Weekly Wrap Up

Misc–karmic mistakes?, Museum Musings, Teaching

Buckle up: this one’s a doozy.

The Bad:

Some things I’m going through this week, you’re going through too. We watch as Haiti gets wracked by another earthquake.

Those of us in California got our voter guide for the ridiculous recall. Governor Newsom is in trouble for enforcing life saving measures. When things started to loosen up and our economy was once again good, polls showed he would survive it.

Now, with the Delta variant and a bunch of selfish, stupid assholes who won’t get vaccinated, we need to mask up again.

And the polls are showing he might lose. ‘Muerica!

We could go the way of Florida, with one of the 40+ bozos on the ballot signing an executive order forbidding us from mask mandates.

In more personal news, the other day when I came home, I saw a man walking out of our complex with two bikes–one looked like the boy’s.

I almost shouted, “hey!” But I didn’t want to be a Karen, accusing an African American man of something before I got my facts straight. So I ran around the house first to make sure it was my boy’s bike. It was, but by the time I circled back, the thief was gone.

I’d been wanting the boy to donate it, since he doesn’t use it anymore, so we’re not hurt by the loss, except for the sense of violation.

The Huh?!?

I am supposed to have 50 students this term, but I only have 20 active participants. I usually lose a couple, but since most students who take upper division writing in Summer Session 2 are sort of stuck, I’ve never lost this many. They’re mostly students who have already “walked,” having put off their writing class until the very last moment.

The only thing that’s changed, though, is that I put a prerequisite on Module 1. It’s always a battle to have students actually read the syllabus and to go through the Modules instead of trying to do the assignments without having done any of the readings.

This term, Module 1 wouldn’t open for them until they read the syllabus. And they didn’t even have to read the pages, really; they just had to click on them.

I kept getting students emailing me on the first two days, asking me to open the assignments. I cheerfully explained that they just had to read the syllabus first.

And more than half of the class dropped.

In other words, I scared away a bunch of graduating pre-med students by just asking them to read something.

The Sad:

My AT&T contract was up this week, so I finally cut the cable cord. I know most people did so a long time ago, but until recently, I needed to have cable to record (and burn to DVD) every Simpsons and Doctor Who, etc. for use in class. Now, with students able to access everything streaming, and with my burning system not working with AT&T’s set up, I find that almost everything I watch on cable/DVR is on TCM. It’s hard to justify paying over a hundred a month for TCM and a few shows on other networks.

Every week, I would go through what was coming up on TCM and record beloved favorites I wanted to revisit, new to me works that sounded fun, and classic horror for the boy. I discovered a lot of wonderful things that way, and I loved TCM hosts telling me trivia.

I know I can find old movies on other sites, but I also know that some of the obscure ones won’t be there, and that I’m less likely to go hunting for those gems, when streaming sites bombard me with all the unwatched contemporary stuff I like.

The Annoying:

For the last year, I’ve been trying to get my various healthcare providers to refund me for payments I made after I hit my out-of-pocket copay last summer. My CVS pharmacy copays are still outstanding. I spent an hour on the phone with them this week, which was possible only because I bitched about them not answering my emails, on Twitter, and then they gave me the number to call.

A good twenty minutes of the call was them trying to find me in the system. The agent had to reboot her whole computer.

When she finally found me, she asked for the prescription numbers I was calling about.

“Can’t you pull up my list of prescriptions and payments to see what I got after I hit the maximum last year?”

“No.”

And that’s bullshit.

I told her I’d have to call her back.

As all my friends know, I’m on LOTS of meds. There are three just for GERD.

Luckily, the Target CVS pharmacists printed out a list of everything I filled, so I can spend who knows how long reading numbers to CVS tomorrow.

The Disheartening:

Remember how I discovered I might have a new peach allergy? Apparently, it might be that I’m just allergic to them when certain things are in bloom.

But I found out I have a sensitivity to figs, too, when I eat a lot of them.

So maybe it’s an allergy, but maybe it’s just an oral reaction to too much fruity goodness.

But I will NOT stop eating too many figs when they’re in season. They’re my favorite fruit, and they’re not available that often.

