Education system going downhill.

Next: teacher imposes literacy, gets the boot...

I presume he dare not miss the date to submit an appeal, eh?

Norti Raskal

From the sounds of it it seems, to me, that the lecturer got dismissed because of the email. He probably said something stupid in it.

Something rude, you mean? although I (obviously) don't know what he actually wrote in that email, let me add just a few other things:

a) I used to teach - in Auckland - and I'm pretty familiar with the atmosphere within the Academia; I think I already said this here: they had prohibited the use of "passed" and "failed" (it was 2003, if I'm not mistaken) and had mandated the use of the mildly inept (but PC) "completed" and "not completed yet(sic!)"; they had said that if you catch a student cheating you must pass him/her, if they were looking for the right answer in a book or whatever (*) and so on. Hard to believe, innit? Plus the obssessive stuff like: you must never be alone with a female student, not even during the (individual) exam season; you must never exit the classroom before the last female student has left the room, because you can accidentally bump into her in the doorway and she could lodge a formal complaint for sexual harassment (yep, it had happened before...) and other similar niceties;
b) Paul is a well-known character; I may be awfully wrong at this stage, but I don't really see him writing something that would warrant his immediate dismissal.

(*) As ridiculous and completely unbelievable as this may sound, I had a student who, during a two-hour open-book exam, was not able to write down a single word on her paper; she browsed through her book for a while, then gave up and waited calmly for the exam to end.

Heh... This history seems to have all the elements needed to incur the ire of the PC folk:

-foreign student;
-foreign under-performing/qualified student;
-foreign under-performing/qualified student of Islamic background;

...and Paulie who writes (in a moment of complete and unexpected retreat from reality) in the infamous email:

"You are close to failing in any event, so these sorts of excuses - culturally driven and preying on some sort of Western liberal guilt - are simply lame". Ouch! As we used to say in Quebec, il s'est foutu dans la marde himself, with his own big mouth. Inexcusable. Sorry, Paul, you should've known better.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/...ectid=10456446

Hes a bit of a prat then.

did you mean merde??

Absolutely. And - well, quite shockingly so.

Nope. Marde is how they pronounce it in Quebec - not merde, like their French cousins. It also gives them the opportunity to refer to Walmart as Wal-marde, which is a step closer to reality, IMO

Full text of the email that got Paulie into deep marde:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/...ectid=10456465

Wow... I had posted the above link, before reading the actual email myself. I have, now. Conclusion: Paulie's run mad. Not only is he being too... er... candid, but he's also making a derogatory innuendo about his arch-enemy, fellow professor Hoadley - behaviour that makes me wonder what kind of chemicals he might've been sniffing...

They also love the expression 'va chier'. I think it is pronounced the same way in France.

SHEE-EH is how it sounds.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/defin...r&defid=409301

Fascinated by your postings, DaveThe Cat... this is obviously linked to the obituary for Common Sense posted elsewhere on BEC. I think I should recommend to my eldest son (who would MUCH prefer to play PS3, Wii, Xbox or anything else he can get his hands on to actually STUDYING) that he'd do well to go to uni in New Zealand!

That's a phrase I hear often. My ex, who is a Swiss francophone, pronounces it as described (including the capitalisation).

"Va chier mange de la marde" is a particular favourite in this household. For purposes of brevity it is usually shortened to "VCMDLM".

<wonders how long until a mod notices breach of forum rules>

As a former student, I appreciated the policies at my uni of lecturers/admin/profs keeping their doors open when I visted their offices.

Yeah, you're right the education system is going down hill. Or maybe it has been down there for a long time already.