At the end of one of my class meetings today, one of the students noted that her professor for another of her courses this term died about a week ago.
Not that anyone said out loud that this semester is what killed him.
Category Archives: Passing thoughts
Under the weight of the semester.
It’s the last day of November. I have three more meetings with each of my classes before finals. I have oodles of grading to do before finals. I have one big administrative task and at least a dozen smaller ones to do before the end of the semester.
And, at the moment, I feel as though the weight of the semester is pressing down on me, like the stones used to press to death that one man so sentenced in the Salem witch trials.
Weekend diversion: Happy Thinksgiving.
The younger Free-Ride offspring’s soccer team has been playing in a regional tournament this weekend, and we’re girding our loins and guarding our shins to go out and play a second day of tournament games. I’m happy that they’re playing so well, but I have to say, watching games in late November is a different experience than spectating in mid-September. (Bone-chilling cold + bad sunburn = some kind of tangible sign of a parent’s devotion. If only one’s child took it seriously.)
Anyway, in the meantime, I wanted to test your knowledge in the identification of some turkeys.
Specifically, the turkeys currently adorning the door to my department’s main office.
Here they are one by one:
Death is not an option: optimizing academic performance edition.
Let’s say you’re a college student.
You have a class meeting today at which a short essay (about 400 words) is due. The essay counts for about 5% of your grade for the course.
At that class meeting, your instructor will be lecturing on the reading assignment upon which that short essay is focused. The material from the reading assignment will likely appear on the final exam, which is only a few weeks away.
Dismal, yes, but is it science?
As I was driving home from work today, I was listening to Marketplace on public radio. In the middle of a story, reported by Nancy Marshall Genzer, about opponents of health care reform, there was an interesting comment that bears on the nature of economics as a scientific discipline. From the transcript of the story:
The Chamber of Commerce is taking a bulldozer to the [health care reform] bill. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported the Chamber is hiring an economist to study the legislation. The goal: more ammunition to sink the bill.
Ewe Reinhardt teaches economics at Princeton. He says, if the Chamber does its study, it will probably get the result it wants.
EWE REINHARDT: You can always get an economist with a PhD from a reputable university to give a scientific report that makes your case. So, yes, there will be such a study.
One of the reasons I prefer a whiteboard to a chalkboard.
Chalk dust thigh:
Indeed, this was the state of my pants after I walked partway across campus from my classroom to my office, so the level of chalk dust had decreased from its maximum level when I snapped this picture.
Random YouTubery video-tainment.
It’s been a long day, between teaching and attending to committee work, giving a colloquium talk, dealing with an emergency drill, and coming home to make a later-than-planned dinner for the kids (since my better half had to help a sprog with an arithmetic emergency during the anticipated dinner hour).
Tomorrow is a day off from school … but for the sprogs, too, and me with piles of papers that must be graded and returned by Thursday.
What I need right now is to see Stephen Colbert dance:
An observation about the student papers I’m grading.
Because, as it happens, I tend to notice patterns in student papers, then end up musing on them rather than, you know, buckling down and just working through the stack of papers that needs grading.
In my philosophy of science class, I have my students write short essays (approximately 400 words) about central ideas in some of the readings I’ve assigned. Basically, it’s a mechanism to ensure that they grapple with an author’s view (and its consequences) before they hear me lecture about it. (It’s also a way to get students writing as many words as they are required to write in an upper division general education course; sometimes assignments need to serve two masters.)
Anyhow, because these papers are focused on the task of explaining in plain English what some philosopher seems to be saying in the reading assignment, there are plenty of sentences in these essays that contain phrases like “AuthorLastName {claims, thinks, argues that, writes} …”
And, in at least 5-10% of the papers turned in to me, the author’s last name is spelled incorrectly.
Among other things, I’ve noticed:
Snapshots from our weekend.
Remember how I mentioned that we had some soccer tournaments this weekend?
Well, it looks like we’re going to need a bigger shelf.
Continuing internet education.
Yo dawg! This is a soccer tournament weekend for the Free-Rides. (First game: 8:00 AM. Time of departure from Casa Free-Ride: 6:30 AM. Zombification complete!)
At the moment, the younger offspring and I are chilling before the younger offspring’s team’s second game; the younger offspring is watching Fred videos, while I am filling in gaps in my knowledge with the help of Know Your Meme.
Know Your Meme is a good way to catch up on memes that are currently part of the collective memory of the internets, but which might have peaked before some of us Luddites were sufficiently plugged in to be paying attention. And the videos explaining them do a nice job placing the memes in a larger cultural context and providing some analysis of why they caught on.
Here’s an episode that had me and my better half giggling last night:
Be sure to stay near the pause button — some of the images go by quickly, and you’re going to want to be able to read the captions. (The last one is our favorite.)