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Thursday, February 2, 2017

If trump was my student...

My day job is teaching a college course on comparative religion. The past two weeks I have found myself wanting to say to our new president many of the same things I tell my least successful students.
* Do your homework. Read and study before you start spouting off nonsense. You should not need another world leader to explain what the Geneva Convention is.
* Quit focusing on yourself. Some of my students try to avoid thinking and writing about unfamiliar topics by keeping the focus on themselves and their experience. Shut up about crowd sizes and TV ratings.
* Think before posting. Some students fire off quick replies without thinking through what they want to say and how to say it. Donald - stop with the tweets already.
* Don't be a bully. Don't pick fights. Don't be a jerk. That kind of behavior quickly leads to disciplinary action. I will not allow anyone to make my classroom a hostile environment. I simply will not have it. If you have an issue with a classmate - or the prime minister of Australia - deal with it calmly and privately.
* Get your facts straight. Use credible, objective sources. Hint: Britbeirt is not the paper of record for anything other than hate. Posting or repeating incorrect information will get you on my bad side quicker than just about anything else. I will ask where you got your information and I will correct you publicly.
* Practice professional communication. Many of my students have been out of school awhile so their vocabulary, grammar, clarity, tone, and sentence structure need work. I would strongly recommend writing and proofreading workshops to student trump*.
Bear in mind, these are all things I expect from college students. The leader of the free world should have a broad knowledge base, emotional maturity, intellectual curiosity, oral and written communication skills, and social graces beyond what might be expected from a typical college freshman. The current one does not.
If trump* was my student, I would be anxious for the term to be over so I would not have to deal with him anymore. Unfortunately, a presidential term is far longer than one academic quarter.
If trump* was my student, I would contact his academic adviser early in the term to express concern about his mental state and suggest he might not be up to the task he has taken on.
If trump* was my student, he would take up far more of my time and energy than any other student, likely more than *all* my other students unless I was particularly careful and conscious about allocating my resources. I would still try to teach him because he needs to know this study. He needs to learn critical thinking and opening himself to others' experiences.
If trump* was my student, I would hope he would drop my class and just go away, yes, despite the teacherly attitude stated above. If he did not leave of his own volition, I would be sorely tempted to do something I have never done in 15 years of teaching college. I would throw him out of my class for the sake of my sanity and so the rest of the class could get on with learning without his disruptive and destructive presence.
Impeach trump* now.

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