The Good:

Now that Karlissa can go to museums again, and since we’re still wanting to do that museum book, we had to see the Van Gogh immersive exhibit in SF.

Melissa took me on Wednesday for my birthday. We had an amazing lunch and then got to meditate on Van Gogh.

It was wonderful.

The Good, but Tainted:

Last October, it was time for me to ask that Davis grant me another three-year contract. According to the union rules, if I can prove I’m “excellent,” they have to give me a 6% raise. I also asked for a 3% merit raise, for the textbook Melissa and I published in Spring 2020.

Our new contract year started on the first of July, but I only learned this week that I’m indeed staying at Davis and that I’ve been granted the raise.

However.

The letter said the University Committee on Personnel tried to stop me from getting the merit raise.

Even though Melissa has already gotten that raise for our book.

You see, they wanted to enforce a rule they’re trying to put in place that lecturers can only get merit raises when they win a university teaching award.

Luckily, the Vice-Provost and Dean overrode them, explaining that the draconian measure isn’t in effect *yet*.

What makes it draconian, you ask? According to the new rule, only four lecturers could ever get a merit raise at UCD in any given year. Amazing lecturers will also therefore be pitted against each other.

I’ve already won a teaching award, so I will probably never get a merit raise again. As one of our tenured colleagues put it to Melissa, we could win the Pulitzer, and they would tell us no.

I could stop mentoring, serving on committees, teaching the independent and group studies the university gets paid for, but that I get nothing for, researching, etc, and get the same excellence raise.

If I were smart, I would stop.

Teaching faculty like me don’t get to decide what the standards are for raises. The research faculty have decided that our research will never be rewarded, even when it directly relates to our teaching, and that clearly outstanding teaching can only be rewarded in an excessively limited manner.

I wonder how they would react if someone got to make the same rules about their raises. What about if only “award-winning” research counted?

While I’m happy I got my-probably-last merit raise, I will also admit that the first thought that popped to mind was how the Department of Education might decide my monthly payments need to be even higher!

Which bring us to:

The Student Loans:

When Melissa and I had a wonderful lunch at Chao Pascao in SF, I got a call from my contact at Mohela. She said my request to de-consolidate the loans has been approved!

!!!

When the consolidation went through, it took about a month before all of the sites updated to reflect it. So I’m trying not to panic that everything looks the same now–that everything still looks consolidated.

I don’t know how all of this is going to work. Will everything go back to the way it was, as I hope? Or will I have to fight them to recognize the 14 years of payments I made, even after de-coupling? When I start the TEPSLF application again, how long will it take? Will it even get approved? (Less than 1% of people who filed for forgiveness under Trump were accepted. We don’t have numbers under Biden yet.)

I’m going to hire a student loan consultant to help me through everything.

I haven’t let out the breath I’ve been holding yet. I won’t be able to until I see the sites say I’ve made all those qualifying payments.

But this is the face of a woman after she got a great call from Mohela:

A couple of hours after this picture was taken, Melissa and I were having a drink on the rooftop of the Van Gogh exhibit.

When my phone rang, it told me Senator Dianne Feinstein was calling. One of her staff members wanted some more information from me so they could contact the Department of Education on my behalf.

I got to tell him that they might not need to intervene.

Say what you want about the Senator, and I know a lot of my friends don’t like her, but she was the last government official to receive my request for help.

And she’s the *only* one who’s responded.

Thanks, Dianne!

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Weekly Wrap Up

Misc–karmic mistakes?, Movies & Television & Theatre, Teaching

This has been quite a week.

As you’re all aware, the Department of Education is behaving terribly. Mohela said they would help. I don’t think I’ll be able to fully release the breath I’ve been holding since Tuesday until I can *see* that my loans have been de-consolidated on all of the websites.

And then the fun of figuring out the next step will begin.

But that’s not all that’s happened this week.

A beloved colleague died.

I learned that a family member has cancer.

A student said something hyperbolic in an email about suicide, which meant many hours of talking to her and to the powers that could help her.

It’s incredibly hot. The kind of hot where you feel rather ill even in an air-conditioned room.

