Out of Context
It has happened to many a teacher. You are up there speaking in front of the class and the words escape your lips. And then you realize it: how awful they will sound if repeated on their own, out of context, by your students somewhere… to a friend, on social media, to an administrator, to a reporter. There is no “undo” on speech. (Yet.) All we have is the humor of it, if there is humor in it, and with luck, a good, if short, story to tell.
(image: detail of “Shocked Crowd” by Sarah McIntyre)
“Suppose you and I hook up.”
Context: discussion of variations of Thomson’s example in which your circulatory system is hooked up to that of a violinist in order to save the violinist’s life.
“What’s so bad about having sex in front of children?”
Context: discussion of “A Ride on the Bus” from Feinberg’s Offense to Others. Though it reads like one, it was not posed as a rhetorical question.
While working through a long list of truth tables… “Let’s try 69.”
“It follows, then, that you shouldn’t blame Hitler for the holocaust.”
.The topic of course was the problem of free will and moral responsibility, ….and couple students actually did complain, because they didn’t get the idea of hypothetical reasoning.
“ha penis”
My errant spelling with unfortunate spacing of “happiness” on the board , right after asking students “What does Aristotle say we all want?”
(NB: this was shortly after my son was born, when I was getting no sleep. In my sleep-deprived state, I found myself spelling things phonetically, rather than correctly).
I assume such situations are the source most of the tweets retweeted by the @myphilprof twitter account.
Just last week, to a young woman who gave an answer that was just about right, but not quite: “You’re hot!” In the sense of being hot or cold in responding. I immediately explained and apologized to her and the class. Sigh.
Climate problem? What climate problem?
The number 69 should be left out of all problem sets, kind of like the 13th floor used to be left out of buildings.
“OK now, spread your legs.”
It gets worse. The students were 8th grade Orthodox Jewish girls. I was teaching at Yeshiva High School and trying to ask them to spread their desks farther apart to take a quiz, but I’d said the offending phrase daily during stretches for the boys soccer team I coached and I was damn tired (because I was teaching, coaching, running the school newspaper, etc.), so I slipped up.
I typically have at least one student taping my classes, and I always fear the day when they edit out of context some crazy philosophical example and share it with the state legislature.
“If I go down to the morgue and slap a corpse, it’s not going to feel any pain.”
We were going over an article defending Epicurus’s claim that death is nothing to us, and a key premise is that we can’t be harmed by something we can’t experience. I shouldn’t have used such an insensitive example, so I’m a little embarrassed by that.
“Of course, it may not wear its A-ness on its face.”
Said while discussing induction, and pointing out that it may be difficult to detect whether an object possesses property A.
In my first intro class, the prof, trying to explain the concept of “everything that lacks the property P”, said something like “it lacks P-ness”. Everyone knew what he meant but it was still a good 90 seconds before the laughter died down.
“It’s like pornography: I know it when I see it”
Said while discussing some hard to define notion (I can’t remember what), referencing Justice Potter Stewart’s threshold test for obscenity which I had not previously mentioned to the class and with which (it turns out) they were entirely unfamiliar.
Trying to explain an argument for the completeness of predicate logic that finished with an induction on premises, showing that the last premise was always redundant, I said “So then we whack off one premise at a time.” Except I realized what I was saying halfway through the sentence, and the awkward pause happened immediately after “off.”
My semantics teacher, wanting to represent the unsaturated form of kratzer’s dyadic conditional on the board: ( . )( . )
Going over Thomson’s famous paper, moving past the violinist case, working on reasons my students think the violinist case is not analogous to the case of pregnancy via consensual sex, we turned to one of her other examples–that of the burglar and the open window.
After I asked if the students thought this was analogous, and the heads predictably shook, I asked for reasons. After a couple failed attempts, here is what transpired:
Student: The difference is that, with the burglar, one never invited him to come into your house.
Me: That’s not going to work. When you have sex, you’re not asking another person to come inside you.