Professors understand your need to express yourself creatively. Even computer science professors. 

Students taking Prof. John Kender’s Honors Intro to Computer Science course found an odd question when they opened their evals:

Discuss: David Sanborn and Kenny G have degraded the art of saxophone playing by selling out to the mass market.

After the survey went online, Prof. Kender sent this email to the class:

As some of you have noticed already, the Courseworks evaluation for this class allows instructors to add questions. For many years, these questions had to be approved by a dean’s office coordinator, whom I happen to know and share an interest with about jazz. I would customarily add as my last question something about saxophone players, just as he is. And, for many years, he would remove the question but answer it the next time I met him in the halls.

It looks like this year there is someone else in charge of vetting instructor questions. This year, to my amazement, the last question was retained. Maybe they thought that “saxophone playing” was a question about Java data structures, maybe like “arraylist printing”, and that “mass market” referred to large disk farms.

In any case, the question, like all others, is optional. Further, it is anonymous. So you don’t need to ask what my thoughts are on Jazz (which, after all, is just a typo for Java).

Prof. Kender

Bwog approves.