A friend of mine told me this true story today, which goes a long way toward explaining why I no longer teach:
This morning I got an email from a prospective [...] student who wanted to see my syllabus prior to registering. Because [the course] deals with literature of many genres, I use the word 'texts' in my syllabus (rather than the specific terms story, play, poem, essay). The student wrote back asking whether she would need to buy a new cell phone, seeing that we were reading so many texts. I assumed she was kidding and replied with a smiley face. Immediately, I received a furious tirade about how unfair I was to expect students to purchase phones and to pay for text messages, which are expensive. I replied that I hadn't realized she wasn't joking and defined what a 'text' means in English class. She wrote back that I had no right to use that word in a way that 'no one could possibly understand' and that she had already looked into buying phones which had worsened 'an already bad day' (guess she didn't vote for Obama?). I didn't have the heart (or stomach) to tell her that I'd switched to 'text' from my previous term 'selection' because former students had found 'selection' confusing (they thought it meant they only had to read part of an assignment--a selection of it. Usually, they just read the first page, especially if I neglected to include the entire page range of a selection on the syllabus).
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