I have taught them well.

I have a lot of derby posters on my door so it's
not hard to guess that I'm into derby if you're
a student who shows up for office hours.

Right now I'm not doing a lot of big posts because I'm busy with the end of the semester in my non-derby life, which involves (among other things) a lot of grading.

I usually don't tell students upfront that I do derby because 1) I did this last semester and then one of them tweeted it to the internet from class and 2) being in a college town, it's already hard enough to have a life away from academia and students, so I try to keep those things separate.

But of course, the derby monster is a big monster, and occasionally he creeps into my academic work. I advertise our bouts on my office door. I also wear my derby helmet when I ride my bike to work. I also had a diagram of a track on my whiteboard in my office once because I was explaining what derby was to some students who came by to ask. Yep.

Anyway, this semester, I taught a graduate seminar where one of the main topics we talked about collective responsibility and whether group was anything over and above the individuals that constitution it and that sort of stuff. It was a good class; the grad kids all know I do derby, since they have offices down the hall from my office anyway and can see when new flyers go up.

So I found this today in a paper I was grading:

Consider, for analogy, a roller derby team.  When they lose or win, they do so as a team, and this means more than each of the members winning individually (the coherence of which is doubtful).  Although the individual performances strongly affect the outcome, there are properties that the team has as a group that affects the responsibility for their performance.  For instance, if a team lacks a particular position, say a really scrappy jammer, they would be far worse off than a team composed of individually equally-skilled players that includes a jammer.  Yet, there is no straightforward way in which the responsibility for not being a jammer is "shared" by the members of the team. 

To be clear, I hvae no idea what a "scrappy jammer" is, but considering this student didn't know anything about derby at the beginning of the semester, I'd say he's done pretty well. :D