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'U Can't Talk to Ur Professor Like This' (nytimes.com)
Millennial college students have become far too casual when they talk with their professors, reads an opinion piece on The New York Times. Addressing professors by their first names and sending misspelled, informal emails with text abbreviations have become common practices (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; here's a syndicated source) among many students than educators would like, Molly Worthen, an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill adds. From the article: Over the past decade or two, college students have become far more casual in their interactions with faculty members. My colleagues around the country grumble about students' sloppy emails and blithe informality. "When students started calling me by my first name, I felt that was too far, and I've got to say something," Mark Tomforde, a math professor at the University of Houston said. Sociologists who surveyed undergraduate syllabuses from 2004 and 2010 found that in 2004, 14 percent addressed issues related to classroom etiquette; six years later, that number had more than doubled, to 33 percent. This phenomenon crosses socio-economic lines. My colleagues at Stanford gripe as much as the ones who teach at state schools, and students from more privileged backgrounds are often the worst offenders. [...] Insisting on traditional etiquette is also simply good pedagogy. It's a teacher's job to correct sloppy prose, whether in an essay or an email. And I suspect that most of the time, students who call faculty members by their first names and send slangy messages are not seeking a more casual rapport. They just don't know they should do otherwise -- no one has bothered to explain it to them. Explaining the rules of professional interaction is not an act of condescension; it's the first step in treating students like adults.
This is basic stuff, and they graduate high school without learning it. What did they put on their college application, a plagiarized form letter?
If you want to be taking just mildly serious, don't talk like that to anyone.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
Y did u flunk mezzzzz?
The community college I went to was pretty laid back with most instructors being called by their last name. The other community college in the district was more uptight with instructors insisting on being called "Instructor" before their last name. Never understood that stick-up-the-wazoo attitude, as they were teaching the same material and getting paid the same rate.
The only person I know who uses "U" and "ur" in serious correspondence is over 50 years old. It's not a millennial problem. It's an idiot problem.
No. It is not the job of college professors to correct students unable to communicate correctly. That was the job of the high school teachers. Students unable to communicate correctly should not have been admitted to college, because they shouldn't have received their high school diploma.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I'd never have used a professor's first name unless the age gap was minimal, and they had explicitly said it was OK... BUT... we walked half-way across campus in 95-degree heat in 90% humidity, to a temporary/portable building that sat maybe 30 students... Then we get told that unlike just about every other class we'd been in, this philosophy teacher (a condescending hippy, ironically, enough) didn't allow drinks... I watched an argument get pretty heated once, and started wondering, hey, who's paying who to be here?
I had a sucky sig.
People have gotten much more informal with EVERYONE. They have no respect or perception of authority or seniority.
Hell, 10+ years ago, Scrubs even did an episode where the (older) Kelso was trying to get through to this overweight girl about the dangers of surgery and she basically talked over him and Google'd everything as he spoke and he went on about how back-in-the-day, being a doctor "meant something" and you got things like free hair cuts, not to mention RESPECT.
So if a comedy show noticed this 10+ years ago, it's been going on for a lot longer. I've gotten far in life simply by treating everyone with respect. People notice and appreciate it when you go out of your way to recognize their inherent human dignity.
Students addressing their professors by their first names isn't necessarily a sign of entitlement, poor manners, or bad judgement. On the contrary, it is sometimes a clumsy attempt at social engineering. You try to make the professor think of you as a friend or peer, and that makes it less likely that your "friend" will give you a bad grade.
As a means of manipulation, it doesn't cut much mustard in engineering. Very few of my colleagues would tolerate it, and very few students I have met attempted it. But I could certainly see how it might be more of a problem in the liberal arts, where grading rubrics are much more subjective.
Doesn't really matter that they talk to their professors....
The problem is that they are writing papers like this. And communicating to potential employers like this. There's an entire generation if kiddiespeaking illiterate sons of bitches that can't figure out why their attempts to get meaningful employment go unanswered.
It's almost as if both instructors and students prefer to be addressed in ways which make them comfortable and feel they deserve that basic level of respect.
