My department had a minor emergency at the end of the Spring which left it in need of summer instructors, so I reluctantly agreed to teach a summer course.
I've been noticing this for several years now: Students seem to think that John Stuart Mill's name is John Stuart Mills. WTF? Should I conclude that this error suggests that they students don't read (but simply hear me talk about Mill)?
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My student's write and say Mills all the time. They also say Barnes and Nobles and Krogers. Some people say Walmarts. With stores I assume it's because they are attributing ownership, as some stores and restaurants do, e.g. Bob's BBQ. With Mill, they hear Mill's idea, and this eventually becomes Mills. We should not be forgiving with grocery stores or philosophers.
This isn't unique to your circumstance. I've been seeing it for about 10 years now, which is as long as I've been teaching. I just got to the point where I said, "Spelling counts for philosopher names. If you write a paper about Mills, you will lose points, since we didn't read any by Mills."
It goes the other direction, too. I'm grading papers for an introductory ethics class, and the students continually refer to James Rachels as James Rachel, or worse, "James Rachel's". So at least yours have command of the possessive apostrophe.
My students often think Rachels is a she.
I think it's because we (or I, at least) will often say something like, "Mill's theory" or "Mill's version of utilitarianism." They just don't hear the apostrophe. I now carefully spell his name for students when we start discussing him, and I remind them about the spelling regularly, but they still do it.
About Rachels (and just about every female philosopher): I'm always careful to correct students about the gender of the philosopher under question. I don't know why, but I feel like this is important. Given that I'm a woman, however, this leads some students to conclude that I'm some sort of 'feminazi' or something.
Yeah, "Mills" is super-common around here too. As is Rawl's.
Just finished 30 years in the classroom. "Mills" has been around my whole career--and yes I think it's because students don't distinguish between the possessive and the possessor during discussion. I have been firm about correcting such misuses though. The name is on the damn book/article/handout and all one has to do is pay some attention (and yes--I expect attention to gender in unambiguous cases like "James"; there is danger in taking whimsical license in class as well: don't refer to the elder Rachels as "Jamie" unless you want to add to the confusion). I must say that students' inability to get names right--when it's right there in front of them on the page--still irritates me. You think I'd get used to such sloppiness--but apparently I don't.
As my Mom used to say in her sweet Southern accent: "I done lived too long."
I had a handful of students who thought that Descartes was a woman. I didn't correct them.
Anon 6:22. Awesome.
6:22; 9:14:
Orwellian pride?
I tell my students they'll look like idiots when they transfer and write about "Mills"... but it doesn't seem to phase them...
I once saw a paper that referred to Hilary Putnam as she!
Anon 11:39PM:
Allowing students to think, if only for a short time, that somebody besides a while male could be a famous, paradigm-defining philosopher.
In my neck of the woods, the explanation might be the presence of Mills Fleet Farm -- which is not under any circumstances to be confused with Blaine's Farm & Fleet.
I frequently get the name with the apostrophe, which is even weirder: "Mill's argues that only the harm principle is legitimate." A quick Google search indicates that it's not just students who make this mistake. Where's a copy editor when you need one?
The most charitable explanation I can imagine is that they're also taking a sociology course in which they're reading C. Wright Mills. But the most likely explanation, as others have said, is that they're getting turned around by the inflectional morphology.
Needless to say, English majors make the same mistakes. I've received several papers, over the years, that not only misspelled the author's name but misspelled it several different ways. (For some reason, almost all students misspell Swinburne's name "Swineburne," either through philological instinct or deep disgust.) Also, first-year students seem incapable of recognizing that the first 126 of Shakespeare's sonnets are addressing another man (the addressee always ends up a "she" in their papers), and they invariably think literary critics and other scholars are male even when they have unambiguously feminine first names like "Magaret" and "Edna."
philosophyfactory, I hope you also tell them that writing 'phased' when they mean 'fazed' also makes them look like idiots.
All of your explanations are wrong. The conjecture that they are confusing Mill with some sociologist (!) they are also (!) reading (!) is hilariously wrong.
The cause of this phenomenon runs much deeper and is to be found in the very laws of nature. The Principle of 'S' Conservation (PO'S'C) states that for every 'S' added to a philosopher's name there is an equal and opposite 'S' removed from another philosopher's name. Mill and Hume are the usual beneficiaries of added S-ness while guys like Rachels, Descartes and Rawls naturally suffer from corresponding S-ubtraction.
Given the status of PO'S'C, it would be a miracle if this didn't happen. This entails that if you read a stack of papers that discusses Rachels' critque of Mill where you think S's have been added but an equal number have not been subtracted (or vice versa), it is much more likely that you have miscounted S's or that you are hallucinating.
Just riffing off the James Rachels comment: I was once in session at a conference and after my paper was given someone in the audience made reference to, multiple times, "Mrs. Putnam" - point of clarification: would it have been rude of me to interrupt him and note that Hillary Putnam is not, in fact, a woman?
I'm a teaching assistant for an introductory ethics course. We were discussing paternalism in end-of-life situations and the permissibility of euthanasia. The professor posted some PowerPoint slides discussing the assigned reading. The first slide for the unit had a quote from Mill's "On Liberty", and the second slide was titled "A Millian Argument Against Paternalism".
When the students were then asked to submit papers on this topic, one student claimed to agree with "A. Millian".
You mean they write "John Stuart Mills" instead of "Jon Stewart Mills"? You should be fucking grateful.
My student's write and say Mills all the time… We should not be forgiving with grocery stores or philosophers.
Or Anon 4:34s...
I'm thinking about publishing under the pseudonym Jon Stewart Mills, just to fuck with them. And I'll be sure to write a lot about utilitarianism, so that people will be able to say things about "Mills' objection to Mill's argument that p."
One of my colleagues had a student who wrote a paper about Dick Hart's Meditations.
Yes, I think that this type of error comes about from not reading. I find that it's become incredibly hard to wrap my mind around the extent that my students simply refuse to read. It has gotten worse, I find, in the past couple of years (at least in my region and university). I'm not talking about *not liking reading*. That was always something with which to contend. I'm talking about *not reading at all* becoming the default expectation.
The winner is....
Anon 7:25 (aka Jon Stewart Mills)
I used to get upset about the spelling of "Mill" and even complained about it to my students. Then I reread an essay that I wrote in my first philosophy course and discovered I'd made the same careless, but trivial, mistake.
Once, in graduate school, I even mistakenly wrote "phased" for "fazed" as philosophyfactory does above, but my prof just corrected me without getting rattled about it.
Lighten up. If you insist that your students spell names properly, use possessives correctly, and don't misspell "argument" and "existence," just write them on a list of words that will receive 1-point deductions when they are not properly spelled. I have used this technique for decades and it works.
This is really cathartic. The "Mills" thing has always gotten under my skin. It's totally the opposite with "Humes" - I get a weird kick out of it (sounds like "fumes"). I confess I also don't correct the Rachels-as-a-she thing. It makes me too sad to correct a young woman who is perhaps pleased at reading "Rachel's" article - "No, Virginia, non-white-males don't get read in intro courses."
I believe one and all must look at it.
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