English Crime Syndicate - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/76/mob

I've never been in a gang, I've never had any contact with any mob, and even my friends together could never be quite threatening.

No one considers the D&D playing cellist as any threat to their well being.

The thing that I am starting to notice though is the mob like mentality of professors.

Seriously, some of the best teachers out there, act like a mob boss in their class. They have set rules and standards, and some of them go on killing sprees of GPAs.

You want to come into my class and act like a fool? You want to disrespect me and my class? You want to mess with me? Huh punk?

Seriously, my student asked me what I was doing in class to receive a pay check (he thought I wasn't doing anything and was just having fun) and suddenly I was going full mob boss on him.

Are you aware of what I can do to your grade? Do you know how strict I can be to your paper? I can make them bleed red ink! I can turn that 4.0 into a 0.4 faster than you can blink, and you came into my classroom and disrespect me like that?

I might not know much about the underworld of mobs, but I sure do know a thing or two about if someone snitches on you to your department head about what you're doing in class, that there are going to be repercussions to that action. I might now know much about enforcing policies with violence, but I sure do know how to enforce some strict grading rules on late assignments.

Trying to drop hints to clueless students is by far the worst. It becomes so bad that it's borderline on some of the bad threats movie mob bosses give. You might really want to re-think not studying for the test, it would be a pity if you didn't study about sentence structures and just happened to have to answer a few questions about them. You really might want to go back home and look over your notes about prepositions because you're not going to like life if the test has 30 points on nothing but prepositions.  Remember that class that I taught about different elements of writing? It would be a good idea for you to include those in your notes, because without them, you don't want to know what would happen without them.

The more I think about it, and the more I throw on that stereotypical godfather accent into those phrases, the more I sound like a crime lord of English. It's not a perfect comparison, and there are a lot of holes throughout the entire thing, but in a weird way, I'm the mob boss of ENG 101 at LDSBC.