Email me at jmayhew at ku dot edu
"The very existence of poetry should make us laugh. What is it all about? What is it for?"
--Kenneth Koch
“El subtítulo ‘Modelo para armar’ podría llevar a creer que las
diferentes partes del relato, separadas por blancos, se proponen como piezas permutables.”
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31 may 2011
Profe
I give my undergraduate students two options. They can call me "profesor" or "profesor Mayhew," or simply "profe." That gives them an informal option that still recognizes what our relationship is. If they call me by my first name I don't actually correct them, because I don't really care all that much. Instead, I usually announce my preferred form of address at the beginning of the course. That way I get fewer "Jonathans" and "Doctor Mayhews" the rest of the semester.
I've come to be conscious of the drawbacks of the "professor" terminology lately. As an undergrad I'd address my professors as "Prof. Lastname" and refer to them as "Lastname" in conversation (no one uses titles when talking about people behind their backs); as soon as I graduated I was expected to be on first-name terms w/ all of them. Which has always felt weird and stilted, because one never _thought_ of them as having first names, and has (on the margin) made me less likely to keep in touch with them. Which is probably just fine from their POV...
ResponderEliminari remember going to a prestigious graduate school and all of sudden having to call my professors by their first names. It felt awkward, but since all my classmates were doing it, I would have felt awkward either way. It was a false egalitarianism because the distance was enormous in actual fact. I let my grad students call me professor until I know them pretty well and then I tell them to use my first name. If they want to go to first name basis sooner I don't object.
ResponderEliminarI always addressed all of my professors as Profesor/a and Usted. In my culture, it's unconscionable that you address adults who are not immediate family members with their first name and the "tu" form. My mother never used the "tu" form to her best friend of many years.
ResponderEliminarMy son Miles was very put off by the moment when his kindergarten teacher told him that he could call her "Christine" once she was no longer his teacher (instead of "Frau Deschamps").
ResponderEliminarWhat I truly hate is their insistence on calling me "Mrs." and also "teacher."
ResponderEliminar"Please help me, Mrs. Teacher."