When my grandparents were in college, they were addressed by their professors as Mr. and Ms. Now, professors address their students by first name. I'm all for insisting on correct spelling and grammar, and for respecting the use of Dr. or Professor, but perhaps the faculty could win support if they treated their students like the adults they are.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
nuf sed
Humor aside, your instructor was correct. Professional life requires the ability to effectively communicate to a large audience. Appeasing your friends and acquaintances is not the same thing. Sadly we have had educators claiming what "you" want is all that matters, to the detriment of millions of students.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
But on the other hand, some students are starting to demand that professors address them according to the personal pronouns with which they personally identify.
To which all professors should respond with some variant of "You're welcome to your own self-image, but I am not required to participate in it."
the usa is ranked round 23rd in math and god knows what in literacy
*Around
your all doomed there ok , if you want to teach kids that might actually learn move to another nation
*You're
I'd also like to see proper sentence capitalization, and punctuation usage other than excessive exclamation marks. Really, do 13 exclamation marks somehow add more to a sentence than a single one?
Overall I give that post a D. While comprehensible, it needs a lot of work.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
This is 2 different problems.
1) Not being able to write appropriately. "U" isn't a word, and using it as such is never appropriate. When you write a formal report, it should be using appropriate words and phrasing.
2) Calling an instructor by their first name. I'm not sure I can understand the problem here. If I hire a plumber, do I have to address him by some weird title, or can I simply call him by his first name? Why is it different if I hire a teacher? Does the teacher address the students as Master/Mistress? Why the double standard?
Now if they're being insulting in some other way, maybe there's a problem, but if they are being respectful I can't see the problem with using the instructor's first name. Pretentious titles don't do anything for me, if you want my respect, earn it, don't demand it, and I'll do the same in return.
Look to your left. Now look to your right. None of you are going to have jobs after you graduate, and you'll each be in debt for a couple of hundred grand. So it doesn't matter how you fucking address the fucking professor. You're still gonna be fucked.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Henceforward you will address me as "my lord", "sire" or "your majesty". Failure to do so will result in failing this class.
I think you missed the point. It appears AC was deliberately making as many mistakes as possible.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Everyone makes the occasional mistake, but a common attribute I see in people who use "u" and "ur" is that almost all of their reading is comprised of internet forums where those constructs are ubiquitous. They do not spend time reading books as a form of entertainment. The misspellings have been deeply ingrained until they start to look correct, and there is no counterbalancing force from exposure to correct spelling and grammar.
> They just don't know they should do otherwise -- no one has bothered to explain it to them.
Or, their parents have explained it to them, like, a bazillion times, and they just roll their eyes and do whatever the hell they were going to do anyway.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The professor in the summary seems to be confused about the power structure.
He thinks he is the boss and the students are subordinates.
The basic reality is quite the opposite
The students are the ones paying the professor's salary. So they can talk to him as appropriate to talk to "the help". In other words they can talk to the professor any way they damn please.
The professor on the other hand had better address his bosses AKA students as Mr. X or Ms. Y if he want to continue to be paid.
I don't respond to or upvote ACs
I was in college in the mid-90's and forms of address were part of departmental culture. For one of my majors, we addressed professors by their first name. The other, "Professor." My students now call me either by my first name or Professor, and I don't particularly care which. Academics who need the social validation are not particularly charming (the worst are PhDs who insist on being called "Dr." in their off-campus lives).
Pose matters dumb ass.
Well blame boomers. They didn't want to raise their children. They didn't instill the bullshit Victorian upper class ass kissing. Now they can deal with it.
In class, I would almost never say "well, remember what she / or he said." Normally I would say "well, remember what Jane / or Jim / or you [pointing] said."
This is because like most people (in my experience), I only tend to use 3rd person pronouns when people are absent.
Moreover, what if their pronoun were "they"? Can you imagine how uninformative, unclear, or even ridiculous, it would be to say, "well, remember what they said?"
So I have never understood this request, unless they are demanding me to refer to them in their pronoun of choice when they are absent. Given that I have a hard enough time remembering my students' names, that's not likely to happen.
