Student arrives twenty minutes late to final exam. Khawaja looks up expectantly.

Khawaja (apologetically, as though the default procedure was to wait twenty minutes to start an exam): We already got started. You ready for this?

Student: I’m ready to bommmb this [laughs]. I didn’t study at all. At. All.

Khawaja: Did you at least get a good night’s sleep? It’s more important than studying.

Student: No.

Khawaja: Hmm.

Student: Yo, I met a rapper last night at a concert. It was lit.

Khawaja: You went to a concert last night?

Student: It was lit.

Khawaja (with forced cheer and strained smile): Hmmm.

Student: A’ight. You know, I don’t think I really want to go to law school any more [laughs uproariously].

Khawaja: Right, so here’s the test.

Another pedagogical win–aka, Socratic voyage of self-discovery–fall semester 2019, Felician University.

Proof that people would rather die than ask simple questions of their so-called “superiors.”  Theirs was not to reason why–and evidently still isn’t.

My view on Afghanistan, circa 2008, from a review of Sarah Chayes’s much-praised book, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (2006).

A government policy cannot rest on an illogical, inarticulate sense of commitment, and cannot be premised on the quixotic thought that good intentions trump feasibility. But that is effectively what our Afghan policy rests on today. To ‘keep trying’ to occupy and rebuild Afghanistan is to sacrifice lives and money on an ill-defined, increasingly pointless, and probably Sisyphean venture. A thousand lives and billions of dollars into that quest, we’re no closer to its completion than when we were when we first started. That is as much a ‘punishment of virtue’ as anything Chayes describes. We’re entitled to ask when it will end.

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When you know that a semester’s worth of pedagogical efforts have been in vain: an email query I got from a student re the take-home final exam for Phil 100, Critical Thinking. The assignment was to read a controversial piece of writing and offer a critical assessment of the author’s reasoning.

Verbatim:

What do You mean by offer a critical assessment of his reasoning ?

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

–Martin Luther King, Jr. (1956), after the Montgomery Bus Boycott

For the first part of “Cashing the Check of Justice”–including some backstory and advice–go here.

The second part can essentially be summarized as follows:

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We’ve had our share of disagreements about the semantics of “terrorism” on this blog, but I think we can all admit that this claim, (supposedly) made by Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) about the recent shooting at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, makes no sense at all. From a story in The New York Times:

Senator Rick Scott of Florida, also a Republican, said the attack should be considered terrorism, regardless of the gunman’s motivation.

If we eliminate the gunman’s motivation altogether, then all we’re left with is the fact that a Saudi trainee shot some people at a naval air base. That fact by itself is consistent with an accident. But however we define it, an act of terrorism can’t be an accident. Continue reading →

Imagine there’s a reset button
that would restore those you love
to an earlier, saved state
before they left you
suddenly in anger
or slowly drifting away in boredom
before they betrayed you
or you betrayed them
or they thought you had
before they went mad
and forgot your name
or before they died
turned to rotting flesh underground
or incomprehensible ashes in a cardboard box

Imagine there’s a reset button
but someone else has it
and is about to delete
everything you’ve thought, felt, and done
since your last save point
someone who loves your past self so much
they’re willing to kill your present self to get it

Perhaps it has already happened

Here we go:

My initial, emotion-driven evaluation, when I started seeing the ad (over and over and over and over, watching NFL football), was negative.  I think I was responding to the woman seeming sort of unsure of herself, maybe weak in some way — and her husband “saving her” by getting her the machine.  I think this got my feminist hackles up.  However, upon reflection, I don’t think the commercial is sexist.  I don’t think it is about a husband wanting his “116 lb wife to be a 112 lb wife.”  It is about an unsure or insecure or unhappy person find strength in accomplishment — and being helped to this by a loved one, by her partner (and, somewhat oddly to my tastes, documenting the whole adventure via selfie).  I suspect that the woman playing this role (unsure, insecure, needing support) made me uncomfortable (even though I bring no simple egalitarian ideals to the table).  For the images and story of the commercial, in addition to capturing a conventional gender reality (but perhaps also non-conventional psycho-sexual reality) that is not, in itself, obviously objectionable, also easily fits into or slides into representations of gender and marriage roles that are unjust and oppressive.  Danger, Will Robinson, danger!  My emotional reaction, but not my considered judgment, more or less line up with the negative evaluation of the commercial as sexist.  Thoughts?

The New York Times recently reported this case, involving a high school English teacher fired for tweets she sent President Trump:

A high school English teacher in Texas who was fired after she sent tweets to President Trump asking him to rid her school of undocumented immigrants should be reinstated or be paid a year’s salary, a state agency ruled this week.

This is a case where (assuming the truth of the accusations against her) I can see the merit in complaints that the teacher created a hostile, even dangerous environment for students. But the facts of the case are somewhat unclear or contested, so I’m going to bypass that issue. Continue reading →