Dear Professor: A Chronicle of Absences

Professor Noterdaeme has compiled a conceptual wonderland of fibs, pleas, prevarications, and fantasies. Teaching, or so his ready-made litany implies, is a strangely Promethean endeavor, a slow drip of deferrals and stunts. Comedy accrues from the Noterdaeme assemblage – bubbles rising to the rim of absenteeism’s snifter. The Professor himself remains divinely silent; his remarkable art consists in turning the relics of the no-show into a voluble museum.

Welcome to Professor Noterdaeme’s inbox, where a steady stream of “slightly big problems” seems to threaten the pedagogical project at every turn. Between conjunctivitis and a benign tumor, a gig in Vancouver, a perplexing family tragedy and a mysterious diplomatic surveillance snafu, it’s a wonder any teaching gets done at all. Still, his students’ buoyant desire to fit at least a little learning in there – and their apparently game professor’s willingness to try to accommodate – give a wry but tender picture of higher education in a time of high distraction.

Like examples from an ethics textbook, these e-mails from missing students ask for an exception to the rule, and thereby throw all rules into question, sometimes while simultaneously admitting that no exception should be granted. These at times Kafkaesque confessions, woven from desperation and indifference, honesty and concealment, force the instructor into a courtroom to cast judgment on life itself. In the end, a strangely funny and exasperating – sometimes even traumatizing – collection from artist-professor Filip Noterdaeme.

In his latest work, homoplagiarist Filip Noterdaeme documents the dislocations of American education in the digital age. As much a work of sociology as of poetry, Dear Professor gives voice to the voiceless in every classroom discussion: the absent student. The result is a portrait – at once hilarious and haunting and highly instructive – of a new lost generation. Lost not in the trenches at Marne Verdun Namur or Mons, but lost on their way to class.

If only Dear Professor were required reading for all of academia. With his signature wit, Filip Noterdaeme offers us a concise and original exposé of what ails American higher education. My gut ached laughing so hard at this insouciant commentary.

In previous times, students who missed class either ignored the transgression, or were forced to address the issue with their teacher during office hours, or during a subsequent class period. Modern communication tools, however, offer new avenues for accounts, excuses, and apologies surrounding absences. In his recent book titled, Dear Professor: A Chronicle of Absences, Filip Noterdaeme presents over 200 emails that he received from students explaining and apologizing for absences. In this podcast, we explore Noterdaeme’s book, and lessons to be learned about the emotional nature of apologies between students and teachers.