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Comment by ralferoo | Hacker News Reader

Watching the actual video puts a lot of it into context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrOzY86YcEM

It's hard to know how serious all this is, because he keeps switching between outrageous comments and then a serious voice explaining the point he's making, and why the students should think about the issue.

It might well get him fired before the end of his final year, but I suspect this will end up being a video that gets referred to a lot over the years as a great way of challenging students' viewpoints.

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He taught what plagiarism is, and how to transform it into a proper citation.

He explained his attendance policy, and very clearly defined WHY.

He taught why you shouldn't trust authority blindly.

He pointed out the problem with predestination, and provides instruction on how to earn an A in a fully remote manner later in the video

This is a well crafted lesson, aimed at adults who can handle a few fucking swear words, not children. It shows respect to their new status as grown ass people in the course of doing so.

It is a lesson in empathy, and if they don't understand it, they should ask their grandparents the next time they see them on zoom.

Brilliant stuff, worthy of a tenured professor. I hope he enjoys his now accelerated, well earned retirement.

At the risk of being a terrible off topic HN commenter,

> He's taught

> He's explained

> He's taught

I'm not sure if it's technically correct (or incorrect) grammar, but I (native English speaker) found these constructs to be really difficult to parse. I wasn't sure whether it was a contraction of "he is" or "he has" as both made sense (though the second point later has context that points to "he has").

I'm not bothered, and I hope no offence is taken by this, I just thought it was mildly fascinating. I don't think I often see that "He's" contraction in English.

Indeed it’s ambiguous in isolation, but knowing that the subject is a teacher interacting with students makes it clear that the contracted word is “has”, not “is”.

That's a fair point, and I've cleaned up my comment to reflect your observations. I just reduced "He's" (short for He has) to "He", as the "has" wasn't really necessary.

I am also a native English speaker (American; living in the UK) and the GP's use of "He's" seemed absolutely fine to me.

Not trying to discount your opinion, just adding another data point.

> Watching the actual video puts a lot of it into context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrOzY86YcEM

Also gets around half of the fucking "transcript" being censored. Honestly, why bother "quoting" from the video when most of it is unintelligible because a lot of the creative swearing is replaced with *s?

Fantastic. Thanks for including the link. It's pretty clear he's making a point of quoting the dialogue in and out of context. His tone makes the lecture pretty engaging to be honest.

This is delightful. Thank you so much for the link. I especially loved the part about plagiarism. Incredible

Hahaha utterly amazing stuff. Just a flame thrower to all the bullshit in college.

I absolutely had that professor that thought the students were cocksuckers not worthy of an A in HIS class.

I am still not sure if his performance is serious or satirical.

You're not sure if he seriously just arrived from Rigel 7?

So many outrageous things in that video...

Tenure or not, is he seriously going give his students random final grades even before the first day of class (as he put it, "predestination")? Surely the school won't allow him to do this

No, he's not. He was just trying to be outrageous to wake his students up. I don't understand how this is all seemingly so cryptic to everyone?

Maybe you should read the article. It's specified in there.

Apparently a lot of bible thumpers go to that school and he's probably heard the predestination argument w.r.t. Covid & dying far too often. Him saying grades are predetermined is another way of challenging that viewpoint. The grades won't (or shouldn't) be assigned randomly

Later he goes on to explain how you can get an A from remote-friendly materials too.

While it's preposterous on the face of it, it's not even completely satirical since he goes on to explain the actual "rules" later for anything he "prescribes" early on.

COME ON! really??

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