Just gonna say:

I'm a college professor and if I'm ever spotted carrying a bag of hammers somewhere? It means I'm going to a Habitat for Humanity event and am bringing tools.

Being the change you want to see in the world should not include inciting violence.

Man, people just get me DOWN, you know?

"How dare you"

I got an e-mail from a student in my class that has an explicit attendance policy (as in, more than x number of unexcused absences* and you lose points). It was effectively, "How dare you give me a D because I have so many absences!"

Okay, I admit it: I kind of hate attendance policies. These students are allegedly grown-ups, they should be able to decide or not whether to come to class. And frankly, almost always, it comes out in the wash: the people with crap attendance wind up failing because they don't participate and they don't get important information. (And their motivation generally is poor; I don't know if poor attendance causes poor grades, or if the two are merely correlated, and people with poor attendance don't care about their education, and so, earn poor grades). And it's a big effort for me to keep track of as many as 80 students, their comings and goings, why they're not here, etc. I'd rather just dump the policy and say, "If you skip and you fail, it's on you. We told you you could not do well if your attendance was poor." but this is a gen-ed class and it's expected that we keep track.

(Also, there are rumblings that because 0.01% of the students on financial aid scam it, we may be required to take attendance - to require attendance - in ALL our classes ALL the time, and even perhaps report DAILY who is absent. Oh, why don't we just microchip the students, or put house-arrest bracelets on them? That would be a lot easier....)

(* And I am pretty generous about what I excuse: illness, even without a doctor's note - I tell people if they are reasonably sure they're contagious, DON'T come to class. Kid's illness. "got called into work at the last minute" if I get documentation. Funerals (I don't generally ask for documentation because it makes me feel like an ogre to, but most students bring a bulletin to show me). Jury duty. National Guard duty, though it's been a while since I had a student in the National Guard. Sports stuff, if I have a note from the coach.)

I don't know, though. I don't like the "how dare you" tone (the student did not say that, but it sounded that way from how the e-mail was worded). Their grade stands because there are RULES and the students know the rules, they read them and are told them on the first day of classes. In the workplace, there are rules, and people can get fired for excessive absenteeism.

But, gah, the entitlement mentality of some students; I've seen it in spades this semester - ranging from people hinting that they'd like me to e-mail them to remind them when their exams are (Surely, surely, there is an app where you can set up an auto-reminder? Or do like me, and write it down on a big calendar than hangs on your wall, and check the calendar?) to people telling me to e-mail them "everything they missed" on the day they were absent. (Meaning: Give me copies of your notes. Okay, kiddo, you ready to do a brain scan? 'Cos that's where my "notes" are these days.)

Oh, I had some wonderful students - I always do. But it's the snowflakey ones that eat up my time and that make me roll my eyes.

Tell me something good

These days, if you try to watch the news, you really have to have your Critical Thinking Hat on. There will be some story that is calculated to cause OUTRAGE and senses of HOW CAN THEY DO THAT and then when you dig a little deeper, it turns out you only have heard part of the story.

I just want to know what's happening in the world without people trying to manipulate me into feeling a particular way. Is that possible? Was that ever possible? I don't remember the news as being so sensationalistic when I was younger.

Also, it just seems like everyone is angry. Angry at some other group, angry at how things are, angry at capitalism*, angry at the Christmas (er, "holiday") season, angry angry angry.

(*My standard rejoinder: Would being in a serfdom, where you're essentially the slave of some baron, be better? Or a world where everything you eat, use, or own is something you have to make yourself, from raw materials you've obtained yourself? Myself, I kind of like capitalism.)

And it just makes me so tired. I know a large part of this is the news trying to whip stuff up but seeing my day-to-day interactions, it does seem that lots of people just have a lot of free-floating anger at stuff....

I mean, if you're angry about something you have control over, and you can change it by peaceful means that do not involve hurting other people**, by all means, go and do that.

(** I hate that I even have to make that caveat, but we live in an age of "Let's burn this b*tch down")

If you're angry about how the world in general operates....well, I don't know. Try to effect change locally? Change yourself? Try to have positive interactions with the people around you? Maybe examine your own assumptions? I'm amazed at the number of people I know who gripe about having an "old" iPhone or a "small" (36 inch) television. I don't even bother to note that when my mother was growing up, her family didn't have a tv AT ALL and they didn't have a phone (the old, wall-mounted, dial-up kind) until she was a second-year college student. And iPhones and big-screen tvs didn't exist when I was a kid, and when big-screen tvs came on the market, it was just the ultra-rich that could afford them. (And anyway, there's not much on tv these days that would be improved by being BIGGER, IMHO.)

The whole material greed thing - whether it's someone griping because their tv is a few inches too small, or whether it's someone promoting looting as a way to get their hands on the stuff other people have (and therefore, that the looter "deserves" to have) - it's chilling. It's putting things over people. Burning down someone's business because you're angry or you want something they have - I don't care if it's a tiny hardware store run by a mom and pop or a big "faceless" Best Buy franchise - how does that make the world any better? How does adding to the sum total of violence in the world act against violence? How does breaking someone's heart benefit you?

