just reblogged like "well ME and MY sibling are like THIS which means DEAN is like that and also [something that sounds smart but doesn't have any reference to or any support in the actual text of the show but is what i personally feel is true about the characters]" so i think ive cracked it

[fayewoodss]

i log onto twitter

i see twitter call a 21 year old a minor

i log out of twitter

[ingravinoveritas]

Been seeing this picture going around a lot today, and just to let folks know, David's sweatshirt isn't a generic "College" sweater--it's actually an homage/copy of a sweater from the 1978 movie Animal House! John Belushi as Bluto wore the sweater in the film:

And it's apparently a sweater David is quite fond of, as he's worn it on multiple occasions prior to this:

[hyperlexichypatia]

Having children and going to college are two life activities done by people within an incredibly wide age range, so it’s completely bonkers that either one is considered an age marker.

And by “bonkers” I mean ageist, classist, and eugenicist.

There is a wide range of ages at which people go to college (many people never do, by choice or by circumstance, which is fine). There is a wide range of ages at which people have children (many people never do, by choice or by circumstance, which is fine). They don’t have to be done in any particular time, or in any particular order, or at all. They should both be far more affordable than they currently are, ideally free, but that’s another day’s post. 

Half of college students in the U.S. are over age 25, and 23% are parents. When people refer to college students as “children,” I always correct them on both points – young adults are not children, and also, most college students are not young adults. The notion that all college students are single, childless young adults aged 18-23, who are living essentially an extension of their K-12 schooling controlled by their parents, is a cultural norm of only a minority subculture of people in the U.S., one with… more financial resources than average. I’m reluctant to use the word “privilege,” because I don’t believe being controlled by one’s parents really is a privilege, but it’s certainly a bourgeois class norm. 

Similarly, the cultural norm that people can only start having children when they’re completely finished with schooling, in their late 20s at the earliest, and married or partnered, is not at all reflective of the reality of many people’s reproductive choices. 

Several years ago, I briefly did some freelance writing for a magazine aimed at college students, and in one article, I used a hypothetical example involving "babysitting your friend's kids." My editor returned it with a note that a college student wouldn't have friends with kids. Not even that a college student wouldn't have kids -- already a false premise -- but that a college student wouldn't have friends with kids. This has stuck in my mind for years as an example of how absolutely out-of-touch people in this narrow subculture are about the educational and reproductive choices of others.

There are material consequences of the erasure of student parents, too, like a serious lack of accessible childcare for students' children.

“What could a 20 year old and a 35 year old possibly have in common?? One is still in college, and the other might have kids already!” 

Actually, they might both be in college. 

Or maybe neither is.

They might have met in the same college class. 

They might both have kids. 

Or maybe neither does.

Maybe the 20 year old already has one or more kids, and the 35 year old has none. 

Maybe they each have a baby, and they met in the same parent group and hang out at playdates. 

Maybe the 35 year old is pregnant with xyr first baby and asking advice from the 20 year old who’s pregnant with her third. 

Maybe the 35 year old left school when he had his first kid, and now he and his now-17-year-old are starting college at the same time (I know there’s at least one movie with this premise). 

Or, maybe, the 20 year old is a childless college student, and the 35 year old is a college graduate with kids, and they could still have plenty in common, because age, educational situation, and family arrangement aren’t the sum total of who a person is. 

One of my mom’s longest-lasting friends of several decades was someone she met when they were 44 and 18, respectively, with a 3-year-old and 1-year-old kid, respectively, living in student housing. This is not as unusual a situation as people think it is. Fortunately, this happened before the brain maturity myth had taken hold, so no one accused my mom of "grooming" or being "predatory" or "emotionally inappropriate behavior" towards her younger friend, even if she was occasionally mistaken for her friend's mother.

Age diversity and prevalence of student parents are even more widespread at community colleges and all-online college programs (for obvious reasons, as those types of programs often have more flexible scheduling). In the online college program I'm doing now, my classmates include 20-year-old parents, 50-year-old grandparents, childfree 40-year-olds, and pretty much every combination of age and family type possible.

I'm so glad the real world doesn't conform to the ridiculous notion of "life stages."

