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Way back in the late 1990s, when American colleges were buckle-down
academies bristling with tough-but-fair professors and dedicated students,
Suck gave an
enthusiastic grade to
Teacherreview.com, Ryan Lathouwers's project to put student evaluations (of teachers)
on the web. Since then, we've enjoyed some exciting semesters: City College of
San Francisco professors
Jesse David Wall (Physics) and
Daniel Curzon-Brown (English) brought a
stunningly frivolous lawsuit against Lathouwers, and
saw it quickly thrown out of court, and Lathouwers now posts only CCSF
reviews, leaving the students of other schools to speak out at
Grade-it.com or the hard-2-surf
Teacherreviews.com.
Lately, however, the
battle for our classrooms has heated up. A self-described professor at an East Coast
school has started
Teachers Fight Back, a "safe haven" designed to "respond to the rising trend of irresponsible, anonymous student evaluation of teachers." For all the frequent complaints that the
students don't have to sign their names when they slam a teacher, the anonymous coward
behind Teachers Fight Back conceals his or her identity even from Network Solutions: A Whois lookup
reveals that the domain belongs to "Teacher Teacher" of "Boston St., Boston."
Nonetheless, English teacher Curzon-Brown, showing a striking indifference
to the dangling participle, tells the San Francisco Chronicle, "[I]nstead of being
passive and just taking what you get, it is a chance to turn the tables." Meanwhile,
Wall is hitting back with
Studentreview.org, which,
needless to say, contains many comical specimens of grammar-free posts by
some of CCSF's brightest young minds. "I worry more about the potential that (sic)
damage this destructive website can do to young teachers," Wall
laments.
Curzon-Brown, for his part, has reportedly registered
Judgereview.org to expose the black-robed villains who failed to support his war on the
first amendment; but so far there's nothing up on that site.
It's all bitter, hard-fought, and about as meaningful as an Associate's Degree.
Teacher evaluations are designed and executed
to give students the illusion of authority. Anybody who has spent any time around
college administrators knows that the complaints of disgruntled students are viewed with
nothing but contempt, and that those student evaluations they hand out at the end of the
semester generally end up unread at the bottom of some archival dumpster.
War crimes tribunals may not be the first place you look for encouraging stories,
but from the trial of the "Butare Four" comes a piece of news sure to gladden the
hearts of parochial school students everywhere — the prospect of seeing two nuns
convicted of crimes against humanity. Prosecutors in the proceeding in Belgium
contend that Sisters Gertrude Mukangango and Julienne Kizito
assisted in the
massacre of an estimated 5,000 Rwandan Tutsis in 1994. Sister Gertrude, mother
superior of the convent at Butare's Monastery of Sovu, allegedly attempted to lock
fleeing refugees out of her building, then showed some of that stern nun discipline
by calling the victims "dirt" and bringing in armed guards to evict them. Sister Julienne
helped out the killers by distributing cans of gasoline to help to burn people alive (one of
the incinerated folks was reportedly an employee of her own convent).
In the old scholastic spirit of keeping people
from talking out of turn, Sister Gertrude later
sued a
reporter who exposed her role in the massacre.
It's a sad tale. But for nun-haters everywhere, the trial in
Belgium is the best news since Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers
took a ruler to Sister Doris Gormley. All we need now is for somebody to register
Sisterreview.com.
Susan Sarandon is not a nun, but she
plays one
on MGM/UA home video. This week, the timeless beauty lends her world-renowned
puss to the hard-pressed people of the developing world, posing with a couple of llamas in
a shill for
Heifer International. The Little Rock
Ark.-based charity provides livestock to Nepalese farmers, and its pitch to Suck includes an all-animal order form: You can pick up a draft horse for the low, low price of $1200,
a water buffalo for $250, and a flock of chicks for a mere three sawbucks. "Is this an
answer to world hunger?" asks the Oscar-winning star. "Absolutely!" Unfortunately,
the pitch leaves much to be desired. We scanned the order form in vain to find out how
much it would cost to send Sarandon paramour Tim Robbins to some Himalayan
family farm, where the lanky actor would undoubtedly prove handy at harvest time. Ultimately we came close to putting up 120 bucks
for a pig instead, but the
sheer volume of
charity pitches we get every day has forced us to be selective. We're not giving money
to any organization that doesn't let us
adopt pagan babies.
After three decades, its very own market bubble and untold billions
of hours of deferred personal hygiene, the Internet has finally fulfilled
its original promise: putting you in verbal contact with someone making
monkey noises.
Cited as the "original" monkey phone call,
monkeyphonecall.com will, for a
mere ten dollars, ring up the person of your choosing, introduce themselves
and then hoot and screech for thirty seconds. Given the powerful
undercurrents of
monkey affection that rage just below the surface of the Web, and the apparent
profitability of the market-leading fake monkey-sound provider, we can
envision a day when monkeys start
performing every task of the
New Economy:
investing venture capital,
developing business plans,
running Amazon. Hell, they couldn't do much worse.
courtesy of The Sucksters Copyright © 1994-2001 Automatic Media Inc. All rights reserved. Suck is part of Automatic Media, home of Plastic, Feed, and AltCulture. |
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