I know, some people will say I "don't understand" because I'm white and "privileged." And yes, I own that I have a certain level of privilege - of unearned, undeserved good things in my life: I grew up in a two-parent family where those parents were loving and gentle with each other and their kids. I grew up in a household that valued education and hard work. I grew up with a church family that taught me even if my peers made fun of me and thought I was a loser, there were people who loved me and valued me and I was pretty much okay. I grew up with a faith that told me to love God and to love other people, even when those other people make themselves unloveable, and that that love means you don't do harm to them. I grew up learning that if you got really angry at someone, to the point where you might say or do something you regret, the best thing to do is to walk away for a while until your feelings cool, and then go and talk to them and explain why what they did bothered you. And I learned that there were some people who just chose to be mean, but also that I didn't have to be like them.

I don't know. I know I tend to see connections between things that are not necessarily connected but I see video of middle-class shoppers pushing and shoving for "deals" on stuff they probably don't really need, and I see the looters in Ferguson (And I'm not making any assumptions about who they are; there are apparently  a lot of weird bad groups that showed up there because there was unrest - anarchists, and white supremacists, and other violent groups), and I see politicians yelling at each other on the tv. And I wonder if everyone's just gone crazy. And it makes me want to build a big blanket fort and take some books and a box of crackers and a thermos of tea in there and hide and just resign from the human race for a few days. I know that's not a useful strategy, that I have to go out among people. And I also know that people who strive to do what's right and what's good need to be out there and need to be heard.

But it just makes me so tired.

I know there's good stuff going on in the world but it seems so little and so scattered these days, and the bad stuff seems so strong.

Something small and nice

There's a lot of ugliness in the world right now. One of the things: the likelihood of the Grand Jury verdict coming down in Ferguson today, and what may come of that. While looking at a story online about that, I ran across this:

Lidia's Thanksgiving message.

(Don't read the comments. Ugly, snarky  people even being ugly and snarky there).

Lidia Bastiniach is a tv chef I've watched for a long time. I was delighted to find my cable provider recently picked up PBS' "Create" channel, as they often run her show there in the evenings. She's a "celebrity" chef, I guess, but very different from the super-celebrities (like Emeril or Guy Fieri). She's more low-key. Her show is more about "here is how you prepare this food" and less about her. Mostly, she prepares Italian or Italian-American dishes; sometimes she travels to show regional differences. (I first learned about "St. Louis-style" pizza from her show)

She strikes me as a nice person. I know I've been wrong in feeling that way about a "famous" person before, but every time I've read an interview with her, she comes off as genuine and also - as noted in this short message - grateful for the good things she has:

"As an immigrant Thanksgiving is a very special holiday for us. In our kitchen, the entire family gathers around the table, and we have an opportunity to give America thanks for the gifts in our lives here."

That's just nice. That makes me happy. As a native-born American, yes, I do feel gratitude on Thanksgiving for the gifts I have from living here - the gifts of freedom (esp. compared to being a woman in some other parts of the world), the gifts of opportunity (in two generations, my family has gone from barely-working-class to upper-middle-class), the gifts of education. And the other God-given gifts I enjoy: fairly good health, a family that loves me, friends that love me, a rewarding (mostly) career, enough abilities to provide for my needs in life, and even enough money to be generous with it and support causes I believe in after my own needs are met.

I AM going "home" for Thanksgiving next week. I look forward to it. It's a hectic time - I'm there for effectively three days and then have to turn around and come back - but I couldn't imagine skipping it.

And her last sentences of the commentary, before her trademark "Tutti a tavola a mangiare!:

"This Thanksgiving may your table be one full of love where food is the venue to gather with those who mean the most to you.  May you not only share a delicious meal but also stories, laughter and memories.  
That’s what this holiday is really about."

We need to remember that. The stuff doesn't matter; it's just stuff. It's what we can learn from our elders and the joy we can see in our youthful family members that is what really matters.

the shirt thing

Probably most of you have heard of "shirtstorm," where one of the ESA guys involved with the Philae landing was photographed wearing a fairly ugly shirt with "sexy" women on it.

And then the backlash some women encouraged, and then the back-backlash that (mostly male) conservative bloggers (mainly) started. And you know what?

It makes me tired. It just makes me all tired.

Was it a bad fashion choice and a seriously tacky shirt? Yes. Are engineers known for making good fashion choices? Generally not.

Am I, as a woman who is arguably on the fringes of STEM (I am in biology, which some consider too "soft" a science...) offended? No, not really. I don't feel threatened by it. I've felt more threatened by a former administrator here who used to make rude, borderline-offensive jokes. But even then, I pretty much rolled my eyes and reminded myself of that's why the person in charge of committee assignments here does her level best not to put him on committees that meet frequently, so they don't have to interact with him as much. The biggest threat he posed to me was that he was an ADMIN and controlled some purse strings and might have input on promotions decisions....so I waited until he was out of the room to roll my eyes and look at one of my colleagues and go, "What is up with that dude?"

An ugly shirt is nothing compared to ugly insinuations.

