I'm Grateful God Gave Me This Student

The Last One of the Day's Office Hours

Jun 20, 2024

Today I was exhausted all day but taught through 2 , 3 hour back to back classes in Lost Angeles. Institutionally this is frowned upon, but I carved some time out of class lecture to meet with students one after another, as many as I could, one on one, to grade their exams from March right in front of them. That way I point out stuff real time and I only have to go over it once. If I grade it before hand, I have to refresh my mind when I meet with them. And I have to write the comments, which they don't read. This way, I don't write comments, I verbally tell them and show them. This part of the book, you don't have it there. This part you don't have. This part you don't have. You need to master the material. If you don't, this is the grade you get. And it's one after another of , uh, oh. Okay. With a few exceptions. A couple B-s and B+s, one A. One. ONE A.

These kids are very delicate. Most are "normal" LA kids. We are at the point in our civilization where "normal" is terrifying. One I'm pretty sure just got out of jail, which is why he missed a few weeks (gang kid--trying to go straight). They are clueless about 90% or so of them. The product of the broken education system and broken families and leftist secular anti-intellectualism.

I have convinced these kids that grade inflation won't fly .

They are pretty humble kids, though. If anything, I scare them. But also I have been gentle on them. I put off showing them their grades until now because most would've dropped and taken another professor. I'm not kidding. What does that tell you?

It tells you I am rare.

So, we play these games. I hook them as long as I can without inflating grades. Which means they get a jolt, but by then, hopefully my hook is in them firmly. I'm struggling against the 1) secular current, the 2) Marxist /fascist current in public education, the thought-control, lazy-programming at tax-payer expense (anti-choice, anti-charter, anti-Republican) 3) ubiquitous, corrupt, grade inflation , 4) Democrat controlled media, Hollywood, gaming, pornography, drug-culture, gang-culture in LA.

One kid with a hoodie --the one who got an A in Logic--told me that he loved my teaching style. This was the very last student I saw. So by that time I was pretty wiped, emotionally and spiritually. I was just dazed listening to him. I told him whatever he was doing seemed to work so just do that for prep for the next exam. He said, his method was just to listen to what I said. He said, you teach it so thoroughly, and you just pound the basics over and over and you're funny. So, he said, I just did what you told us to do.

As he was saying this, I marveled that it was that simple.

Of course, I know it is that simple. But what are you gonna believe, 20 mostly failing students, or your lying eyes and lying experience.

I was grateful God gave that kid to me as the last one. I was starting to feel like my techniques were some Potemkin village, that it was all an illusion, a grand illusion.

But I was able to end the day at 10 pm with, they aren't obeying my orders and are suffering accordingly.

One example: lots of stuff in logic you have to memorize. And you get this rebellion against that. It's always been there in the student spirit but now you have an entire political party that encourages the rebellion--you didn't have that before the New Left took over education at the end of Viet-effing-nam.

I give them my personal example of teaching Chinese kids English. Chinese kids who speak Chinese at home, whose parents don't read English and can't help them. (This is part of my experience). So with the small SAT prep kids, you do spelling. Starting with the alphabet. There is no alphabet in Chinese. You have to memorize each character, the stroke order, how it sounds, and what it means. Three things. In English we have 26 letters, in Chinese there are over 10,000 characters. You can't sound out the characters. You have to memorize how they sound.

Of course, in English you have to memorize how to say the words, too. You can't simply sound out the words if you know the alphabet. "Is", for instance, sounds like it's spelled with a "z". This confuses kids. They want to understand. But I tell them they have to memorize it before they understand it. Similarly, "island" doesn't sound the way it's spelled, even after you get the "z" thing down for "is." I tell them, you just have to memorize it, or you won't understand it. Same with the "v" sound in "of," the "f" sound in "off" (strength in numbers), the "f" sound in "cough" but not in "through," and the "oo" sound the latter but not in "ugh."

Then I write a sentence in Chinese. A simple sentence that says "I am a Chinese person," and I write it really fast, and put the correct tones, and I try to pronounce the tones correctly. And I ask them what it means. And of course they don't know. And I tell them I memorized this 25 years ago, and that's why I understand it.

我是一个中国人. I have the thing to draw out this stuff on my phone. It's nice--it predicts what you're gonna draw after a couple of strokes and then offers you 3-7 options you can choose, so it goes faster.

The lesson is, for some things, you can't understand it, then learn it. You must memorize it, learn it, so that you can understand it later. The same lesson applies to many different things.

This last kid just took my advice. Did flash cards on the vocab. Did drills. Etc.

I drove home after chasing a racoon around a lawn at 10:30 pm in Lost Angeles (on campus). Deserted.

When I got home over an hour later I was wide awake and not exhausted anymore. A mocking bird was singing down the alley in some tree somewhere. The same one that's been singing all night for weeks now. The streets were quiet, and the air was mild, slightly cold, actually, and a tad damp. Which is odd for Southern California because this is an arid climate. 90% of our water is piped in from hundreds of miles away. There is no water source for Southern California.

Much of my work here feels keyed in to a feeling, an intuition, that disaster is coming to the United States. And probably California. Sometimes I feel Noahic in a way, preparing for disaster. A disaster no one else senses is coming, but which I can feel, around the corner. One where, the prepared one will be the default leader. Some of this is my Enneagram 6 coming out--we sense danger before others do, and are on high alert when others are asleep. Head on a swivel. Noticing things that most miss. Adjuncting only exacerbates that tendency. It's hard to describe. Sometimes it makes you feel very alone.

One time I was on that campus and I opened my trunk and realized I left a gun in there, a Colt revolver, a police service pistol from the 1970s that I had bought used from a retired police officer's heir who didn't like guns and didn't realize what a nice hand gun it was . I looked up the serial number, made in 1970, a Colt Metropolitan .38 . Butter smooth action. Beautiful gun. Amazing grips, and balance. Tight lock up. Slight holster wear. The guy made detective and didn't carry it most of his career after that.

Anyway, I looked down and saw the gray sleeve it was in, the one the retired cop who sold it to me gave it to me in . And just knowing I had that Colt in the trunk, with me, made me feel about half the anxiety I had. Half of it was gone, poof, just like that. With just a revolver. A week later the school shooting happened--all those unarmed people, dead. Allowed to die by law-enforcement. By school officials who disarm teachers, staff, coaches, janitors. These same school people send me my students, the ones who fail exams, when they are grade-inflated.

Either I'm the one missing something, or they are.

I think they are.

The Republican Professor

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