The highest percentage of students ever failed my untimed, open-everything library quiz. After reading a chapter on how to research and watching a screen capture video I made specific to our library, students are asked to find a nonacademic source, a book, and a peer-reviewed article on The Simpsons. The instructions specifically tell them not to find me something about OJ Simpson, Jessica Simpson, the Simpson’s paradox, etc. So when a third of my students linked to an article about the Simpson’s paradox, I cut and pasted the instructions into the comments, to explain why they got a zero on that question.

I then sent out an announcement about it.

A couple of days later, I got an email from a student who said she didn’t understand my comment or why she was marked wrong. She explained that “the Simpson’s paradox” was in the title of the article, so how was she wrong?!?

In three weeks, these students will be done with the last writing/research class most of them will ever be asked to take.

I had to see my gyno’s colleague because of more issues with bleeding (this will apparently be “Summer of Blood 2: The Bloodening”). When I was getting checked in, the receptionist asked if I wanted to pop back for the allergy shots I was supposed to get the next day, so I only had to come once. Then, the allergy nurse said I needed to meet the new allergy doc, so she could refill my prescription, and asked if I wanted to do that after I saw the gyno. And then the nurse appeared, having to wait for all the shots to go in (there are four, and they’re complicated). It took me a moment, though, in the exam room, to figure out he was trying to check me in for the allergy appointment first. So we had to find the other nurse to take me to the right room.

And the gyno said no sex for a month.

What’s been good?

I started Blindspotting on Starz; it’s beautiful. I wish I had the dance vocabulary to talk about some of the physical work they do on the show. The slam poetry they incorporate is fantastic too. Highly recommended.

Dante stopped watching Schitt’s Creek last year, after a break up, but this week I used my horrible mental health to explain why we had to go back in. And now he’s seen the whole series.

I got to take Melissa to Tapa the World to celebrate her birthday.

I got to make a Mexican feast for a couple of friends last night.

The main thing, though, that has gotten my through this week is the outpouring of support that I’ve gotten from you. So many of you offered to help. So many of you gave your sympathy, love, and prayers.

I am immensely blessed to have you all in my life.

And so, for you, another new wrap pic:

Yes, the only room with good lighting in my apartment is the downstairs bathroom.
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Weekly Wrap Up

Chronic Pain, Misc–karmic mistakes?, Movies & Television & Theatre, Teaching

Last weekend, I finished grading my SCC lit class, which leaves me with just three courses for the next three weeks. And then I’ll get a whole week off before my summer courses start. (My goal, in addition to finishing my three courses successfully, is to prep my June course well enough that I can actually take that week off from work.)

The end of the SCC lit class could have gone better. One struggling student cheated on both her last paper and the final. Another, who needed an A+ on every remaining assignment to pass, skipped assignments, turned in a research paper without any research in it, and then turned in an incomplete final AFTER I’d turned in the grades.

(Did he tell me he needed another day? Of course not. That would entail communicating with me.)

My comedy students’ final is soon, so I need to write my routine, since I’m the MC.

A beloved colleague brought my attention to a temporary fix the DOE might have for people like me, who paid an incredible amount of money to the “wrong” plans. So I’m filing for that. Do they want ink signatures from UCD to prove I have worked there all this time? They do. Is the website confusing, because it says I’m not eligible since I, like everyone else, is in automatic Covid deferment, but then also have a paragraph about how I should ignore the giant warning on every singe page about that, since they’re the ones who deferred me? Yes.

I tried Jupiter Rising, but didn’t like it. Tried Invincible. Might like it. Tried Hacks with Jean Smart. Fucking loved it. Started Ted Lasso. Will binge more soon. Couldn’t quite get through Army of the Dead last night. Started and finished this season of Shrill, which is awesome. Watched Jason Alexander et al in The Sisters Rosensweig via Zoom and The ABCS of Love via the Sacramento French Film Festival.

I’m mourning Paul Mooney and Charles Grodin.

My upper division students are struggling, because I’m making them write a grown up argument (one in which the thesis is actually debatable (for reasonable people) and defendable, and one that works to inform and persuade its intended audience, and one that fully and fairly engages with counter-argument).

You’d be surprised how many draft theses are unconstitutional, EVEN AFTER I SAID IN THE VIDEO ABOUT THIS THAT THEY SHOULD NOT MAKE UNCONSTITUTIONAL ARGUMENTS.

