Well, it happened. Oh joy.

WARNING. THIS POST CONTAINS MILD ADULT CONTENT.

Remember what I said at the beginning of the semester? I am not enjoying my English Compostition 102 class as much as I could, for the reason that my professor, while fairly good-natured,

• swears in class
• uses crude analogies
• expressed political twisting of the facts
• deals with increasingly adult content

and has made me more and more concerned about whether or not I would need to deal with the situation actively as opposed to passively.

So today, he got right off on a grammatical start, dealing with whom vs. who by giving the example of the Hamilton - Burr duel in early American history. Not particularly bad, no big deal, except that he then went on to lay vs. lie.

"You do not get 'laid.' You get 'lain.' I don't care how any of you do it, same sex, opposite sex, animals, corpses, but you do not get laid! You get lain." Good grief. This is a man with children at home.

I was just going to deal with it, not bother talking to him about it, but then he started...comparing God Almighty to the Greek "deities." You see, we were talking about Sophocles's "Antigone," and he started talking about the concept that people were the playthings of the gods, and he compared the play to the Torah (or Hebrew Bible) which he said had been coming out at the same time as this play. He talked about the suffering of the Greek mythical woman Niobe. Because of her pride, the gods killed her innocent children, then turned her into stone which continued weeping forever.

My professor then went on to compare Niobe to Job, asking whether anyone was familiar with the story of Job. I raised my hand, and was granted the "honor" of telling the story. He cut me off after the beginning, the permission granted to Satan to torment Job. He said, "Look, they are playing with a man's life on behalf of a wager." He then went on to complain that Job's children were innocent, and brought up the classic problem of suffering in the case, namely "How can Job (who has been established as a good man) suffer with the permission of a just and all-powerful God?"

I pointed out that at the end Job got everything back and more, but it didn't especially seem to bother him. I figured, enough is enough and I'm not going to take this garbage all semester. Let me tell him where I stand. So after class, I went up to him. "Great points on Job earlier, by the way." he commented. "Yeah, actually, I wanted to talk to you about that." "Please, go ahead." he invited.

I politely told him that I had been offended by his way of addressing that, and that it had sounded like he had started from the assumption that the Bible was false. He responded by apologizing and saying he didn't see how that was what it had sounded like. I then went on to point out that when I signed up for the class, I didn't know that it would contain this level of adult content. He told me, "I'm sorry that you were offended, but I'm interested in results, and experience has shown me that there will be fewer of those grammatical mistakes on tests and papers when I make these analogies." I nodded, thanked him and left.

So now the question is whether it will happen again.