I used to think what I really needed this time of semester was elves.
Category Archives: Passing thoughts
Let’s see your mug.
Dave at The World’s Fair is collecting field data on coffee mugs. Or maybe he’s trying to create a meme.
Anyway, he poses a bunch of questions which I seem to be unable to resist answering:
- Can you show us your coffee cup?
- Can you comment on it? Do you think it reflects on your personality?
- Do you have any interesting anecdotes resulting from coffee cup commentary?
- Can you try to get others to comment on it?
My answers will be restricted to the coffee delivery vessels (all three of them) I use at work, thus excluding the travel mug I use in the car on weekday mornings and the mugs I use at home on weekends. Also, since I have the necessary materials and apparatus in my office to make tea, but not coffee, these mugs might more properly be counted as “tea mugs” (or “coffee and tea mugs”).
An odd (but pleasant) milestone.
Today is our last day of classes before final exams, and it’s looking like this semester is notably different from the nine semesters that came before it:
As well as I can ascertain, none of my students have committed plagiarism in any of their assignments for me!
Yes, that should be the normal state of affairs, but we are painfully aware of the gap between “is” and “ought”, are we not? Some semesters, I’ve had to deal with multiple plagiarists. This term, no cheating-related paperwork for me.
Thank you, students, for restoring some of my faith in humanity. Be sure to eat healthy food, get adequate sleep, and kick ass on your finals.
Random bullets of “AAAAARGH!!”
I would like to rejoice that it is Friday. And yet, as the end of the semester draws nigh, the press of Tasks That Cannot Be Deferred Any Longer is sucking a good bit of the Friday-ness out of this Friday.
So, I suppose this post is the cyber-equivalent of an itemized primal scream:
Separating the public and private spheres.
Depending on your blog reading habits, you may already have heard the news that feels almost like cosmic justice that a law firm has rescinded an offer of employment from a third year law student whose online activities the firm found troubling. The linked posts will give you some flavor for those activities (as will this post), so I’m not going to go into the gory details here. However, I wanted to say a few words about this comment Amanda Marcotte made on Sheezlebub’s post on the matter:
While it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, I simply have to voice my unease with the politics of personal destruction, even when done for the right cause. Getting people fired is the right’s strategy. (I know.) Scalp-collecting bothers me to no end. Granted, we didn’t do anything to get him fired, but needless to say, I have to protest any and all attempts in the future to separate a person from his job because of his opinions in a non-work capacity.
(Bold emphasis added.)
You may recall that Amanda left her job with the Edwards campaign because Bill Donohue’s Catholic League decided to make Amanda’s personal views into a big issue for Edwards. (Arguably, Donohue did this by misrepresenting her views, which strikes me as an ethical violation of the bearing-false-witness variety, but I’m just giving you the background for Amanda’s comment.)
Anyway, the issue I want to examine is the separation between work and non-work conduct and opinions, especially as they are manifested on the internet.
Bloggers who regularly make me think.
I’ve been dawdling on this. I was tagged by not one but two of my blog pals for the Thinking Blogger meme. Here are the official rules of the meme:
Do I blog like a girl?
This tool uses an algorithm to guess whether the chunk of text you enter into the text box was written by a male or a female. What do you suppose it thought about my writing?
Look at those leatherbacks go!
Friend of the blog LO alerted me to The Great Turtle Race, wherein a passel of leatherback sea turtles “race” from Playa Grande in Costa Rica to the Galapagos Islands. The linked website it tracking the turtles via satellite, so you can watch their progress and root for your favorite. (I’m pulling for Stephanie Colburtle, “an intensely patriotic turtle who can fly through the water like an eagle”.) There is also information there about leatherback sea turtle populations and ways you can help protect them.
Reeling from today’s news.
Today was fully scheduled for me. Prepping for class, participating in a phone interview, teaching, midday meeting with my department chair and a dean to discuss developing an ethics module for an intro class in another department, more teaching, power-photocopying for this week’s Socrates Cafe, then a dash to the car to get the sprogs in time for elder offspring’s soccer practice.
It wasn’t until about 20 minutes into my drive home that I heard the news about the shootings at Virginia Tech.
Welcome NYTimes readers! (Plus a few words on my linkage luck.)
If you got here by following the link from Dennis Overbye’s story about the movie Dark Matter, you may want to read the post he quotes about Theodore Streleski and the dangers of extreme power imbalance between graduate students and their advisors. (It’s also possible that this time next year I can post a follow-up about the less extreme but still real power imbalances between the tenured and the untenured.)
And now, let me indulge in a tiny bit of grumbling about linkage: