This was a good week for "Chad bristles at side issues of massively reshared stories," with the Vox and gender bias stories, and also this PBS piece urging parents to tell their kids science stories. That probably seems surprising, given what I do around here, but while I fully endorse the end of that piece, the opening section in which Wendy Thomas Russell explains why she never liked science mostly makes me think that she's an awful person. She attributes her lack of interest in science to bad teaching, and provides a series of examples ending with:

Later, at the University of Nebraska, I was able to avoid math and science for the most part (the journalism department was kind to me). I did take one astronomy class — and was pretty excited about it! — until I realized that the teacher was a very old Japanese man whose heavy accent destroyed any chance I had at making sense of the universe. He pronounced “star” like this: “stah-waaaah.” I barely scraped by with a C-.

Seriously? You know, there are a bunch of valid criticisms that can and should be made about uninspiring science teaching. Complaining about people's foreign accents is not one of them. Openly mocking said accent is well over the line into Not OK.

There's a bit of irony to this, as another of the pieces being massively reshared around the same time was this interactive chart comparing RateMyProfessor evaluations for men and women. This provides a nice illustration of biased language used in evaluating faculty-- see the write-up at the NYT for examples if you can't think of stuff on your own. Among the not-okay things cited as being mentioned more frequently for women are comments about appearance and personality (though as the NYT article notes, these are less frequent than you might think). Those are definitely on the list of things that make faculty say "I can't believe I have to deal with this horseshit."

Right up there on that list with "needs new clothes" is "has a thick accent." That sort of thing always makes me roll my eyes when it turns up in student comments. But "He pronounced 'star' like this: 'stah-waaaah'" goes past eye-rolling, to "This student's evaluations should be disregarded because the student is a bigoted asshat."

Bad instruction is a real problem in science, and there are valid criticisms to make about poor teaching turning people away from the subject. "The class was presented in a confusing manner" is perfectly valid. "The lectures were extremely abstract and boring" is an appropriate complaint. "The professor talked funny" is not. That has no place on an anonymous student evaluation form, and it's completely inappropriate in a major media outlet.