Aw, Professor

 In honor of naysayers.

In honor of budgetary pain that is distributed indiscriminately.

 In honor of misplaced measures.

  In honor of the hollowing-out of academic communication, in the name of branding.

In honor of Carl Schurz (1829–1906) and dishonor of Mike Ditka . Patriotism means speaking up!

In honor of my (long-ago) promotion to Absent-Minded Professor Credit to Pamela Hayes-Bohanan for inspiring this meme.

In honor of keyboard geniuses, left and right.

In honor of Perry H-B. Awprof fans be alert: the dog actually appears in some of these memes. She seems to know she is cute.

In honor of my good fortune. Maybe I grumble about my university sometimes -- okay, there is no "maybe" about that -- but only when it fails to live up to its potential for students and the broader community. But I know that I am exceedingly fortunate to teach only classes I have chosen to teach. I have listed most of them on my " portal " post, and every one of them is equally interesting and important to me. Corollary: please do not talk to me about "getting through" general-education courses. They are just important and can be just as rewarding for faculty and students as upper-level courses.

In honor of a global perspective. I wrote this in 2019. Sadly, it makes even more sense in 2020.

In honor of ALL the farmers. I am very proud that one of my former students helps to lead the consumer-action arm of Equal Exchange . We are working to figure out how the lessons of fair trade can be applied to all foods.

In honor of short words. While it is true that I am terrible at spelling French words, I have embraced "Maven" for some specific reasons .

In honor of our most damaging holdover from the 1980s. Never elected to anything, and never really employed to do anything, Grover Norquist continues to have an outsized, negative effect on everything government does. Although he is more responsible than anybody for the Right's ongoing  anti-tax fetish , he has long enjoyed the benefits of taxpayer-supported services in his own leafy, liberal community of Weston, Massachusetts.

In honor of the travel-authorization form, which Byzantium would have rejected as tortuous. 

In honor of confusion about which way money flows in our society.

In honor of students with money to burn. I know that most of my students do not  have money to burn. But some seem to forget this. And yes -- we always know when students are texting , even if we do not say so.

In honor of assessments that have not been assessed. Those who wish to learn more may be interested in my 2014 post Resisting the Education Oligarchy  or the ongoing research at FairTest . Educators who wish to become involved can join me and about 65,000 other teachers at  BATS .

In honor of my demographic and its attention span.

In honor of holding a university to the standards it espouses. Most people who know me know that this is about a decade-long effort to open a mission-driven café on our campus. It would give the university a chance to put into practice many of the ideals to which it gives rhetorical support.

In honor of audacious questions. Unlike the hypotheticals I create for most of these memes, I do get this question at least once a semester, and it always catches me off-guard. Professor Tom Wayman became a hero to fellow teachers everywhere with his 1993 poem Did I Miss Anything ? In an essay with the same title , he explains why he no longer uses the poem as an answer to his own students.  Perhaps he just stands with a blank stare for a few seconds, as I do. 

In honor of doing as we say, not as we do . Apply these lessons anywhere but within the university itself!

In honor of fairness in coffeelands #ThankTheFarmers  In June 2020, I was part of a discussion of this very topic with Equal Exchange experts on fair trade and coffee quality. Please read the description and then have a listen to an hour we spent on Our Version of the Perfect Cup . (And yes, one of those experts studied coffee with me.) I learned something from my fellow presenters, leading to an additional post on Micro Quality .

In honor of joint ventures. I have long been interested in the implications of NAFTA; the spread of the 2026 World Cup across the three NAFTA countries is an intriguing one.

In honor of students who have not noticed anything about my teaching style. (This meme is an exception: I  do  get this question from students in real life.)

In honor of innumeracy ... and learning to apply statistics correctly.

In honor of hard lessons.

In honor of myths.

In honor of the written word ... and national treasure Rep. John Lewis .

In honor of reality-based scholarship

In honor of wide-open thinking.

In honor of all workers.

In honor of orthographic discretion.

In honor of orthography.

In honor of second and third chances.