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	quantumreality 2012-01-09 03:44 am UTC (link)
	At first I thought you meant 4000 emails :O Anyway I'm reading that e-mail and the thing making my eyes hurt is that she's liberally interspersed it with all kinds of bold, italic and underline formatting and frankly, made some pretty OTT accusations about others and statements about herself. (Reply to this)

keri
2012-01-09 04:51 am UTC (link)

Holy crap. I just started her list of grievances and the entitlement! wow.

I hear a lot about students with entitlement problems from professor friends and... "In one particularly notable email, Professor Zaloom told me that my personal stance on OWS was making 'conceptual progress in the class difficult to sustain.'" - this makes me cringe so hard, because one of my friends has described almost the exact same thing. Using a topic that is in the news and everyone knows about in order to illustrate various points, but being unable to actually get to those illustrations because one particular student refuses to get beyond the very first step of "this is happening now, and is important, and we will be discussing it in class". Which is just...bizarre for a cultural/social analysis course (or anthropology or sociology) especially.

And then...

DuringJen's 2nd and 3rd lectures, she mostly refused to call on me, even when I was the only student raising my hand.

... Maybe because you were derailing the lecture, and she needed to be able to keep to the topic at hand for all the other students who were following along? Can't stop class for the single person who is struggling when there are at least a dozen other people there. I learned that really quick in undergrad, and I learned to write down my questions and take notes and arrange time later to go over what I didn't understand.

Yikes. I feel kind of bad commenting on her emails, because it seems clear to me that there's something going wrong. The professor did give her an alternate assignment (though it still involved OWS, which seems to be the primary theme of that section of the course), and the dean did say that he told her how to make a formal complaint, yet after she sent copies of emails that referred to those things, she says none of this happened? And then she says that she went to the OWS site anyway, but still can't write the paper, even about the data she gathered then.

I think she's a bit misinformed about why mental health workers might be useful for students, also. :/

I don't know. I say I feel weird rubbernecking about this, because there's something not right, but I still feel jaw-dropped enough that I go "wow, she seems like she really isn't aware of how universities work"

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white_tean
2012-01-09 05:41 am UTC (link)

I think she's a bit misinformed about why mental health workers might be useful for students, also. :/

Exactly. In my experience universities are very cautious with students who are stressed, and want to get them to their mental health services and take off as much pressure as they can. If they're recommending mental health services to you, it's not an attempt at oppression, it's that they don't want you jumping off a building (a student I know had to be hauled off a ledge this year).

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quantumreality
2012-01-09 06:01 am UTC (link)

At the same time, our society tends to be pretty quick to label people who have the "crazy" label, and if she's at all aware of this she's probably extremely sensitive to the likelihood that her complaints might be sidelined owing to a mental health diagnosis. Yes, these things are supposed to be confidential, but even just having to see a shrink sometimes carries a "where there's smoke" aura around it.

What concerns me is people will just see "entitled selfish student" all over her and not consider, as you and

keri did, the possibility that the student probably really does need to decompress in a major way.