Of course, those are not pronouns.
Do the professors and instructors address the students as Mr. or Ms. Student ? Show the respect you demand and you will often find the respect you deserve. My advisors always addressed me as Sir or Mr. except in the most informal of circumstances. In the later years we were on a first name basis outside of campus but always a formal basis in class, lecture or lab.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It's so scary that university administration has so warped our students that they believe this crap.
What did the Japanese guy say when asked whether he knows the other famous Sumerian city? "Uruk, hai."
Ezekiel 23:20
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/s...
"We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway). Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers is not rewarding; we'd rather spend our time elsewhere."
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Do you address them by their first names? That didn't used to be the case either you know. If you want them to call you Mr. Lastname, you should be calling them Mr/Ms Lastname as well.
I teach in a professional setting, we would never dream of asking our students to address us by anything other than our first names, they're adults, and we treat them as such.
Insisting that they use a title to address you, while not doing so in return indicates that you are trying to demonstrate that you are "better" than they are. Yet they're the ones who pay your salary, maybe you should respect them as well.
If you are in fact using a title to address them, then you are simply indicating a very formal and detached setting. I have less of an issue in that case, however I do think it's rather stuck-up, and probably not particularly conducive to actual learning.
I am a university professor. I prefer that my students address me as "Dr." or "Professor", BUT I address them as "Mr." or "Ms." (or "Mrs." in the case of a female married student who reveals that she is married.) It goes both ways. I find that the formality helps the students to take the class a little more seriously.
I am aware of a professor who assigned a negative point total to an assignment.
The student had submitted an absolutely abysmal paper.
It was entirely written in text message speak, and did not contain a single capital letter nor a single punctuation mark of any kind.
This was enough to earn the student 0 points toward the assignment.
The instructions to hand in the assignment were to print and staple the pages and place them on the instructor's desk, with five points being deducted for papers that weren't stapled together.
The student thus earned -5 points for the assignment.
I earned my degree ~15 years ago now. I didn't even realize that earning negative points was possible.
I guess they've had to improvise the grading scale to make room on the low end.
And here's the thing. Years ago it DID go both ways, teachers addressed their students as Mr/Miss, and students addressed their teachers with titles as well. But many years ago teachers stopped using titles with their students, and now they are upset when the students do the same.
If you don't think it's respectful when a student uses your first name instead of a title, then don't call them by their first name either.
My teacher introduced himself as "Professor Blank", so I called him that. OTOH, I had no problem with him calling me by my first name. I never really thought of myself as a "Mr. Magnon" anyway.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
yes. ...
Do you have any those titles ... sir?
the demand is higher than the supply. if these snowflakes have bad attitudes. i'm sure there are other snowflakes willing to have better ones.
I was intending to address you as "Mr. Magnificent" and refer to you as "The Wondrous Johan Magnificent, Esquire" to others, but have it your way, sire.
Academia didn't used to be as much of a business, now it is. Get over it.
OK, so we've established that in the US, students can shit all over their teachers. No big surprise there. But what about the civilized rest of the world, though?
Ezekiel 23:20
I would hope that this would be irony.
and tell me with a straight face that you're gainfully employed. Good job on actually using quotation marks, this time, you lazy twit.
I know it's fashionable to have flat, zero-hierarchy organizations and brief communications styles, but I can tell you from 20+ years of working, clear spoken and written communication is not some irrelevant concept from a bygone age. I'm not one of those people who demands respect simply because of a rank or power dynamic, but I will have a lot more respect for someone who addresses others politely, states their opinions like adults, listens to others' points of view, and can write clearly. It also works both ways -- in my experience I have been able to get much further in having people see things my way than colleagues with more abrupt communication styles.
I am firmly in the introvert crowd, and not a salesy type in the least. But, no matter how introverted you are, learning a few common social courtesies is critical to being successful in any setting. I'm not even talking about ladder-climbing brown-nosing style success -- I know part of the reason I'm kept around and allowed to do interesting technical work is that my bosses know I'll make them look good and be professional; in short, they don't have to worry I'll say something stupid.
