Exactly my thought. Good grief, I teach Woolf to 19 year-olds every semester, and I am a reasonable teacher at best.

I love how the interview is full of "I've read this twice.... I've read this four times... and I listened to the audio recording of this one as well! .... and I wish I had my copy of this to show you because I underlined all my favourite bits in it."

C'mon. We can't do better even with a peaCOCK in the house?

I have to say, this smells like a troll to me.

AGH! Fuck that shit! I was lucky that my undergrad school's English faculty consisted almost entirely of women. I think there were all of two male professors in the department and if they had tried any such bullshit, they would've been torn to shreds.

I think this guy mixed up his teaching and OKCupid profiles.

I disagree. Writing and teaching are separate skills. As a temp, visiting lecturer, sure; but as a full-time professor, when he doesn't have a doctorate? No.

Harold Bloom's entire existence is a circle-jerk.

Here's when Newsweek jumped the shark:

I thought the same thing when I saw Roth at the end of the list. And this: "And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class."

Oh! And then another student came up and introduced himself as a former student of Harold Bloom as well. It was like a big Harold Bloom circle jerk.

True story: in my first semester at NYU, I signed up for a class on literary theory with a prominent professor. In the very first class, he informed us that he was a pupil of Harold Bloom, he unveiled his syllabus—which was nothing but Phillip Roth and Raymond Chandler, and then he flipped the fuck out at a student…

Wait... what? This guy put Proust on his list of manly writers? There's no fucking way, surely?

| Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Haha, my first reaction to this was "I can just imagine his starry-eyed awe at reading his first Harold Bloom essay when he was 17"

My high school gave extra credit if you took the "Great American Novels" summer program between your junior and senior years - enough extra credit in English to pack a serious punch on your GPA. So it was a popular class. The syllabus for the three month program was picking at least 30 novels from a selection of 50 -…

University of Toronto's understanding of the purpose of his class:

I would agree with that. Girls are still subtly pushed aside when it comes to STEM fields, and that needs to change badly. Personal experience tells me that it is, but slowly. I volunteer at a science museum on the weekends, and I get about equal numbers of boys and girls who tell me they want to grow up to be…

When the SATs first came around, boys tended to outscore girls on the math, while girls outscored boys on verbal. SAT writers assumed there was a flaw in the verbal section and skewed the types of questions and subject to raise boys' scores, while assuming the math section was as it should be.

It boggles my mind that an education system that was developed largely by men specifically for boys, and has changed very little even with the inclusion of women into it, is now commonly dubbed "female friendly" and it's assumed to be somehow discriminatory towards boys. It's the exact system we've used for boys for…