If I had a colleague in my department who regularly dressed like that, I'd probably mostly give him a wide berth rather than reporting him to HR. Now, if he regularly made statements of a demeaning and demonstrably-to-a-reasonable-person sexist nature (for example, not dropping doing the dumb "make me a sandwich!" joke or demeaning my abilities because I am female), I would probably talk to my immediate higher up (in this case, my department chair) and say that we all really need to have a meeting about 'expectations.' Or, if the response was "he gets to make those jokes and you just have to put up with it," meh, I'd brush up my C.V. and find a new job somewhere less annoying.

But the thing is, all the back-lash and back-back-lash? Don't we have more productive things to do with our time? I know I do. And I'm just on the fringes of STEM.

In conclusion: it's an ugly shirt. If I had been the guy's wife or mother or female housemate or whatever, I would have strongly counseled him to wear something a little less flashy on that day. If I were his boss, I probably would have chewed on him a little afterward for not wearing the standard button-down, or at least something less idiosyncratic. (And yes. People's bosses do have the right to chew on them for how they dress.)

But I think there are a lot of other things in the STEM fields that go farther towards discouraging the participation of women than one dumb shirt.

End of the semester

It's approaching. I've been busy, teaching an extra class is no joke.

I still have a few students I really want to give a good shaking to. They're not going to be able to compete in the job market (unless it's stocking shelves at the Lowe's) with grades and attitudes like they have. This is why I'm so bugged by "college for all" - when it ceases to be something seen as rare, and starts being seen as an extension of high school (which it should not be) lots of people don't value the education any more.

(Of course, part of the problem is that high school seems to have become an extension of junior high, and junior high of middle school, and it's turtles all the way down, but....if I were in charge of things I'd make grade schools more rigorous, end "social passes," and make the threat of expulsion a very real thing)

I do have a number of good students, but it's easy to forget them in the dealings with the Snarkmeisters (who always have some rude comment to make, either to me or to their colleagues in class) or the Problem People who seem to be like that character in Li'l Abner who always had misfortunes happening to them - their cars break down, their kids get sick, they have to go appear in court....and perhaps some of that stuff is made up (though I do ask for things like doctor's notes), but it's just frustrating having someone constantly missing important stuff in class because their life seems to be falling apart. Or there are the people who are aggressively clueless, who miss getting a copy of the handout of the data collected in lab, which I expressly point out will NOT be on the class BlackBoard page because our scanner is broken and I have no simple way to upload it....and then they come bitch at me for not making it available. Or who just plain flat don't listen to instructions in class and then are 100% lost during lab and I have to effectively re-teach the whole pre-lab for them.

But yeah. Getting kind of tired and really hoping my students next semester have fewer problems and are more mature. At least I've not had anyone crying in my office so far this semester, so I'm ahead of the typical semester.

This election day

The choices I have make me kind of sad. That's all I have to say. There have been very few elections in my life where it wasn't a "lesser of two evils" choice rather than "this person is a good person and they will do good things" choice.

I will say if things happen as planned, I'm bracing for lots of hurt commentary. Whatever. My feeling is, we can go broke as a country in 10 years or in 15 years, take your pick. I'm in favor of 15 years, myself, but I recognize that at the rate we're going, we're still going to go broke, and then everyone better hope that they are as self-reliant as they think.

I will say that unless things change much between now and Nov. 2016, the BIG choice I will have then will make me very sad. (As I said over a year ago to my mother: "If our choice of next president is Hillary Clinton or Chris Christie....well, neither one of those is a GOOD choice.")

This annoys me slightly

People are making a big fat deal about Pope Francis coming out and stating his acceptance of the Big Bang Theory (the cosmological event, not the television show) and biological evolution.

Um, if I remember rightly, Pope John Paul II said essentially the same thing some years ago? To relatively little fanfare, though I did mention the evolution thing in my general biology classes. (Though then again, some of our fundamentalist students unwilling to even learn about evolution still think Catholicism isn't Christianity)

I don't know. The whole "he's a rockstar, he's more liberal in some ways than past Popes, so let's make a big deal out of him" thing bugs me a little. (I probably don't have a right to, not being Catholic. But I am). Actually, I'm bugged by the whole "rockstar" thing. Not just for Popes, for everyone. The whole media-adulation thing. It's kind of like the Dalai Lama - people like to fawn all over part of what he says because he's this cool mystical non-Western guy - but they don't talk about some of the more rigid or harder things he says. I'm sure there's stuff Pope Francis has said and that he believes that your average media fluff-head would be aghast at, but they don't hear that stuff, they just hear the "rockstar" stuff. It's like Christianity lite: wanting the good stuff without thinking about the "go and sin no more" part of it.

Dear New York City:

The Ebola thing? It's going to be okay, really. We aren't having any kind of zombie apocalypse down here near Dallas, the guy who died of the disease didn't infect family members, and apparently the two nurses who caught it (probably from either intubating or putting an IV in Mr. Duncan) are doing better.

Though I admit, some of the news channels, with their thinly veiled attitude of OH NO, EBOLA IS NOW WHERE THE PEOPLE WHO MATTER LIVE! is a little off-putting.

We're gonna see more cases. We just are. But we're learning about this fast. I may not have a lot of trust in the CDC or even some hospital administrations, but I have trust in individuals (doctors, nurses) who want to stay safe.