I spent 9 straight hours giving feedback on drafts on Thursday. Then, I tried to join some high school friends for a Zoom reunion, but I felt so sick with exhaustion that I had to go lie down.

The most stressful thing this week, though, was another visit with my TMJ dentist.

I told his assistant that I wanted to talk about getting a lower night guard and/or a dental device for mild apnea (since the dentist is convinced my tongue is in the wrong place when I sleep). The dentist was dismissive of anyone who’s vouched for lower guards. (“Well, I guess your friends have made literally thousands of upper night guards like I have, right?”) But he agreed to let me have a lower one and “run [my] own little experiment.”

But, I said. If you think I need that apnea dental device, shouldn’t I get that and not use any type of guard?

We came to consensus on trying that first. I have to do a sleep study for insurance to approve it.

Then he brought up all the other things he wants to do: the frenectomy, sawing down some of the protruding bones in my mouth, braces, etc.

I said I’d like to go in stages since I have other doctors who want to do things to my body that are also extreme.

We left that conversation with him knowing nothing more about me, but with me knowing about all of his surgeries. Sigh.

He said to get the sleep study done and then we’d do a scan for the device.

When I was alone again with the assistant, who had been in the room the whole time, he tried to schedule me for a scan for a lower night guard.

“That’s not where we landed,” I explained. “We need to schedule a scan.”

“For braces?”

No.

Once I got him to realize we were trying for the apnea device, he wanted to get the device going right away.

“Don’t I have to get the sleep study first?”

“I don’t think so. They’ll want to study you with it in.”

“But the doctor said I needed the study before insurance would authorize the device.”

“Oh, yeah. That makes sense.”

He scheduled me for a scan next week, saying we can do the scan without authorization, but I don’t trust him, so I’m calling tomorrow to talk to someone who can parse conversations better.

Overall, though, it was a good week.

My son and I celebrated the end of his first year in grad school with a sushi feast.

A beloved friend got me an amazing gift:

And I am celebrating that, as of last night, it’s no longer been a year and seven months since I’ve had sex with another person.

Yay vaccines!

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Weekly Wrap Up

Chronic Pain, Misc–karmic mistakes?, Simpsonology, Teaching

Last week definitely had more ups than downs. This week, not so much.

The bad:

Both the boy and I had to deal with medical b.s. Mine included driving all the way to Sacramento with a migraine, to see my TMJ specialist, only to be told that my appointment had completely disappeared from their system.

I’m also prepping for some facet injections in my back. The pain clinic and I are sort of at a stand-still. I don’t respond well enough to the treatments we’re trying, and they’re also a little dangerous (since I’m so young, I shouldn’t have frequent disc injections). They want to burn the nerves in my lumbar spine, but I’m unconvinced, both because nerve pain isn’t the only thing going on and because I’ve had a nerve burn done in my neck, and it backfired. Instead of my brain saying, “we’re not getting pain signals from her neck anymore, so let’s not make her feel pain,” my brain said, “holy fucking shit! They BURNED HER NERVES! Let’s send the regular pain signals and the pain one should feel after being burned!”

The facet injections are a compromise, basically. They’re hoping to show me, through it, that a nerve burn would work there.

Anubis decided that two family members having health problems wasn’t enough, so his urethra got blocked. Now we’re monitoring his pee, and Dante has to help him keep is clean (Anubis’s surgery to widen his urethra has helped, but not quite enough.)

We didn’t get to really celebrate St. Urho’s Day, due to the chaos.

In other news, I took a break from celebrating getting out of medical and consumer debt to check on how those student loans were coming.

Borrowed: 133,733

Paid back so far: 88,744

With interest, what I owed Tuesday: $154,213

My laptop’s keyboard is starting to have sticky keys. Apparently, it’s a known issue, and they should fix it for free, but the fixers say I have to be prepared to be without it for a couple of weeks. My desktop can’t yet do Zoom, so I’ve had to order a web cam with mic before I can get the laptop into the shop.

The meh:

My 300th college course began this week! It’s an intro to lit class at SCC; unfortunately, it’s an 8 week class. And while I got rid of a few units (postmodernism, the Southern Gothic, and fairy tales), it’s still a challenge to do a semester course in half a semester.

