And it's not about my car insurance. We found out a couple days back that one of my colleagues will remain on sabbatical/leave for the 2007-08 school year. While that isn't good news in and of itself--I rather like this particular colleague--it means that T will be able to retain her visiting professor gig for a second year. That's contingent on whether or not she gets a tenure track offer from another school. If that happens--she's on the job market, as she should be--she'd have to accept and we'd be looking for another visiting scholar.
Provided she doesn't do something silly like show porn in class, which she threatened to do today, the job is hers. You should have seen one of the members of our department shoot out of his office when T mentioned the word "porn." Too funny. In her defense, she was talking about how elements of porn have entered television, movies, advertising, and the like. Her phrasing about what she inteneded to teach in class, however, was purposefully vague and ambiguous. Having known her for years, I read through the ambiguity--I'm privy to the secret T code! Others are not so lucky and haven't quite figured her out (and I hope they never do).
4 comments:
Oops, I dragged my students to see porn, and then wound up with them seeing film of my naked boobs - not from porn, but from a performance art piece! Can I forget any chances of getting a spring teaching assignment, you think?
Sheila
At our school, the performance art would be fine. The porn . . . not so much. That would be crossing some boundaries. We can, and do, talk about porn in class, but I think "examples" would be a bit much.
How can you talk about porn but not look at it? Isn't that like trying to discuss Moby Dick without having read it???
s.
"How can you talk about porn but not look at it?"
I'm sure most students are quite familiar with what is meant by porn. I've talked about porn on any number of occassions without showing a single example and everyone seems to get it. In fact, I'd argue that it's inappropriate to show porn in most college classrooms--I MIGHT be able to make an exception for a graduate class concerning sexuality. Showing porn would make many of the students extremely uncomfortable (you should see them squirm during R-Rated nudity), uncomfortable to the point that learning stops. I suspect showing porn could also be dangerous to a non-tenured professor's career. That's not a risk I'm willing to take. I suspect Professor T is probably with me on this.
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