And may we learn something that can be taken over to Africa and used to stop the suffering there - too many kids have lost their parents, too many parents have lost their kids.

Really, the bigger worry, I think, is the fact that there have been "unlinked" but similar terrorist attacks in Canada and your city in the past few days. And that there are young women and men here (the women are the one that boggle me) who think hopping a plane for Syria or where-ever to fight alongside ISIS is a dandy idea. That worries me a lot, too. As a woman, how disaffected and disengaged do you have to be from Western culture to think, "Yeah, going to a country that historically requires women to cover from head to toe and have a male escort when they're outside will provide me far more opportunities."

(I also admit some consternation that those in moderate Islam are not speaking up, the way Christians do about the excesses of that so-called "Baptist" "church" out of Kansas, of the way many did after an abortion clinic bombing.)

lack of confidence

If anything good comes out of the Ebola mini-outbreak in the  US, it will be to show ordinary people that the government is far from infalliable and that they can screw up on a regular basis.

Apparently the CDC told a nurse who had worked with Duncan that it was just fine to fly back home from Cleveland although she was starting to be feverish. (Granted, it was a LOW fever, and she was likely unable to spread the disease at that point).

But now - schools in Ohio are closing down for the day "out of an excess of caution," people who flew on that plane are freaked out. All because the CDC said, "Yeah, sure, get on a plane" instead of "We are contacting the nearest hospital to you right now, go there, they will isolate and monitor you."

I am extremely hopeful no one ELSE catches Ebola - and especially that there are no infections from these nurses having contact with anyone while they were asymptomatic - but it's going to be about a month before we know that.

Crap. I hope this doesn't eff up Thanksgiving travel, but I bet it will. (On the highly unlikely chance that more people become infected, and the disease becomes widespread - well, I will not be traveling to see my parents for Thanksgiving. I've already told them that and they completely understand).

It just seems that so many balls were dropped on this. For bureaucracies that can be incredibly draconian and heavy-handed in many things, it seems like they are not taking this sufficiently seriously. (If it were me? I'd absolutely quarantine every health-care worker who worked with the guy dying of Ebola for about 10 days, and then insist on three clear tests before releasing them. And test anyone they came into close contact with. And yeah, there might be a few false positives, but the main harm of that is someone gets isolated for a while who isn't sick. And I'd make damn sure that there was a way to suit up so you were fully covered, and disrobe to avoid transferring blood or sputum, if you were going to work with Ebola patients. And I'd shut down entry from the West African nations, at least as much as one possibly can do (people lie, people change flights) until the epidemic has gone down) Oh, and something I forgot: I'd have made sure the borders were as secure as humanly possible ALREADY. Which would help with many other problems...

I mean, the federal government can insist that kids can't have school lunches with white bread in them, but they can't tell someone who was directly exposed to the virus and starting to show symptoms, "No, don't fly home, go to the nearest hospital that has an isolation unit" instead? Priorities are so far messed up. (Also the fact that only a tiny part of the NIH budget, apparently, was dedicated to researching this.)

I wonder if this is going to be the HIV/AIDS of the 2010s....Only this disease seems like it might be harder to avoid if you're a health worker.

And another case

As I said before, I live within the Dallas media market, so I've been hearing a great deal about this second case of Ebola - a nurse who cared for Duncan has contracted the disease. At this point it seems likely she will pull through (she's not as sick as he was, and got care faster). But it raises some issues, I think:

1. Screening at airports. We should be doing this ANYWAY for the really bad infectious diseases. I mean, if you transport a pet across state lines you are really supposed to have a veterinarian's certificate showing they aren't carrying anything transmissible. People have, I think, changed - when I was a kid, if we had a vacation planned and one of us got sick? Either no vacation, or the sick person stayed home if there was someone available to care for them. Now, because of changes in attitudes (ME FIRST, ALWAYS ME ME ME) and changes in airline policy ("every ticket nonrefundable! You gotta problem with that?") and business policy ("You're sick? Too bad, you still need to get to that meeting. Take some Dayquil and go.") more people are traveling sick, or that's my sense.

2. Heck, in this crisis, we probably SHOULD shut down entries from West Africa as much as possible. Didn't they stop flights to Israel a couple days this fall when Hamas was lobbing missiles around? That seems less of a threat to the American populace in general than in bringing in people who may be sick with a serious disease.

3. That said, given that Duncan died, it may discourage other travelers: America isn't some magical country where you can come to when you're sick and get cured. Health care has its failures here, too.Especially if you're poor, if you're "not from here," if you're a person of color....you may not get the same treatment. Oh, it might be better treatment than some small rural hospital in a developing nation, but big-city hospitals are not perfect. In fact, I'd probably avoid a big, central-city hospital for emergency care, if I were given a choice.

4. Apparently a nurse's union is crying foul that the claim of "protocol mistakes" seems to be putting the blame on the nurse. Okay. We are now to the point where we need to man up and woman up and stop worrying, at least for the nonce, about hurt feelings. If there was a protocol breach, it needs to be said that there was and the details need to be made public. And steps need to be taken to stop future ones. That said - there needs to be better training for doctors and nurses, stat (as they say in the ER). None of this BS of handing them a piece of paper with a weblink where they can watch a video on it. None of this BS of giving them a sheet of instructions. This is something that needs to be practiced. Important, life-saving things need practice: you need to actually USE a fire extinguisher in a "dry run" before you may have to actually put out a fire. If you own a gun, the responsible thing to do is to do periodic target practice to keep yourself up to speed.

