Philosophy And French And Professors Who Know Neither

You'll excuse the tardiness of this post because, well, you really have no choice. Anyway, I had another interesting day in my "Philosophy and Society" class. My professor, if I hadn't mentioned it before, is as pinko as you can get. Sometimes she just randomly screams out, "Karl Marx, I want to have your baby!" which is really distracting when you're trying to do the reading that was due last week. But I digress... Today, she decided to read to us from a book on philosophy written for the lay person (i.e. everyone but college students). Now, before I get to the main point of the post, I have to explain something. She hates America and everything to do with it. She wouldn't tell you that, oh no, but she does. She's always talking about Americans in the third person plural because she either failed 8th grade English, or she doesn't even consider herself an American. She's constantly reminding us of how tough philosophy is for American students to grasp because we're very much fixated on practicality rather than theory (maybe it has something to do with the fact that the people who care only about theory are the kind of people who play Dungeons and Dragons in the engineering building and have never spoken to a girl without having to give up their credit card numbers). She honestly spends more time telling us that philosophy is hard than she does TEACHING US PHILOSOPHY. Another thing she does is constantly remind us of the fact that she was educated in the French philosophical tradition. Every time we turn around, it's French this and French that. Everything she says is so incredibly important because it was taught to her by people who saw France one time, or something like that. Anyway, so, she was reading this book to us. When we got to one part, where the author tells us about some painting that moved him when he was ten years old (I know. What kind of retarded ten-year-old likes fine art?) He described several paintings, all done by... you guessed it, French artists. The funny thing was, my professor totally butchered the names! It was as if she'd never heard someone speak the language. Here's this woman who has spent most of her communist life studying every facet of French philosophy, and she couldn't pronounce a single French name to save her life! I know, you could cut the irony with a scythe. Or a toaster. Or a really sharp communist.