End of Spring 2011 at Long Beach City College

Folks following the flame wars with the ASFL progressives will have noticed that variations of the "shitty community college" slur is routinely deployed as if that's some kind of an epic put-down. The only people who ever say such things are leftists. But of course the two-year colleges serve the constituencies progressives purportedly claim to champion, so the attacks once more show the monumental hypocrisy of the Democrat-Socialist ASFLs.

That's LBCC President Eloy Oakley at the clip. And I got a tickle out of a card a student gave me during the last week of classes, where she writes:

I had a great time in class. I was always tired from work but your personality made the class fun, and refreshing ...

She's a very nice young woman, a legal immigrant from Mexico who supports strict border enforcement. I don't think she'd approve of students dropping f-bombs, or their professors who award them for it.

A lot more happened this semester, including a student who ended her pregnancy at the beginning of classes and was miserable for the remainder of the term. During discussions we talk a lot about the right to privacy and questions of choice, when covering civil liberties, etc., so that must have been rough. And it turned out that another one of my students had just had a baby, so her child was just a couple of month old when school started. She talked about her son all the time. And she was so happy. It was enriching and invigorating. I worked with both students very closely. The range of life satisfaction was like day and night, or, well, life and death, unfortunately.

More later ...