Thankfully, I wasn't born in this country. I learned English starting from the 4th grade, and by watching a lot of television. This was back in the mid-1980s, in New York City. All this horseshit about English being malleable is just laziness. Where I come from, a Spanish-speaking, Caribbean country, we address elders with designated nouns, verbs, and adverbs. "Dime" and "digame" are used for people of different ages and familiarity, thus you are earn your way to how you are addressed. At my age, I detest being called "buddy" or "primo"; I am not your fucking friend or your cousin. I expect to be addressed as "mister". I thank God everyday that I grew reading Orwell and had awesome teachers starting all those many years ago. Teach your children to respect the rules of English and stop turning out lazy little fucks who can't listen or speak.
A 22-year-old college senior was about six years old for 9/11 and the new millennium and about five years old for Y2K. The generation that came of age around the new millennium is no longer in college. There might be a problem with college students today, but very few of them are millennials in any real sense of the word.
Medieval studies. Been there, done that..... M'lord.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Growing up in the PNW, I was blown away when I spent a year in Louisiana. Everybody puts Mr. in front of even first names. If the name is unknown, it's Sir. I was really surprised at first. In my travels, I've found that the closer to the coast you get, the more words are abbreviated and dropped. Once you can see the ocean it becomes sms shorthand speak
"lol wut dood? u liek propr english? ROFL y u salty bro?"
Mass communication has its side effects.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Ever interacted with a cop? they have actual authority over you, not the pretend authority the teacher has, and yet they call you Sir or Maam. Respect goes both ways, if you want it, you need to give it out as well.
Trying to rub it in that you have the authority by forcing other people to call you by a title while refusing to do the same doesn't get you any respect, and it certainly doesn't make you look good.
Replying to undo rating.
It isn't, but if the instructors insist on it, why wouldn't it work both ways?
yo dawg that b phat n shit
ya feel me dawg
Words have two types of meaning, both connotation and denotation. Two words may have the exact same denotation, but quite different connotation.
The primary purpose of clothing is clothing is to cover the skin. Other purposes of clothing, such as "saggin" pants, dress shirts, and lab coats include communicating information about one's values, role in the current context, and standards of behavior. Certain clothing suggests that the wearer believes snitches get stiches, other clothing indicates the opposite.
Similarly, the tone of language communicates all of the above and much more. If you are unable to understand the difference between "yo dawg u b trippin" and "Sir, I believe your perspective may lack appropriate context", you may be lacking an essential skill. The two sentences convey quite different connotations, though the same denotation.
Would flat out delete emails that were not properly composed and I cannot blame them. It takes too much time to decipher someone's run on sentence. Take the time, be professional, and compose a good, will-written email.
German: Fick Du vs Ficken Sie.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As far as I can tell it starts in High School. I'm amazed at the stories I hear from my high schoolers about the things that are now permissible that never would have been allowed in the late 80s when I was in high school. Then again, the kids who go to their high school aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. One of my daughters was in an 11th grade science class and she was the only one who had ever heard of plate tectonics. Another time she had missed the previous English class and the teacher informed her that the other students had spent the entire previous class broken up into groups of 5 trying to list all the grammar rules they could think of (e.g., start a sentence with a capital letter) and he would give her 5 minutes to do the assignment on her own. She was able to come up with more rules in those five minutes than all the other groups combined.
Adulthood (as formerly known) used to involve kissing stone-encrusted rings. I, for one, do not miss these goober encrusted overlords.
Note that this summary doesn't defend formality as a useful custom (what does it accomplish, exactly?), but rather defends formality as a valued human tradition among fuddy-duddies known as The Gainfully Employed (soon hereafter known as The Recently Outsourced).
When I was a TA for a CS course back in 2004-2005, one student handed in a three page paper without any capital letters, and virtually no punctuation. It was the first time that we'd run into the problem. Struggling through what he was trying to write I eventually gave him 70%. He complained saying that grammar and punctuations weren't listed as requirements in the assignment. The professor found me to be generous with the grade.
I call my students Mr. Smith or Ms. Jones. I regard this taking the initiative in establishing an environment of professionalism.