5. And another thing: the first person who cries "racism" or "classism" or whatever about the airport checks needs to be told to man up or woman up. (Though I'd be willing to bet if a European-American nurse working for Samaritan's Purse or something was coming back from Liberia on a commercial flight, they'd be checked just as hard as a native of that nation. Or at least, I'd expect they would be. Or maybe even checked *harder,* seeing as they actually worked with sick people)

This situation, I think, represents a bit of a crossroads. If we toughen up and stop worrying so much about 'feelings' and do what is the right thing for the majority of the populace and health-care workers, we can most likely defeat this. But if we dissolve, as we seem so often to these days during a crisis, into blaming other groups for stuff or complaining about how things are "unfair" or playing the "whatever" card, we could see a lot more cases, and it will get a lot, lot uglier.

It makes me wonder what would have happened in WWII if we had the softer attitudes we seem to have now.

6. I've also been a hell of a lot more lenient about excused absences for sickness in my class. I want to train people that if they get really sick - because there WILL be a Norovirus outbreak or the flu - that they need to stay home. I've had a flu shot but I can still catch Noro and I don't want to get sick. (And I have approximately doubled how often I wash my hands, just to train myself). And yeah, maybe some people are taking advantage of that to skip class. But you know what? They do worse on exams. So it sorts itself out. I take attendance because the administration says I have to. I'm not going to encourage someone who may be contagious with WHATEVER to come to class. In fact, I have actively discouraged students who called me to say stuff like, "I'll make it to the exam if I can stop throwing up long enough" to NOT come and to reschedule.


As for me? I'm going to do my best not to come into contact with ANYONE'S bodily fluids. Luckily, in my job, that's not too difficult, provided someone isn't an idiot in lab who cuts themselves on a broken beaker or something. And even then, I can just hand them a Band-Aid and tell them to take care of it.

The nuclear option? I have several month's worth of canned and other nonperishable food, I have lots of books, so I go in my house, lock the door, and don't come out until the disease dies down. And I have chlorine bleach to wash stuff off with if I have to.

Ebola vaccine

Apparently, they're working on one. Good. It can't come fast enough. Because then the good doctors and nurses and missionaries who go into the Ebola areas can be protected before they go. And people who live there who aren't so anti-scientific they think vaccines are of the devil, they can be protected. (And yes - apparently one of the issues in some areas of West Africa is that there's enough anti-Western-Science, pro-superstition beliefs that people won't get a vaccine that might save their life.)

Would I get it? Well, I live somewhere I'm highly unlikely to be exposed, but if I knew it was reasonably safe and effective, and if I felt there was a slight chance of exposure, yeah, I would. I'd want to be protected.

I admit that the slightly mean and snarky part of me wonders how the anti-vaccination types here (which range from the "my child is too special for the even small risk of a bad reaction, screw herd immunity" to the "vaccines are tools of capitalist fat cats that make money for the evil pharmaceutical companies, so I resist them, screw herd immunity" to the "God didn't intend us to stick disease in our arms, screw herd immunity" crowd)

(To that last one, my response is: "God gave the doctors and pharma researchers the smarts to figure out out. And vaccines may not be "natural" but polio is "natural" and I sure as shooting don't want polio")'

Because I think SOME of the anti-vaccination sentiment in the US comes from the fact that we've never really seen an awful and deadly and scary outbreak of a disease (especially one like polio that seemed to preferentially claim children). We've forgotten the reason why we fought so hard. (I see similar parallels in the small but alarming crowd of anti-water-chlorination people. Yes, there are some bad byproducts to chlorine exposure but trust me, cholera is a lot worse).

A lot of this thought was brought up by the fact that apparently there's someone in a Dallas hospital who may have been exposed while traveling. Dallas is not all that terribly far away, certainly it's within a day's drive. And I wonder: who else might that person have exposed before they got to the hospital, or while they were waiting there? How soon does someone become contagious when sick, and do we really KNOW?

Can you imagine: "Your child may have been exposed to Ebola; the librarian at their school just came back from missionary work in Africa and is showing symptoms." Or "All you professors teaching International Student X, you may have been exposed." Or, or, or....it's kind of scary.

I know some people are saying this is the Zombie Apocalypse that our pop-culture has so gleefully presented to us. I admit, I hate dystopian fiction and things like zombie shows because I'm all too good at imagining what it would be like if it REALLY happened, and I'm fearful that there could be a patient or two who travels around a lot, or goes to a crowded store, or goes to work for a few days, before realizing what they REALLY have, and then everything hits the fan all at once....

I'm glad it's back

The season premiere of NCIS was last night. This is one of the few shows I actually make time to watch and the only one on the regular networks that I watch.

I hadn't really watched the re-runs over the summer when they showed them; part of it was I'd seen them already, part of it was that I'm still having a little trouble warming up to the new female agent (Ellie Bishop).

