Fish follow-up

A generally thoughtful piece by Mark Bousquet, with some valuable considerations of the various ways — legitimate and not-so-legitimate — that teachers can get their students to rate them more highly.

But here's an odd thing:

Fish makes two arguments against the proposal. He squanders pixels bolstering his weaker point, that students aren't necessarily in a position to judge whether Fish-as-teacher-phallus has, ugh, “planted seeds that later grew into mighty trees of understanding.”

How exactly is planting trees a phallic act? Apparently Bousquet is forgetting that there's more than one meaning for the word "seed."