Implicit Bias

            On Tuesday morning I finished working out the chords for “Merde à l’amour" (Shit to Love) by Serge Gainsbourg. I ran through the song in French and English and then uploaded it to Christian's Translations to begin the editing process before blog publication. 

            I weighed 88.9 kilos at breakfast. 

            I wrote an email to my Brit Lit 2 assistant professor addressing his little speech urging his students to be conscious of implicit bias when doing our course evaluations: 

            Dear Professor Dancer, 

            I'm writing to point out to you that your speech encouraging your students to be conscious of implicit bias when evaluating courses was a mistake for a few reasons: 

            First of all, unless you happen to be a woman or a person of colour this is outside of your course purview. Ultimately this would be far more appropriate to appear in a mass email from the dean or the president of the university. If you could eliminate implicit bias entirely by telling your students to be conscious of it, it might be worth insulting their intelligence by doing so, but that is not how consciousness works. You may very well be able to influence some students to curb a tendency towards implicit bias by reminding them to do so, but you could just as easily have the opposite effect on other students. Are you willing to take responsibility for that? You could also just as easily influence students towards reverse bias and cause them to ease back on an honest evaluation. Consciousness is a loaded term and telling people to be conscious is a lot like the old Zen joke of the master telling the student, "Don't think about a monkey while meditating," resulting in the student thinking about nothing but a monkey. 

            It would have been fine if you had snuck this ethical lesson in indirectly through an interpretation of a piece of course material, but otherwise it comes across as virtue signalling. I've always thought it odd when conservatives accuse our PM of virtue signalling, since it's his job to address racism and sexism in Canada. But I don't think it's really your job as a professor to directly address it. 

            Also to tell your students to be conscious of implicit bias implies the fuller sentence of, "Be conscious like I am." which is problematic and somewhat pretentious. . 

            Ultimately if there is obvious implicit bias against professors who are women and or people of colour then the university should adjust for it when the evaluations are reviewed. If the university is not aware of implicit bias in course evaluations I would suggest that would be a better direction for your pleas for consciousness. 

            Best, 

           

            Christian Christian 

            I weighed 88.8 kilos before lunch. I had kettle chips with skyr and salsa. 

            In the afternoon Dancer returned my email but all he had to say was: “”Thanks for your writing and for your feedback. You’re right that it’s a tricky issue to handle so any feedback is helpful.” It seemed like a pretty dismissive dis. By saying my feedback is “any” feedback he’s suggesting it’s the opposite of unique. But maybe he wasn’t being consciously clever but just burying his head in his woke. 

            I took a bike ride to Ossington and Bloor. 

            When I got back Benji poked his head out of his door. I sang to him a song I’d just made up, “It’s lock down / in Hog Town!” He lamented that in fifty years he never expected to end his life like this. He’s seventy and always talks like he’s only got a couple of years left to live. 

            I weighed 88.2 kilos at 17:50. 

            I finished reading through all my Brit Lit 2 lecture notes since January and started all over again getting up to a quarter of the way through. 

            I weighed 88 kilos before dinner. I made a fresh batch of gravy and had some with a potato and a chicken leg while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story Gomer spends more time chatting with customers at Wally’s filling station than he does working. As a result Wally fires him, which means that he also loses his home because he’s been living in a room at the back of the garage. Andy offers to let Gomer stay in his house but Gomer stays up all night and makes noise trying to do chores to help Andy. When not doing that he either sings or just makes a lot of noise on his own. Once Andy talks with Gomer about the problem he tries to be quiet but then all of Gomer’s customers from the filling station start bringing their cars around all night long and shouting for Gomer to fix them. When Gomer first appeared in this series all he knew how to do was pump gas and he knew nothing about machinery. Andy learns from Wally that he hasn’t had any customers for days. When Andy comes home and finds a long line of cars waiting for Gomer to repair them, he makes them all follow him to Wally’s station and shows Wally that he needs to hire Gomer back.