It's not so much that Bishop is so terrible, it's just that she's Not Ziva, and I liked the character of Ziva. And, well, okay: I tend to feel like Abby should be the smart-but-quirky female character. But I guess with Ellie they had to go with kind of the closest thing to the anti-Ziva they could do. (They couldn't do a true anti-Ziva: that would have to be a brainless, spoiled princess-type who would never manage to advance in the military and who wouldn't be accepted by Gibbs anyway).

But I liked last night's episode. I think it was because it tended to have most of what I like NCIS for anyway: Gibbs watching out for his team and also kicking bad-guy ass. There's something satisfying about Gibbs kicking bad-guy ass, and it's a satisfaction that relatively few shows give these days.

I like the character of Gibbs. In many ways I think he is a deeply moral man. Sometimes the things he does (e.g, shooting the druglord suspected of killing his wife and daughter) may be a bit outside the strict letter of the law, but in terms of "what's right," it's still something that seems moral. (As in: the druglord was never going to be brought to justice, he was ruining other lives, and so Gibbs essentially did what Atticus Finch did to that rabid dog: took it out so that it couldn't endanger others). Gibbs is quiet - it's kind of a running gag how little he says. He does what's right. He protects the innocent, especially those weaker than himself. He has a soft spot for children and for people like Abby. He gives tough love (and head slaps) when necessary. In my mind, he's the kind of man we need more of.

(Yeah, okay, so Gibbs isn't real. But I tend to think one of the uses of "art" or at least of "entertainment" is to show us a world we long for or something to aspire to).

I will admit I can do with less of the CBS drama-queening the "next week's episode" teaser - apparently it's something bad/sad involving either Ducky or Vance. Well, okay: the actor who plays Ducky is getting up in years (if I remember correctly, he's older than my dad, and my dad is nearly 80) and I could see the actor wanting to bow out gracefully by retiring and somehow having Ducky written out. (But please, no melodramatic deadly diseases). I'm concerned it's Ducky, because he's one of my favorite characters (But I also like Vance. But then again, they already wrote a storyline with a Director that had a terminal illness, even if she chose to go out in a different way).

But anyway - it had some of my favorite things (Gibbs being laconic, Gibbs protecting his team, Gibbs kicking ass, Abby being the worrier of the team, a little bit of Tony and McGee sibling rivalry) and I missed that over the summer.

Feeling better

I was REALLY bummed out earlier this week, to the point of having one of those "I don't know how much longer I can do this, but I don't know what other career to go into" conversations with a colleague. Part of it was the rude student, part of it was that half of a class failed to turn in an important assignment, part of it was that students flaked on me about something they had promised to do.

But last night, I had my capstone-level class. And we discussed projects the students could do. Several people had good ideas; the student I talked with the most had a really fascinating idea that could even be publishable, depending on the results he gets.

We need more students like him. Part of it is that he's a little older (just a few years younger than I am) and had a whole career (as a paramedic) before coming back to school to do what he "really wanted to do" (his words).

More and more, I'm starting to lean to the idea that some have proposed, that of having 2 years mandatory military (or other) service for younglings before they can go into the workforce or college. And while that would have ticked the heck out of me as an 18 year old (I was ready for college - I knew what I wanted to major in, I even kind of knew what I wanted as my career), there is a critical mass of people now (maybe there always was) who don't really have a clue just yet, and who kind of drift around their first two years and often wind up wasting a lot of time (and taking longer to graduate). And there's also the whole whine factor: I've had people whine at me because there are no make up labs and they were SICK and that's just UNFAIR. (Oh honey. Oh. Life isn't fair and the faster you learn that the better). Or that a month is too short a time to write a five page paper in. Or that "all that math" is "boring." And I can't help but think: If you had just spent the past 2 years scrubbing latrines and marching, or spent the past two years picking up trash on the roadside, or spent the past two years building stuff in National Parks, you wouldn't be whining nearly so much.

(And yeah, I get the "but how, as a nation, would we pay for this?" I don't know, but I wish we had some way we could, because there are an awful lot of people I get in my classes who come from totally coddled backgrounds who expect everyone to bow down and do just what they want. And it ticks me off. And it ticks off the mature students, like the guy I was talking about above).

But anyway. I live for students like that guy - the people who have a passion, who want to be here, who know why they're here. He also talked about how he recruited his kids as field hands and how his daughter is really interested in birds and is keeping a Life List - she's 11. And I wanted to tell him, but I sometimes get shy about doing stuff like this, that he was a good dad because he was showing his kids that it's cool to be interested in stuff, that it's worth having things you care deeply about. I hope in a few years he maybe considers sending his kids here, we need more students who care.

I find my own passion for doing research flags when I have to deal with too many students who seem content to drift along, but it reignites when I talk to someone like that guy. (Actually, same with my passion for teaching).

I don't know how to keep from letting the energy vampires in my classes get me down. I do know I need things like conversations with students who do care to keep me going.

Ugh

Not too much to say. Busy.

But I have one student I wish would DTFO (as HH says) of my class. This is someone who is CONSTANTLY checking his smartphone. He talks to the people around him,  and when I stop and glare at him he shuts up for a few minutes. He randomly leaves class early. In lab, he does as little work as he can get away with.