As far as what students call me, I don't insist upon Dr. or Professor -- I guess part of this was the influence of a research laboratory of a large national provider of telecommunications services that would not use such titles. All I ask of students that they address me by my properly assigned legal name, and if they call me by my first name, I am fine by that because that is who I am.
I very much agree with fighting against the massively lazy, semi-literate way of writing that most people under 30 seem to believe should be perfectly acceptable even in the most formal settings.
That said, it seems clear to me that anyone who enforces the use their title in order to garner faux respect necessarily has significant insecurity and/or ego problems. Real respect is always earned and cannot be demanded.
I suppose the women and men in uniform calling you "Chief" is assigning an equivalent military title to your role as an instructor-who-is-not-called-professor? Professors are like commissioned officers so they attribute to you a non-commissioned officer's rank?
The only thing is that persons in uniform calling me sir, (or ma'am in your case) puts me a little at unease because whatever my level of authority, I am not serving in the military and I have not served in the military.
Given the U.S. Constitution (you are, USian?), students serving in the military need to learn the proper etiquette for relating to civilians in positions of authority. Mr. and Ms. would be appropriate. Especially military personnel being trained as officer will have such interactions with civilians in positions of authority.
Given the U.S. Constitution...
Given the level of pretentiousness in your post, I'd say you have to learn to not be a shit. What the fuck does the Constitution have to do with how a member of the military chooses to address anyone? You're a dipshit, and you deserve to be addressed as such.
Casual interaction and being unable to spell simple words in your native language correctly are two completely different things. You can be informal while still being correct in language, grammar and etiquette. Yes, there is an etiquette for casual interaction as well.
I don't work as a professor (though some people try to push me into that career). But if I were to receive somewhat official communication from a student with glaring language mistakes, I'd probably send it back pointing out that we are at an institute of higher learning and if you expect my time and attention, I can expect proper spelling and grammar.
One thing that education should teach you is that behaviour is context-sensitive. At a business meeting, at the bar, at the beach, at a job interview - every setting has its own rules and expectations. The better you can adapt to different roles while still staying authentic and true to yourself, the better for you.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I suppose the women and men in uniform calling you "Chief" is assigning an equivalent military title to your role as an instructor-who-is-not-called-professor? Professors are like commissioned officers so they attribute to you a non-commissioned officer's rank?
Just FYI, Chief is also used to address Army & Marine Corp warrant officers. The warrant ranks sit between NCOs and commissioned officers.
The only thing is that persons in uniform calling me sir, (or ma'am in your case) puts me a little at unease because whatever my level of authority, I am not serving in the military and I have not served in the military.
If it eases your conscience a little, military personnel generally address civilians as "sir" or "ma'am". There's nothing authoritative about it, it's just how the military trains its personnel.
Can I ask where you were raised? I was brought up in the southern US and "sir" or "ma'am" was a fairly common form of address, particularly kids addressing adults or two adults who hadn't previously met addressing each other for the first time. Times have changed somewhat, I imagine.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
In communist DDR: Sie Ficken Du!
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
I totally agree on proper spelling and sentence construction, but that "Professor" or "Sir" thing wouldn't last for 5 minutes over here in Norway.
Titles and formalism means jack all over here, and we have the flattest organisational structures around. You don't think twice about talking to the boss, and it isn't unheard of by the ground floor do-ers to sabotage decisions in larger organisations if they are considered bad.
, the only place I ever had professors who preferred to be addressed by title was law school, and even there it seemed as if it was merely part of training future lawyers in courtroom decorum.
You'll find the same thing in the medical faculty, but this is understandable as it might affect patient confidence in teaching hospitals if they see their consultant followed by young "trainee doctors" calling him/her by first name.
This. A thousand times this.
It's uncanny how closely this post reflects my own experience & opinion. In fact, I'm starting to wonder whether I have been sleep-posting on /. as an AC last night. And if yes, would that count as "sock puppeteering"? Oh noes! ;-)
I tell my students to address me by my first name, in particular with graduate students I find using the last name introduces an artificial barrier in discussions. Typically the only students who do address me by first name are Asian students (funnily enough they would often just use "Professor" without my last name, which I just find sounds weird). However, I was previously coordinating the final year projects at an Engineering department (>200 students per semester), so I was getting a lot of emails and phone calls (even though I specifically told students to always send an email, instead of calls) with issues about handing in reports, supervisors ...
