21 September 2008
sexy professors...hmmm
This recent New York Times feature on academics and fashion is a curious thing. 'These professors make academia look good.' But, erm, do they? I'm not sure. If anything, they look exactly how you'd expect academics to look in pointlessly fashionable clobber. There's the still-sexy older Lit professor, there's the tweedy guy with a bow tie, and not one, but two(!), perky young science women ('Im in yr labs, confoundin yr eggspegtashunz!' - urgh, sorry), erm, and some older blokes hanging around looking sheepish and out of place.
I'm seriously glad that RateMyProfessors.com never really caught on over here, as the thought of students discussing the relative hotness of their lecturers fills me with a curious kind of horror (not least because one of my lovely new colleagues is an ex-model, o ho ho ho). Still apparently, if you're deemed 'hot', you students tend to also think you're a good lecturer, which seems unfair to everyone (This argument is apparently made in this paper: 'Attractiveness, Easiness, and Other Issues: Student Evaluations of Professors on RateMyProfessors.com'). Still, you can't get away from the fact that if you fancy a subject, you tend to fancy the people who know more about it than you do. There's no cure for that. Last year I had a student who developed such an affection for me that his grades improved from borderline fail to a high 2:1 with several first class marks. Whilst he did monopolise my office hours, my emails and gave me new scribbles to read constantly, the episode clearly demonstrates that, with enough subjective will, you can do almost anything.
Here's to a new term!