5 of the 26 enrolled students didn’t respond to emails or log on to Canvas the first week. Half of the rest are already failing because they haven’t turned in the homework. I’ve reached out to everyone, and most are telling me they just didn’t think the course would be time consuming. When I explain that they would have physically been in a room with me for 6 hours and 40 minutes each week if we were in person, and that they should therefore be prepared to do at least that much (which is much less than the Carnegie expectation of 20 hours/week for this class), they are shocked.

I’m not shocked that they’re shocked, but I’m disheartened.

Many of my students are working full time and also taking a full load of courses, which an 8-week course isn’t compatible with.

Half of the students hated “Hills Like White Elephants,” and I had fun reading their interpretations of what the “operation” was. The most creative was that the American wanted Jig to join a prostitution ring. I also included “Bullet Points” by Jericho Brown in this first week, to show them that poetry isn’t just dead white guys writing about daffodils. Most of the students loved it; the one who wants to be a cop found it offensive.

Next week, we do plays: Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune and Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play. It’s my first time teaching the latter; I’m cautiously optimistic. Am I having them watch the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons first? Of course!

I finished my four Winter courses, and I got the syllabi and Canvas pages up for my three Davis Spring courses, which was quite a feat. There were a couple of days, including yesterday, when my brain broke.

The good:

I got to see the Sklar Brothers and Grep Proops perform virtual shows.

Spring came.

I took The New Yorker‘s recommendation to watch The Bureau, which is excellent.

I had many students thank me for my work last quarter. A few of them realizing how much time I spend writing to them and talking to them is the only thing that makes it worth it. One student wrote this:

“I have never had another teacher like you before. You terrified me for all of the right reasons. I kept feeling called out in the beginning. I used to write papers for the grader instead of the purpose because of their biased writing styles. In fact, I used to do everything to please other people because I thought that is how life works. I know now how incorrect that way of living is. Maybe this wasn’t your intention, but I understand how I want to live my life from now on. You taught the class with humor, honesty, and empathy: three characteristics I strive to perfect one day. There was never any bullshit, and for that, I am so thankful. You taught the class not only how to become better writers, but also how to be better people.”

I’m pretty sure “[terrifying] for all of the right reasons” should be on my tombstone.

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Trump team misrepresents evidence

Teaching, Who’s Your Source

This week, we’re watching the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The first defense move was to argue that he could not even be impeached.

NPR reported this week that one constitutional scholar has a problem with how he was cited in the Trump team’s defense brief.

His argument was that Presidents could, in fact, be impeached under these circumstances, but Trump’s team said he said the opposite.

I would never let my students get away with that.

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Grades Are In F2020

Teaching

Q: Karma, now that your grades are in, what are you going to do with the rest of your day?
A: Continue prepping the four classes that start in two weeks, start putting together the Atwood journal, do some mandatory manager training online, and get an echocardiogram.
Q: Weren’t you supposed to say you’d be enjoying the season and the break?
A: [incoherent sounds]
Q: Are you hysterically laughing or crying?

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Writing Your Narrative: A Choose-Your-Own Adventure

Teaching

A few years ago, I had an idea that maybe I could illustrate the right and wrong ways to open and close a narrative essay with a choose-your-own adventure-style story.

This week, I finally tried it.

It took way longer than I thought it would, and there was some cussing at the program when it wouldn’t save certain links in the chain, and trying to get all the threads straight kinda broke my brain, but the draft is done.

Wanna play?

https://www.inklewriter.com/stories/14788.

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A Covid Shift in My Dreamspace

Teaching

When I first started teaching, I had anxiety dreams. I would show up without my materials, without a plan.

All these years later, I’ve gained confidence. I showed up without my book once; it was fine. Classes have gone off track, productively or not, and I got us back on track.

I’ve improvised an activity for the class to do so I could leave with one student, who was in such crisis she needed to see a mental health professional right that second.

My dreams have to work harder to throw me.

Now, if I have a work anxiety dream, I show up to a class that isn’t mine–in a subject I don’t know–but I’m somehow expected to teach. In the last one, I looked at a board covered in Chinese logograms and turned to the class. “Look, I’m obviously not your teacher.” And then I woke up.

