Good Humor Man

Behold the power of cheese!

There's a topic I've been meaning to blog about for several months, but I keep forgetting about it (or coming up with better topics). But now I'm catching a lot of shit for not updating my blog in awhile, and this is as good a topic as any.

I got my teaching evaluations from the fall about a month and a half ago. On the whole, they were very positive. What can I say? I'm just amazing. On the other hand, the comments were pretty nondescript (re: boring). Two of them, however, stood out.

The first was positive:
Mr. P is balling out of control. He is a true playa and he is the English man!

I didn't know how to take that one, but I liked it anyway. Admittedly, I don't know what "balling out of control" means. Maybe my fly was down for most of the semester. I do know what a "true playa" is, and I can assure this student that such a supposition is completely true. I'm such a playa that I'm going to force all of my students to call me Mr. P-Diddy. I'm just that balling!

The second comment was negative. I was looking forward to reading some good hate messages; I thought they'd be entertaining. This one actually kinda hurt my feelings:
His jokes are cheesy and he has a poor sense of humor.

I laughed at first, but then I was sad. Of all the things for a negative comment to focus on, it had to be my sense of humor. I thought that was one thing I had going for me. It sure wasn't my teaching skill. At the end of the day, the best I can hope for is a decent laugh from these melon-brained freshmen.

Cheesy jokes!? What kind of comedic gold were these guys hoping for? I'm not wasting my A-material on them. Most of them couldn't recognize a good joke if gave them a courtesy reach-around. Well, that's not entirely fair. Some of them have a sense of humor. In fact, some of them actually make ME laugh. Last semester I assigned a "supervillain monologue" paper. The reasons for this assignment are fairly dubious - something about writing from another perspective or some bullshit like that. I think it's just a fun paper to read. Some of my students did not disappoint.

One of them wrote from the perspective of the arch-enemy of Snuggles of the fabric softener bear. It was this classic monologue about how the little bastard's laundry legacy was at an end. A more disturbing paper came from someone who was apparently MY archnemesis. This very quiet girl who sat in the back of the room wrote this very detailed monologue describing the various tortures that were in store for Mr. P. I was going to be forced to eat poisonous hot dogs as my intestines were ground into dust and then my toenails would be yanked off one-by-one. I was disturbed, and I gave her an A on the paper for safety reasons.

Maybe my jokes are cheesy. I don't know. But if you can't take the cheese, your performance in my class won't be very gouda.

*Dodges various metaphorical vegetables being tossed for that one*