Emails in txt speak were not uncommon. Often emails did not even start with a greeting, led alone a proper ending. Even worse were the phone calls, I would pick up the phone and literally the first thing the students say to me after I answered is "Hi, I can't see my mark, what's wrong?" (in fact I would be lucky to even get the "Hi"). As I said this was a class with over 200 students, so how they expected I know them by voice is beyond me. Unfortunately this was very common, really makes you wonder what is going to happen once they work.
Millennial college students have become far too casual when they talk with their professors
I remember in my college years almost 30 years ago of students being crass and too casual to professors, a never ending source of friction that always ended with students experiencing a rude awakening regarding Academic and professional etiquette.
This country has been churning HS graduates who can neither add fractions nor understand the difference between "you're" and "your" for decades. Yes, for decades. This has been noted since the late 70's, and is the reason why so many millions of people in their mid-40's and 50's are struggling (they are, in effect, illiterate.)
Don't pin this on Millennials. This shit has been going on for years.
"When students started calling me by my first name, I felt that was too far, and I've got to say something," Mark Tomforde, a math professor at the University of Houston said....
Explaining the rules of professional interaction is not an act of condescension; it's the first step in treating students like adults.
Every single work supervisor I've ever had has introduced themselves by their first name and preferred to be addressed that way.
I'm also a 'technologist who works with academics' and I find your comments bizarre. That 'three-five minute self-introduction of themselves' is the part where I like to listen most clearly, as understanding where someone is coming from, their context, what they're working on, what they want to solve, is the single-most important thing to ensure I'm giving them effective solutions that they are actually looking for, i.e. that I'm going to be offering something of value to them.
And knowing someone's title is just a trivial, basic matter of respect in the academic. If you keep calling someone who has earned a doctorate "Mister" then yeah, they're probably going to keep getting annoyed about it, because you're being sloppy and disrespectful, you seem to have a chip on your shoulder, and I would never hire you, because that same sloppiness is probably going to translate to the work you do also. If you can't even remember someone's title, you probably can't remember basic things relating to the technical problems at hand.
I look at this a bit differently then most folks. College students are paying to attend the university so from my perspective they have hired the school and the professors to perform a service. So I have absolutely no problem with referring to professors by their first name. When I'm paying for a service, I'm in charge.
The piece of the article that annoys me is the laziness in and lack of etiquette in communications. It isn't necessary to use abbreviations in emails which do not have character length limitations. But if you pay attention to pop culture or advertising you'll see continual attempts to introduce abbreviations as if that is something hip or cool.
Another problem you'll see is that the same thing is happening in posted articles on supposed main-stream news sites - use and overuse of abbreviations and regular grammar and or spelling errors. It doesn't appear that the web articles receive any form of editing or proof reading these days.
I'm one of those old timers that only went back to receive a college degree because the company I worked for flat out said, even with 7 years of history, without a college degree I couldn't be promoted any higher. That is one form of job place discrimination that is considered perfectly acceptable.
So in my late 30's I completed my degree, and one of the only classes that I felt I received any value from was a course on technical / business writing. The class showed that when you're writing either for presentations or training or documentation, the key was to focus the style and content for the intended audience. So the same document might be written in different ways if the audience was sales versus development, but don't use jargon or abbreviations for an audience that doesn't have the context to know what they mean.
That is the one text book I actually did not sell back after completing the class and I still have and sometimes refer back to it.
45 years ago my German High School teacher retold a story where a student (in Germany) addressed the Professor with "Du" instead of "Sie".
It still goes on.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
You're more than welcome to file a complaint with the head of the business. I'm sure they'll take it to heart and kindly send you on your way. Having one less asshat "customer" to deal with when there are plenty of nice customers lining up to take their place is better for all involved. Even the asshat may learn a valuable lesson.
