Freudian slip?

Sentence from an email I sent a student:

You don’t need to apologize for emailing me two hours after class about an assignment not due until [much later].  It shows that you’re on top of things, and professors love stupids who are on top of things.

I know they’re not homonyms, but, you know—if anyone's looking to unload property under a rock, drop me a line.

(x-posted.)

Comments

[Tom]

*slow clap*

[tomemos]

That's the revenge Freud exacts on those who reject the validity of his ideas.

[N. Pepperell]

I had an incident a couple of years back where I decided to send an email to a student who had been fantastic in class discussion. I got a bit worried that some of my riffing in response to his comments might have come across as critical, and so decided I should send a quick note just letting him know that his class contributions were very good. Just as I hit "send", I realised the autofill on the email address had chosen a different "Tom" from the same class - so this compliment was headed on its way to someone who had barely said a word all term...

Figuring it would be fairly obvious to the student what had happened, but would hardly improve things to send a follow-up mail indicating the first one was sent in error, I just left it. But the next class session, the accidental recipient of my compliment was just /on fire/ - he exploded into the class discussion and continued being a strong presence in discussions for the remainder of the course.

This always makes me feel vaguely guilty I don't mail out random compliments to students on a more regular basis...

[Ahistoricality]

Damn. I'll have to try that!

[Rich Puchalsky]

It's a good thing that you made the slip with "stupids", because it distracts attention from the much more troubling slip about professors loving students who are on top.

[Sisyphus]

Every quarter around finals time I have to catch myself responding to worried student emails with the words "good lick!"

[Thomas Basbøll]

After moving back here, I've sometimes struggled with Danish spelling. "Noget" = "something". "Nået" = "reached" (as in reaching a goal). I was writing an email to my department head about what I accomplished ("opnået"--i.e., "attained", "reached up to"). Proofreading it, I found I had to change a "reached" ("nået") into a "something" ("noget"). I had written something like "I just thought of reached" instead of "I just thought of something". You know where this is going. When I got to "Hvad jeg har opnået" ("What I have accomplished (or attained)") I thought "aha! another one I have to fix" and wrote the wonderful sentence: "Here's what I have up-something."