Nah, the teacher was just wrong about the facts. If they had been right about the facts, there's nothing wrong with saying that imo. The reality was that it was the partner who should have gotten that lecture rather than the author.

So I'd say that you shouldn't say that if you're relying on your own feelings and impressions to judge facts not in evidence, because your instincts may be wrong. They may even be racist or sexist (i.e. something that the person you're maligning has to deal with constantly), instead of in this case when it was just a weakness for ass-kissers.

Too many times somebody else got a good grade from my work. I don't begrudge them the grade because I don't care when other people get nice things for free (I love it when me or my friends get nice things for free), but they certainly had no knowledge in what had been taught in the class they just got a B in.

> Those people are the reason academia is such a miserable experience for so many.

School isn't a therapy session or entertainment. If it's a miserable experience and you come out smart, it's 1000x better than if its a wonderful experience and you come out dumb.

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tikhonj 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's a big if. I've learned far more from settings and courses I enjoyed than from ones I hated. I expect the causation flowed in both directions, and there's no way I'm unique in that regard.

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TaLiTr 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> So I'd say that you shouldn't say that if you're relying on your own feelings and impressions to judge facts not in evidence, because your instincts may be wrong.

That's exactly my point. That teacher didn't have any facts, they just decided someone was a slacker based on vibes and used that bias to single them out. And presumably would go on to add systems to allow them to persecute others they deem to be slackers.

> School isn't a therapy session or entertainment. If it's a miserable experience and you come out smart, it's 1000x better than if its a wonderful experience and you come out dumb.

As someone who gets told he's smart somewhat regularly by his peers, and had a school mandated therapist because they thought he was a suicide risk, I believe that's a statement that needs a citation.

In any case they're not mutually exclusive, you can have an education system that works without grinding people down into lifelong anxiety disorders.

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gowld 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> And presumably would go on to add systems to allow them to persecute others they deem to be slackers.

According to the story (which seemed to lack a "trunk"), the proposed system was individual essays.

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tolerance 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> The structure of this post is a bit of a miss for me. Sorry about that. I wanted to write a short post about writing non-fiction but it turned out to be a bit longer than expected and I need to get to work now. I hope you enjoyed it.

It almost reads like the author climbed the tree to shake its branches and content himself with whatever dropped. Which in this case is fine by me.

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DanielVZ 4 hours ago | parent [-]

To be honest what happened was that I tried to write a short introduction with both stories from university, they got way too long, then wrote the writing advice, and then tried to mix them both into a coherent post, then noticed the analogy of the trunk was a good anchor and remixed the article even more around that, and this is what we got. Still I enjoyed writing it.

	▲	tolerance 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's always hope for a Part II. Maybe on rhetoric; which is what I interpreted "The second most important thing" to be about. But the concepts introduced there are entirely new to me so I may be off.