This is the second time this guy is taking my class. He failed the first exam.

I'm just done. I predict eventually I'm going to progress from glaring at him to saying something, and then progress to yelling if he doesn't get a clue that WHAT HE IS DOING IS RUDE AND IT PROBABLY CONTRIBUTED TO HIS FAILING THE FIRST GO-ROUND.

He also skips some Fridays because he finds more-fun stuff to do on Fridays (And yes, he essentially told me that).

It's hard not to take all that personally - which I am kind of doing, I admit. There have been a lot of times in my career when "fun" beckoned, but because I take my job seriously, I skipped whatever fun thing I might have done in favor of doing the right thing. And someone blatantly ignoring the class tells me, "I don't think your class is important and I don't think you rate even an iota of my attention."

And yeah, I need to get over that. And teach for the people who DO give a crap, because I have a bunch in that class this semester.

But the talking in class thing HAS to stop. It distracts me, it derails my train of thought, and I'm damned if I'm walking in there with a frigging SCRIPT of what I'm going to say just so Mr. I-don't-give-a-crap can keep up his stupid talking.

I don't even get why this guy is in college. He has a job with a local agency, which is partly why he has this attitude - he knows even if he washes out of the degree, he's still employed. He gives me the strong impression he doesn't care about education, doesn't think we know more than he does....so why is he wasting someone's money (his family's, the taxpayers, or his own future income) to fill a seat and piss me off?

dress code

So, I had a student show up to class today. Showed up in what amounted to a sports bra with sleeves (very short, very tight t-shirt - you could see her entire midriff) and a pair of shorts that looked like what I'd consider to be a reasonable bottom for a swimsuit. (I THINK they were some kind of lycra fabric; no I did not look very closely)

I don't know if the guys in the class noticed; I wasn't checking reactions. The thing is....that's just a little much, in my opinion, for a class. Understand most of the students in here show up in jeans and t-shirts, or jeans shorts of a reasonable length (rarely, there is someone in a pair of "Daisy Dukes") and a t-shirt. A few women wear skirts, usually of the maxi type lately, a few students wear those flannel not-quite-pajama-bottoms. So most of the students are fairly covered.

(Also, this is the classroom with the hyperactive air conditioning unit. I "run hot" and I have to bring a cardigan to class with me).

I don't know. That kind of thing (the inappropriate dress) makes me tired. On the one hand, yes, it's not really my business to say anything unless the student was truly violating public decency. But on the other hand, this is someone who is gunning for professional school. I just hope she dresses more professionally (or just plain MORE) when she goes for her interview....

Also, based on some things this student has said before, and based on the slogan buttons she sometimes wears, I suspect my saying something to her about her dress would be taken badly, that I might even be accused of trying to "slut shame" her. (I have no idea of her sexual proclivities or level of activity and frankly do not care).

As I said, this kind of thing makes me tired. This is someone wearing the most LOOK AT ME clothes possible, but I suspect if the guys in class WERE ogling her, there might be complaints. And I admit, I get really tired of people doing things to be 'transgressive' in some way and then complaining when people react negatively to them.

I don't know. I hope that she has a slightly more extensive wardrobe that will come out when it gets cooler outside....

I will say there are the occasional articles of masculine dress that bug me. I don't like t-shirts with sexual innuendo messages on them (Thank goodness that stupid "Big Johnson" t-shirt fad died years back). I don't like the really tight "muscle shirts," though men rarely wear them to class. Or the shirts that have the whole side seam essentially ripped out (and are sleeveless), so you see the entire armpit area on a guy. Again, I don't say anything but I find some of those things kind of distasteful.

I will say if I ever have a student in a lab I am teaching, especially one involving hazardous chemicals or boiling water, they will be asked to cover up.....I might even go to my office and get the giant old t-shirt I have advertising a now-defunct student club and give it to them to wear. Because I don't want to deal with an "accident report" for a student who got scalded on her belly because she had exposed bare skin in lab. (or the same for the armpit guys.)

I can't, not any more.

You know the old saying about how if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention to what's going on in the world?

I don't want to pay attention to what's going on in the world any more. There's so much anger, so much outrage, and so many bad things happening. And there's screw-all I can do to fix any of it.

First, the pessimism: I think we will see more Fergusons in the coming years. For various reasons. In some cases, it may be trigger-happy cops. In others, it may be perps who push a little too far. And in some, it'll be the media or the attention-hound types who show up and make a big deal of it, and whip people up.

It's become all too easy to see other people as The Other of late.

(for what it's worth: My conclusion is there are no heroes in the situation. Everyone was wrong in some way. Even if the cop is vindicated....we will never know totally what happened at that altercation).

More pessimism: I won't be surprised if we see more terrorist attacks on our own soil. There are apparently ISL members who have US passports - who are US citizens. They could come back here and I don't know what. And quite aside from the disruption, loss of life, possible loss of a city (if they use a suitcase nuke or something and the survivors have to be evacuated and the area cordoned off), I suspect the government will use that crisis to add on more restrictions to law-abiding citizens. Because the law-abiding citizens tend to be the ones who have to deal the most with things like airport security, being stopped and checked out in some public place, etc.

