Right after I posted about Kelly’s and Christian’s college professor, over at Truth Has a Chance, Giles posted about another profoundly ridiculous manifestation of cultural hegemony at an Oregon State football game. This only serves to discourage the very people the football team should try to encourage: the people who pay to watch the football game and are even willing to pay extra for the privilege of buying a ticket!!! Sad, sad, sad.
Day: October 13, 2011
I texted Kelly and Christian a message about reports they had due in their writing class this morning. The name of the class is Argument-Based Research and it is taught by a professor in the community college English department who seems to personify everything that went bad with the 1960’s. Kelly thinks he is a little older than I. I am always interested to hear what happens in this class because it is usually interesting, almost always a train-wreck, and almost never has anything to do with writing. Here is the text message exchange between the three of us from a little earlier this morning:
Dad (9:08 am): How did your papers come out? Any comments from Professor Commie Marxist?
Dad (9:23 am): How did it go in class today?Kelly (9:24 am): Hey dad they were fine! He just picked them up is all. We are discussing gender theory now.
Dad (9:26 am): Oh great. Good thing he is now talking about how to write.
Christian (9:26 am): Not yet. He talked about sexism in the Bible which was a drag.
Dad (9:28 am): What a loser. The Bible has been the single biggest contributor to the emancipation of women in all of history.
Kelly (9:29 am): Right… he was going on about what Paul said about women and Old Testament verses so I asked him why didn’t we look at how Jesus Himself treated women?
Dad (9:30 am): What did he say?
Kelly (9:31): That that topic is for the NEXT segment on religion. Please.
It dawned on me that this professor, having taught at this community college in the Bible Belt for such a long time must have had to engage with a thoughtful Christians on this topic at some time during his career. It boggles my mind that, as the professor in an argumentation class, he argues for what, at best, is a position with two sides. This is the easy, vacuous, left-wing, ivory tower approved, intellectually lazy position to take. He propounds this position without historical or culture context to an audience of generally inexperienced community college students. Some might suggest this is a cowardly position. I won’t because he can flunk my children at his whim. I guess that is kind of cowardly, too.
Day 52 of 1000
Lorena and I are big fans of Dave Ramsey and the whole concept of zero debt. We do pretty well with the pay cash for cars, send your kids to a state university, use debit cards, not credit cards, and all that sort of stuff. We fall down when comes to staying away from Wendy’s, the BEST fast food chain in America–fast, fresh and good to eat! We see a big cash drain coming next fall when both the kids transfer from community college to Big State U. If there was ever a time to switch our mortgage from a 30 year fixed rate to a 15 year fixed rate, now is the time.
My boss, Igor, switched from a 30 to a 15 year mortgage, got a great rate and even kept his payment about the same. That is the thing that pushed me off center to start working on a refi. I went to Dave Ramsey’s web page, clicked on the Churchill Mortgage Link, and signed up to see what they could do for me. After about four days, they called me back and I emailed most of the paperwork over to them last night. There were some major hoops through which I had to jump in a very short amount of time that I do not remember having to jump last time I did this about four years ago. The claim was that new regulation requires it. It felt a little uncomfortable so I am going to check into it.
I will write more about this if anything interesting happens.