Inside Higher Ed is reporting on a new sociological study that shows a greater frequency of rejection of religion by young people who don’t attend college. We college professors aren’t responsible!
Daniel Solove is going to be in big trouble at the next meeting of the secret teacher’s cabal: he has revealed our favorite method of grading papers, and documented it with photos, no less.
This is not fair. Writing a doctoral thesis on a blog? How about doing your masters thesis on a wiki? Don’t these people know you’re supposed to suffer when writing a thesis?
I remember mine. There were months of tapping it out on an Apple II computer, and occasionally printing it out on the clumsy old dot-matrix printer so my advisor could rip into it and rearrange everything. Then, finally, I’d hook the computer up to the daisy wheel printer the department owned, and print out the good “final” copy for my committee—this had to be done late at night, because it took about 6 hours to print it all. Then the committee hacked it up, I revised it, then back to the daisy wheel for another late night. Then off to the dreaded grad school office, where the proofreader whipped out a ruler and told me one of the margins was off by a sixteenth of an inch…back to the daisy wheel. Then the defense, and “suggestions” for some additions…daisy wheel. Grad school office. Extra space between paragraphs on page 57. Back.
It was hellish. So now the whippersnappers are streamlining the instruments of torture? I don’t know that I approve.
(I’m sure someone is going to gasp, “You had a computer? We used a typewriter!” And then someone’s going to announce that they had to set hot type, and we’ll get the quill pen stories, and the real oldsters will whine about chiseling hieroglyphics. Save it. My pain and exasperation will always outweigh your minor inconveniences.)
Oh, there’s also some useful information in that article about what Nature considers the kind of prior publication that would preclude publishing a work in their journal.
Oh, come on. This is no surprise. Public schools mostly take religion for granted—it’s rife in athletics, in particular, but many of the ceremonies have prayers and ministers involved—so when a valedictorian speech damns her godless classmates to hell, it’s just a reflection of the culture.
People keep Share this:
Did you know that nature is a nice place, a kind of untamed Cute Overload where nobody ever gets an owie, there are no diseases or parasites, and everyone eats tofu? That seems to be what one school administrator in Florida believes, anyway.
A class was studying reptiles and a student brought in his pet boa. Somehow it was suggested that anyone who was interested could watch the boa being fed its usual meal: a live rabbit. The teacher arranged for the feeding to be held after school hours and attendance was voluntary. No one had to be there who didn’t want to be there. According to the story, the teacher even warned the squeamish to stay away.
I’m not bashing the school admistrator’s religious beliefs, but rather his silly inanity in the statement: “The school uses lessons and curricula that teach respect for God’s creative handiwork, and this event does not support that.” Snakes eat rabbits. Welcome to nature. Snakes don’t shop at the market for cans of rabbit stew.
Leave it to me to bash the administrator’s religious beliefs! If your idea of “god’s creative handiwork” involves an absence of death and predation, then you’re an ignorant nitwit, and I blame your religious miseducation — especially since this occurred at a place called Trinity Christian Academy. And I certainly hope this administrator doesn’t ever eat meat, and doesn’t have any pet dogs or cats, unless he wants to be guilty of hypocrisy.
Just to push the absurdity to an even greater level, this administrator has issued a proclamation.
We have taken steps to ensure this type of event doesn’t happen again.
Somehow, I don’t think the hungry carnivores that live all over the place are planning to pay much attention to that order. It’s probably enough, though, that he’ll close his eyes to reality and pretend nothing is eating anything else—willful blindness is the Christian thing to do.
This is an ugly story, and it’s ugly on both sides. First, rude students make a nasty, mocking video of one of their teachers and post it to YouTube, which is bad enough; these are kids who definitely need some discipline. But then the school district suspends the students for 40 days in punishment. Forty days is almost a quarter of the school year. They deserved a harsh response, but kicking them out of school just deprives them of the education they need, and they’re probably going to regard it as a vacation.
I must confess, though, that what first caught my eye about the story is that it’s from Kent, Washington — where I grew up. I read it wondering if it was my alma mater, Kent-Meridian High School, that was going to be the scene of the crime…and no, it wasn’t. It was Kentridge, our hated cross-town rivals, the school that was even more despised than Auburn. I felt relief.
It’s funny how those silly scholastic enmities can come back to you after 30 years…
Oh, dear. John West of the Disco Institute is in a furious snit because, after refusing to grant tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, Iowa State University did promote Hector Avalos, of the Religious Studies department, to full professor. You can just tell that West is spitting mad that Iowa would dare to keep Avalos around, and thinks it a grave injustice that one scholar would be accepted, while their pet astronomer gets the axe. So now they’re going to do a hatchet job on Avalos.
I cower away from the horror that is MySpace, and I scarcely know what to do with facebook; I’m all at sea on this social networking buzz. Now I’ve gone and signed up for another one, the Nature Network, a social networking site for scientists. I’m still lost. Maybe if I encourage a bunch of you other scientists out there to sign up, some comprehension will begin to gel for me.
Attila Csordas has a nice writeup of the whole magilla which helps. I’m giving it a shot, anyway.
I already notice it lacks those bosomy young ladies in skimpy clothing that always greet me on MySpace, and the contributors all seem to know how to write plain English, so it’s different on those scores.
I just finished grading all the genetics final exams, and submitted final grades to the registrar!
I’ve just got two independent study papers that need to be turned in and graded, and then I will be completely done.
