Dr. Free-Ride’s parents, Duke and Super Sally, have been working hard to shed some of the material goods they have accumulated in the last several years, on account of they are planning a move to smaller living quarters.
Of course, this means that they shipped several boxes of stuff from their current place to Casa Free-Ride. There’s some sort of conservation of matter principle at work here.
Not that I should complain. For one thing, half of those boxes are actually Uncle Fishy’s. For another, there’s some stuff cool stuff in the boxes that are staying with us.
Category Archives: Passing thoughts
I get letters.
This just arrived at the email address associated with my blog (rather than the email address associated with my university appointment):
Programming note.
Observant readers will have noticed that three of my last four posts — the ones sporting the spiffy Research Blogging icon — were posts discussing peer-reviewed journal articles. This is a substantially higher proportion of writing about the details of scholarly research than I normally feature on this blog.
But I think I’ve developed a taste for it.
Recent search strings to ponder.
Our online world is searchable, but it seems likely than not all of our searches are destined to be fruitful.
Here are some searches that have recently brought people to this blog:
Archetypal classroom moments.
Why is it that it’s not until you’re right in the middle of a class discussion, one where lots of people are actively engaged, asking good questions and raising important issues, and where you know that you are working against the clock to get all the contributions in, that you discover …
Question for the hivemind.
Which has a larger carbon footprint:
An office that uses a photocopier or an office that uses carbon paper?
Grading tip: back to the drawing board.
The semester must be in full swing, because suddenly I have an abundance of papers to grade. So I’m using a brief pause (between grading one stack of papers and grading another stack of papers) to share a grading-aid I just figured out at the end of last semester.
Typically, by the time the stacks of papers come in, I have all kinds of other pieces of work-in-progress on my desk. I could put those away (and hope that I’ll remember where I put them when I’m done with the grading), or try to keep the papers I’m grading restricted to part of the desk. This never works that well, and the feeling of being cramped makes the actual grading painful enough that it’s hard to sit down and just get through it.
Also, the chances of coffee spilling on the student papers is pretty high.
My old alternative was to stick the papers to be graded on a clipboard and work away from the desk. This still involved a sense of being cramped, as I’d have to shuffle the papers I was grading and the grading rubric — your standard clipboard, after all, is just wide enough for your standard sheet of copier paper.
Well, last December, as I was hauling final exams into my office for grading, my gaze fell upon an item I’ve had in my office for a few years:
Weekend reflection: what makes blog commenting inviting?
I’m not looking for a general theory of what sets up the right room for dialogue as opposed to an argument, nor even for a fine grained analysis of whether dialogue or argument is what most blog readers and commenters are looking for.
If you’re reading this post, I’m interested in knowing what you prefer.
First, a quick poll (where you can choose all the answers that apply):
Good riddance to a pair of academic pretenses.
Following DrugMonkey’s lead, I’m going to play along on the meme proposed by Female Science Professor:
What tradition or other general characteristic of academia would you like to see eliminated completely?
According to the rules, which I just invented, the things to be eliminated have to be of a general nature. So, for example, the answer “my department chair” or “my university’s moronic president” are unacceptable unless you want to eliminate the general concept of department chairs or university presidents.
The candidates for disposal can be anything to do with academia, from the most momentous of traditions (tenure) to the most bizarre but inconsequential (academic gowns).
It actually took me a little while to think of a candidate for elimination, but once I did, it really grabbed my viscera. (Actually, technically, what I want to eliminate may be two distinct general characteristics of academia, but at their root they’re so closely related that I think they ought to get the heave-ho together.)
Blogiversary addendum.
Earlier today, I had this conversation with my better half.
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: (with a look of deep concern) So, I saw something in your post today.
Dr. Free-Ride: Oh? (Wondering if a heinous typo got through cursory attempts at editing)