[kaurwreck]

I'm sincere when I say I don't know how y'all have the energy to scrutinize Mori treating his successors like they're competent when the Port Mafia's skill users have been culled thrice over within seven years by men who can't act right (Rimbaud, Verlaine, Shibusawa, Gides, Fyodor), and the longevity of the tripartite framework relies on Mori not patronizing who's left.

Especially considering, like, there are foreign military police in modern Japan, British Somaliland appears to still exist, and Ango has seemingly kept Taneda in a medically induced coma for an irreversible amount of time so that he can unilaterally leverage Taneda's fictional authority within a very-historically-real cabinet in the Japanese government that hasn't existed irl since the Meiji constitution.

Like, I'm not asking anyone to engage with media in any other way than the way they enjoy most. It's just. Has anyone else noticed bsd!Russia appears to have annexed bsd!Abkhazia and bsd!South Ossetia.

All of this to say: you don't really have to beat the same dead horses if you don't want to. If you do, then by all means, lay into Equus with your whole chest. But, also. There's a lot in bsd the fandom scarcely, if at all, touches, and the incongruity between the work's layers and worldbuilding and even niche fandom engagement with the material is stark.

[weird-machine]

TIL that approximately 41% of first marriages end in divorce, 60% of second marriages end in divorce, and 73% of third marriages end in divorce.

[juniperseph]

Okay i finally finished MisMag so i can have opinions on the discourse.

TLDR: good effort but could be better

They did a good job critiqueing HP from a world building POV, and a racial diversity POV with most of the people on the table and the PCs being POC

But i think the main/loudest problem about JKR more than anything is that she's a proud TERF. They should've adressed that by having actual trans main characters and people on the table (i know Erika is trans, but Dream/K themself didnt even consider being trans until the final episode).

They can do better than just saying "fuck TERFs" by actually having trans representation especially transfem rep which i KNOW dropout has (Persephone is RIGHT THERE)

And like, even the cis players can choose to have trans characters (like Oscar Montoya playing Rue in ACOFAF) but no they just chose to make cis characters.

It's kinda sad because i KNOW what dropout is capable of in terms of representation and inclusion. They do care about representation and i know that. But at the end of the day i think MisMag kinda falls short on that aspect.

[luminescentmoth]

I know a lot of people see ace discourse as being a purely online thing but there really is a certain raw pain in having your friends debate in front of your face whether or not you "count" as queer. Then you get home from school and open up social media and every positive post about asexuality has been coopted and twisted to make fun of people like you. You want to make a presentation for a debate competition about asexuality but AVEN isn't listed as a website you're allowed to source from. There aren't really any resources you can use, not unless you're willing to risk disqualification. You try to get other queer/LGBT students to join your effort to get AVEN put on the list. They say "i just don't think asexuals are an oppressed group." "Idk if asexuality is something we should grouping with LGBT."

People were less cruel and vitriolic irl than online, but there were still real life consequences to the discourse around asexuality. It wasn't just some petty terminally online bickering we can look back on and laugh.

[freyholland]

That era of my life predates my tumblr one, but I was a very big Leliana fan back in the day. I actually got into a debate in one of my Queer Studies courses back in college because someone brought her up as an example of Bad Queer Rep because she was “crazy”. I nearly started hurling chairs

[moregraceful]

hope everyone who got a creator subscription notif from me today realizes something deeply unwell and bizarre happened to me in march

[beedreamscape]

WARNING FOR COMPLAINING 🥰

Now that all eps recordings are up... the ExU Divergence thumbnails are so ugly.

The image quality is weird, the lighting looks blown out, they look awkward, their outfits are mismatched.

And the people here (Divergence cast) are HOT. Ffs.

See? Cohesion! Sexy.

Look at it side by side with Downfall, and it wasn't even ExU proper. But Divergence's doesn't sell the tone of what we're about to watch AT ALL! Why those clothes? Why that gold frame that looks so awkward?

By all means do something to differ it from previous seasons but also make sure I can look and recognize that is Exandria Unlimited.

Please, this was THE season to put them all in black outfits or something grunge. Go raid Taliesin's old closet, you'll find them in there.