Thank you for presenting this perspective.

Also, in other developed countries (pick one in Europe), though the excellent services, skilled professors with good salary, well maintained buildings and resources and all exist, which were used as the reasons by the economists presented in your blog, the cost of education is nowhere close to the one in the United States. In fact, in many of them, the tuition is free, and there might even be some stipend for students. The absurd cost of education here, has to have some more reason on why it is so high.

I know multiple people who’ve faced this issue you’ve stated in this blog, yet won’t speak about it or confront it because of obvious reasons (bad credit, bad reln, losing funding to name few). The person who’s supposed to guide you, not only failing to do so, but making your academic life miserable would certainly be stressful. I do think we have considerable resources to tackle such issues at Tech but there’s always space for more improvement.

This post is interesting as you focus on one specific area of your teaching technique. May be the students did not get the sarcasm? Because humor might differ as you move on to a different culture? So may be the students didn’t get the joke, not that they disliked your attempt on sarcasm? I do think a balanced goofiness can be a great ice breaker and may increase the students’ comfort level in interacting with you. Coming from Nepal, Sometimes I just do not get the jokes here, and it is not that I do not that I get offended or don’t appreciate, I probably don’t get it because it might not be something I can relate to in the way people who grew up here do.