Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Flashback Megan

Megan berates a student who emailed her for help. Megan, who is psychic, has determined that the brat just wants someone to do her homework for her.

Bleg
08 Feb 2008 09:01 am
I'm looking for a particular study--one in which students were given a piece of (false) negative information about a teacher, and then told this had been a mistake, that the bad information was about someone else. Nonetheless, when the students who had gotten the bad information were asked to evaluate the teacher, they systematically ranked him/her lower than the students who had never heard it--even though they now knew this to be false. Can anyone help? I had the study, but I can't find it, nor remember the name.

Woops, I'm sorry. That's Megan asking someone to do her homework for her. Here's the other post.
Amusing moment of the day
11 Feb 2008 01:22 pm
I got an email from a student today asking me to do her homework. This is not exactly unusual--the more thoughtful ones provide word counts that I am supposed to hit--but usually they try to be a little more subtle, asking me to "summarize" or "clarify". With the typical conviction of the teenager that adults are total morons who were never young, they expect that I will not recognize the poorly disguised voice of a blurrily photocopied handout peeping out of their request. This one bypassed
such subterfuge and threw herself on my mercy. Having already passed ninth grade, in however desultory a fashion, I find myself unwilling to take on the repeat burden of someone else's homework. I kind of admire the chutzpah of the thing, to be sure, but I am afraid America's students will have to struggle on without my help.

Megan, who frequently berates others for being impolite, cuts a kid to ribbons in the pages of the Atlantic. Imagine how humiliated the girl felt. A simple rejection and enjoiner to do one's own work in a private email would have been enough, but Megan enjoys sneering at others.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I barely even believe that high school kids are writing Megan asking for her help with their homework. Seriously, how many teenagers read the Atlantic? If their intention was to cheat, there are a lot of easier ways to do it than sending a blogger an e-mail. She's blowing that out of her ass.

That's what's so annoying about her constant pleas for civility in the blogosphere. She thinks just because she doesn't drop the f-bomb or call someone dirty names that she's a rung above on the polite ladder. She's just as snide and rude as the angriest post at FMM. She just keeps the language clean and writes in circles instead of just getting to the point, and terribly at that.

Susan of Texas said...

If Megan is as messed up as I think she is, she truly feels it's very imporant to be outwardly polite. She has said repeatedly her mother raised her to be polite, and I think that's exactly what happened. However, looking at the rest of Megan's behavior, it's very evident that she was taught surface politeness only. I suspect she was browbeaten with liberal ideas instead of conservative ideas.

As an authoritarian she repeats what she heard, but as an angry, resentful child, she chooses the opposite ideology out of an attempt to assert herself against her parent(s). So she declares herself a libertarian, not conservative, and feminist and racial liberal, while her actions and words say the opposite.

She gets a thrill bashing liberals but is embarrassed to be conservative in her views. And of course her conservatism is really the anger of child not treated with respect, who must demand admiration to make up for that lack.

Anonymous said...

She's definitely a big, fat phony. Or tall, skinny one at least. She mistankenly imagines herself as some elite, well-bred intellectual that's a cut above the rest of us. You can tell by the patronizing tone of her writing. She apparently doesn't realize that most of us were raised to be polite as well. There's nothing special about good manners. She's really just a boring, mediocre, insecure, poser spoiled brat.

Susan of Texas said...

Yes, knowing why she reacts as she does is one thing, dealing with it is another.