[John B.]

I hadn’t seen that comment in the original quote, and so have nothing to say about it directly. But as a college professor who has sometimes been given a ‘puff’ class to ‘tighten it up’ – i.e. been put in charge of raising standards – I certainly know that when you raise the standards, more people try to cheat, at least while the process of raising is going on. It takes a while to shake out all the common ways of cheating, too; students are often more ingenious about trying to avoid the work than they would have to be to just do it, and I learn (and have to devise ways to shut off) a couple new tricks every term. So my guess is that New York CAN expect cheating to increase, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily to be approved of; just that it’s expectable. When the price of used car parts goes up, we can expect more cars to be stolen; if the police chief says that, it’s not necessarily because the police chief approves of car theft.

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Name : John B., Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Atheist, Age : 42, City : Rural area, State : CO, Country : United States, Occupation : College professor, Education level : Over 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class, 

[John B.]

Years ago as a freelance writer I did a story about bus drivers in St. Louis, MO. It’s very important for a bus not to run early (people depend on them to be there). So a driver generally checks his time at each stop, and when he gets ahead, he stops at a stop and waits until the time he’s supposed to be there.

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Name : John B., Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Atheist, Age : 42, City : Rural area, State : CO, Country : United States, Occupation : College professor, Education level : Over 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class, 

[John B.]

If you watch, parents spend years trying to teach their very young children not to respond to every person in their vicinity (don’t follow the mail man, don’t spontaneously hug the waiter, don’t run up and talk to strangers). By about age 5, everyone outside the family or the age group is invisible to most children. (This is why they will try to walk through you). The ability to project another person’s humanity fully — i.e. to realize that those people ‘out there’ are having inner lives as complex as your own — doesn’t develop completely until late adolescence. Which, in some people, doesn’t occur before their unlamented burials … So sometimes it’s an assertion of ‘I’m too important to pay attention to you’ or ‘I will annoy you to show I can.’ But just as often, it’s because none of the rest of us is quite real to that person. We’re more like a badly behaved computer game. (This means, of course, that they are _extremely_ alone … which may or may not be punishment enough for the nuisance they make of themselves).

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Name : John B., Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Atheist, Age : 42, City : Rural area, State : CO, Country : United States, Occupation : College professor, Education level : Over 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class, 

[John B.]

It’s because verbal ideas aren’t neutral; they react with a history. Hardly any white people have found themselves subjected to black people who did not regard them as fully human; whereas the reverse is within living memory. We talk about how animals smell because 1) we don’t much care about how the animal feels about it, and 2) we don’t think they understand us. That’s the implication behind questions about black body odor. But very few white people – or at least few straight white males – have ever felt that their humanity or relevance was seriously in question. Hence, the issue doesn’t sting as much.

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Name : John B., Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Atheist, Age : 42, City : Rural area, State : CO, Country : United States, Occupation : College professor, Education level : Over 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class, 

[John B.]

I’m a college professor who teaches theater and speech classes; I teach some stagecraft (building scenery and props, hanging lights, etc). I long ago noticed that in my ‘lecture’ clothes, lots of people talk to me, but in my ‘stagecraft’ clothes, I’m invisible to about half the people. Also, other faculty and administrators are much more willing to disrupt or cause problems for stagecraft than they are for lecture classes. Oddest of all, a different group of students comes to see me in my office (for office hours) than comes to see me in the shop. I’m the same guy with paint on his clothes, but during my 2-3 hours in shop clothes, the social world does change around me. So your situation might be the straightforward problem that so far no one has invented a way to fix a car at a desk in a clean white shirt.

User Detail :  

Name : John B., Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Atheist, Age : 42, City : Rural area, State : CO, Country : United States, Occupation : College professor, Education level : Over 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class, 

[John B.]

Coming from a pretty uptight white middle class background, and being naturally loud and boisterous myself, when I was a kid I always wondered why everyone was whispering and why I was always being shushed. Different cultures accomodate different people better; in some cultures it’s easier on the naturally quiet and reserved, and in others it’s easier on noisy extroverts. There’s not really a why; just a not-very-important difference.

User Detail :  

Name : John B., Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Atheist, Age : 42, City : Rural area, State : CO, Country : United States, Occupation : College professor, Education level : Over 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper middle class, 

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