Customers aren't always right.
What exactly is wrong with addressing your college professors by their first name? You are both adults. He is not some kind of CEO or high-level executive. And I dare say professors that allow it foster a greater rapport with their students. Treating your students like children is not going to earn anyone brownie points.
If I can address my doctors by their first name I sure as shit should be able to address a college professor by theirs.
If you keep calling someone who has earned a doctorate "Mister" then yeah, they're probably going to keep getting annoyed about it
Well, yeah, because they'll expect you to be calling them Rob (or whatever their name actually is).
If you can't even remember someone's title, you probably can't remember basic things relating to the technical problems at hand.
Shit, I can't remember all the letters that come after my own name, let alone the ones that come after everybody else. Then there are the stupid rules like using 'Mister' when someone's got FRCS even though they're also a doctor.
Fuck your title, lets focus on the shit that matters: the technical problems at hand.
First name basis should only exist once both parties, particularly the one in a position of stature/authority clearly says its ok first.
Don't try that one on me. Stop me using your first name and you'll be very distressed by the name I use instead.
I don't respect authority. Never have. Shit, I use your title it's almost guaranteed I'm doing so to show disrespect.
I respect people. I talk to them. They can like it or fuck off.
What I don't understand is why people don't think it's polite to not address people the way they want to be addressed. With a very few exceptions, I don't give a crap about other people's sex organs or gender or whatever, so why not call people what they want to be called?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I teach at an upper Midwestern public academic institution.
I seem to be getting a lot of shade thrown at me for saying whereas a classroom instructor being called "Chief" or even "sir" is cool, civilian instructors at civilian institutions are not in your chain-of-command, however much the grade in my class affects your career.
I am not asking to be called "Dr." or "Professor", simply "Mr. Familyname." Real doctors call me that, including one trying to get my attention after I had collapsed from a nurse jamming an IV line into a vein. Or you can call me by my first or given name because that is legally who I am.
If the military trains its personnel to address civilians by "sir" or "ma'am", I guess that is OK but as military, you are wearing a uniform conveying authority, and I am used to persons in authority from my instructors during my adult life to a doctor to whom I am a patient to police officers calling me "Mr. Familyname." In my role as a teacher at an academic institution, the military is "sending you" to my classroom to learn valuable skills in relation so your military career, if you are in my engineering classroom as part of becoming a military officer, your career very likely will involve interactions with civilian contractors and engineers, and in my role as an educator, I am trying to gently suggest that however cool it seems to us civilians to be given honorary military titles, we remain civilians.
One more thing: I think the President of the United States answering the salute of his Marine Guard is really lame, especially if the President never served. If I were President, I would ask the military commanders if it is really appropriate that I answer the salute, and if they say yes, I would get someone to teach me how to do it right rather than make a mockery of it. The Russian President never answers the salute of his honor guard, and they tell me he held a military rank in the KGB.
As to who has the pine cone stuck someplace, if military personnel coming into my classroom have such a 'tude on them regarding what I seek to teach, either math, science, engineering, or my expectations for professional conduct in the engineering workplace, Heaven help all of us. But as someone else here suggested, and AC or even someone under a handle can claim to be military.
I tell you that I feel that I do not merit, as an authority figure in an academic setting, being called "sir" because I do not have a military rank nor have held a military rank? That I state "whatever my level of authority" as a way of agreeing with you that I have "never experienced the crucible of military life"?
Do you call people who agree with you a "civilian piece of shit" or a "motherfucker" (I guess I thought that sobriquet was reserved by persons in the military to refer affectionately to fellow military personnel who have had special experience with that crucible).
"Four trigger-pull pounds" -- are you as either active duty or a military veteran threatening me? With a service weapon?
I'm certainly not trying to throw shade and if I pissed you off, that wasn't my intention. I really was just adding my two cents and making some general observations from my previous experiences. I'm guessing my tone was lost in translation.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
You are certainly not throwing shade on me -- I was responding to the collection of responses to my remarks to which I thought you were also addressing, of which your response was by far respectful and professional.
Thanks!