Today is our first day of classes. I used to be excited about it, and now it is just a giant pit in my stomach.
For the record, just so it doesn’t have to be imagined anymore in other classrooms and by people who have never so much as said hello to me:
Have things changed since you started teaching? Are student more arrogant than they used to be and less curious? Are have you become more curmudgeonly as you’ve been teaching for longer?
The more time that goes on, the more time we have to be molded into the perfect amorphous blobs that the state wants us to be, subservient to the intelligentsia’s every whim. Whenever I think that there must have been a better time, I remember what my dad used to tell me about New York City in the 1970’s, and about how it was brought to the brink of bankruptcy by years of dishonest “civil servants” and Tammany Hall. He also reminds me that before car congestion was an issue in New York, the big question was where to put all of the horse shit. My point being that I don’t for one second question our resiliency and ability to innovate. The tides might be against Reason, but they have always been, ever since the Greeks opined for a state that could help craft more virtuous men.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/05/nyregion/recalling-new-york-at-the-brink-of-bankruptcy.html