But not all teaching dreams are about anxiety. In many, I’m just doing my job. I’ve woken up having given a whole lecture I had planned to dream students. And then I experience deja vu when I do it for real.

But today, I woke up from a dream of creating modules in Canvas, filling page upon page, converting what I would say to what they would read.

I’d prefer the anxiety dream.

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When They Don’t Answer

Teaching

Teaching online has been eventful, which is ironic, since it doesn’t look that way. Watching me teach now is seeing me sitting at my computer, typing. It’s only when you might catch a glimpse of me with a medieval jester puppet as I make a video that an “event” is evident.

There were struggles when I had to teach my first fully online courses at Davis and when I had to convert my Los Rios semester classes to online mid term.

Right now, I’m teaching my first fully online Los Rios course.

I’m better prepared, both through the few months of experience I have and through the course I took for certification to teach online.

I’m grappling with a problem I assume is common. Many of my community college students aren’t doing any of the readings or watching any of the videos. They’re just going to assignments.

And then they fail the assignments because they didn’t do the reading.

The Davis students last term learned their lesson quickly. They either started doing at least some of the reading or they dropped.

My current students aren’t learning that lesson quickly. I can post announcements and videos and write comments on their assignments all day long, but if they aren’t doing the readings/viewings, then they aren’t seeing those corrections.

In class, I could pull them aside. I could make an announcement to the whole class that they would at least be in the room for.

I’ve managed to find ways to pull most of them aside, virtually.

Except one student.

She added the class with a PTA the second day. And I honestly don’t think she’s read anything.

Not the syllabus or schedule. Not the announcements. Not my comments to her. Not the textbook.

She’s failing, not surprisingly.

Over a week ago, she wrote on an assignment that she was confused because the dates kept changing.

I haven’t changed a single date.

The schedule I give the students is complete at the very start of class.

And we stick to it.

It takes an emergency–and not just a personal one. The only time I’ve changed due dates in recent memory was when school closed because of the fires.

So I wrote her a note back, telling her that I wanted to figure out where the confusion was so we could get her on track.

And then I remembered that she didn’t read my comments on her submissions. So I sent her an email through Canvas and an email the regular way.

No response.

She didn’t disappear, though. She keeps turning in failing assignments.

It’s been a week. She’s gotten a second email (I know she uses her email–she emailed me twice at the start of term) and a phone call.

Yes. A phone call. (Their numbers are on the roster in the Los Rios system.)

She didn’t pick up, but I left a message that I wanted to get in touch because I wanted to help her figure out the assignments and the dates.

No response.

I don’t know what to do now.

If this were a movie, I would find a way to find her, neglect my family and my other students, and babysit her little sister, while helping her complete her assignments.

This movie idea–that we should all reach every student all the time–is damaging and pervasive.

At every conference, it’s reiterated that if our students can’t pass our classes, it’s because we’re doing something wrong.

This is an excellent example of how that’s not true.

But I still want to help her.

And she’s not going to let me.

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The Healing of America, by TR Reid

Teaching

As I’ve mentioned before, I do extra credit book clubs with my students.

After one book club, one of my students recommended The Healing of America, so I made it our book for the next quarter.

Reid lays out the problems with American healthcare, which is fundamentally about our paradox. We spend more than anyone else, but we’re definitely not healthier. And not all of us have access to care. We let people die of manageable diseases.

Reid takes his own imperfect body around the world to look at how other developed nations handle care.

Along the way, he addresses common American misconceptions about the rest of the world, about too-long wait times, rationed care, etc.

I was surprised when my 104F students told me that Reid’s book surprised them. They had believed all those myths.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I didn’t know much about how the rest of the world worked when I was their age, but I thought they might know more about their field–and how fucked up it is.

One smart, tightly-wound student managed to shock me, though. After the other students talked about how they would definitely want to work in systems where insurance companies couldn’t override doctors, etc., one student said she was against affordable healthcare.

“If anyone can come to my office–if it’s not expensive to see me–then they won’t respect my degree and how much work I’ve done.”

Another student pushed back.

“So you would rather work in a system where someone could die because they couldn’t afford treatment?”

“Yes.”

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