Which she did. The TA has been put on administrative leave and Ms. Fulnecky is being praised by TPUSA, among other conservative Christian organizations, for her bravery.

Higher education has its problems. This is not the way to address them.

I can’t speak to Ms. Fulnecky’s motivations. But the *appearance* here is certainly that she chose a class in which the TA was transgender (something which doesn’t have anything to do with whether the rubric was properly applied) to make a point.

Then, doing a little fact checking, I found out that Ms. Fulnecky is a junior psychology major. A junior, taking a class in her major field, who turns in a completely inappropriate paper should absolutely expect to get a failing grade. She knows the expectations by year 3 of her college career.

It seemed that the TA grading the paper was too inexperienced to react properly—to invite the student to office hours, explain the criteria again, and give her chance to rewrite and submit, with a letter grade taken off for lateness.

Coming into a class with all of your defenses firmly in place is not the best posture for learning; I’ve gotten my share of freshman essays that footnote the Bible instead of dealing with the text.

And there would have been shared responsibility.

It takes them at least a semester to realize that we, the professors, generally aren’t out to sabotage their faith. (I say generally as I can’t speak to all motivations, but in the English department at William & Mary, we were mostly just trying to teach them close reading and decent writing.)

IAfter nearly twenty years of teaching freshmen, I could 100% see this scenario unfolding. My take: the child headed off to the U of O having been thoroughly warned about the godlessness of a secular university and her responsibility to uphold Biblical truth. I’ve taught those kids.

We might change it up a bit next year, but for this year, it was the perfect transition from the old to the next.

We watched What About Bob? and Zootopia and random episodes of Frasier. We fed all the livestock twice and put up the Christmas tree (to be decorated tomorrow at breakfast) and played more games. (I won Citadel, not that that's important.)

I’m setting all the food out at 11 AM. We’re going to spend the day in our great room with a fire, movies, and family games. Everyone can help themselves to whatever they want to eat whenever they want to eat it, They can join in games and movies as they choose. They don’t have to wear shoes.

After Mom died, I fixed the same meal for all my people. We sat down and ate it. It took fifteen minutes and then everyone was done (after three full days of cooking). I retreated to the sofa and wept. It all felt false and awful and I couldn’t even say why.

So here’s what we’re doing this year.

Mom and Dad couldn’t imagine Thanksgiving without a formal sit-down meal in the underused great room, with silver and napkins, and a long pastoral prayer to start out, and all of the kids wearing shoes (that was always a tough one).

Aww, thanks!!