Still more: I don't even know what will happen in Ukraine. Likely it will come under the domination of Russia once again. Worst case scenario is a full-blown war breaks out, and we see something like Crimea Round 2 or the Balkan Wars all over again. Well, actually, worst case scenario would be World War III.

And still more: What of the people crossing the border illegally? A lot of voices are calling for caring for the children, for caring for those claiming to be fleeing oppression. But then again: where does the money come from? We have poor kids in Appalachia, poor kids in the inner city who live under terrible conditions and 50+ years of federal programs don't seem to have made their lots vastly better. (I am fine with private charities choosing to do something, though I also think merely patting someone on the head and handing them a debit card only pushes the inevitable dealing-with of the sources of the problem further into the future).

And I look at all of this and I feel so tired. And yeah, on some level, hopeless. Even though I am a Christian and believe that Good will win, I really don't want to have to wait until "we all get to Heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be" in order to see the world getting better.

And the other thing, as I said, except for praying (And I do. I pray for our leaders, that they will figure out some kind of wise path. And I pray for future leaders, that there will be someone good who comes forth and not merely someone who is looking to either repeatedly get re-elected or looking to merely shove the other party's face in it), there's screw-all I can do to fix ANYTHING.

I don't know. I was raised to be a 'fixer.' That if a problem came up, rather than giving up or throwing my hands up or sitting down and crying, that I was to sit down and figure out a way to fix it or at least make it better. And it's a strange feeling of detached hopelessness when it seems that the world is falling apart and there is truly nothing concrete I can do. I mean, yeah, I hear about a lot of people talking about the save-your-own-skin-and-your-family's stuff like making sure you have a good store of food and tools and other things....and I do that, but I don't want to just save my own skin. I want things to be better, full stop.

And as I said, I don't know what to do. I try to do what I can: to give my students the best preparation they can have for their future careers. To be a compassionate and caring person and to direct people in the direction of actual help when they have a problem (E.g., referring a student with bad personal problems to the counselor, so hopefully they can begin to work on them). To do volunteer work through my church and even stuff  like picking up litter in my neighborhood.

But that's all so damn small. It feels so small. It feels like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

And I realize on some level this is a "you don't control other people's behavior" situation: if someone decides to go and bust out the plate-glass window on a store downtown, simply because that store sells stuff the person can't afford and they think it is UNFAIR, I don't have control over that and frankly there's probably nothing I could say to change the person's mind. But I also....I don't know, I have such a hunger to do something that makes the world a better place and it feels like everything I can do is so insignificant. That things have got so bad that there's maybe nothing any of us can do to fix things.

And my reaction to that is to draw back. To watch cooking shows and cartoons instead of paying any attention to the news. To lock myself in my lab and work on research about stuff that really doesn't have any direct impact on humanity. To read Regency romances and detective novels and other books that flesh out a world in my head that is a lot nicer than the real world is right now.

I feel conflicted by this because part of me says that part of being a responsible person is paying attention to what's going on, partly so I KNOW but also partly so if things get bad enough I have to get out of Dodge somehow (though frankly, where I live is pretty far out of Dodge to begin with; it's probably where the rest of my family would run to if the larger cities they were in became undesirable because of being a terrorist target or something). But part of me feels that since I can't do anything, and it's destroying my happiness, and if I'm gonna wind up getting blown to Kingdom Come or have to spend the rest of my life trying to scrape out a living by farming and hunting (if the economy really goes kablam), that maybe it's better to be a happy fool now.

And I don't like feeling that way.

Odd random thought

I suppose there's probably some law against this somewhere (or maybe not constitutional), but I was thinking about how they are saying there are apparently American (and also British) citizens who have joined ISL or ISIS or whatever you want to call it, and are fighting alongside of them.

And my first thought was this: rescind their American citizenship. So maybe that makes the guy a man without a country. I don't have a problem with that. (And the same thing for Britain). Because isn't what they're doing technically traitorous?

I don't know. Of all the things in the world that worry me the spread of some kind of crazed fundamentalism worries me the most. (I won't even call it Islam, because they're killing their supposed co-religionists, and a number of Muslims have spoken out against it (though we need more to)). They've got money, they don't have any compunctions about dying (or at least, the kids they recruit as cannon-fodder don't), they will kill others horribly and brutally to make "good theater."

It's a completely different philosophy from the West, and one thing that worries me is whether we have the fortitude to fight it in the way it probably needs to be fought.

But maybe declaring any person of American citizenship who decides to go join them a traitor, and not welcome back here, and losing their citizenship (and hell, I don't know if it's legal but: having their assets in this country frozen) might be a place to start. A small place, but a place.

So far, so good

Classes have started. We had our first full week. In general, things look good, even though I'm teaching an overload.

Though there is one in every group. I received not one but two panicked e-mails from a student detailing all of their current Life Problems (none of which would rate an accommodation from the Disabilities office, so....) and that those things are going to be the Reasons that I have to do stuff for them, or make changes and adjustments.

And it just makes me all so tired. When's the point that I get to tell someone, "Suck it up; you're an adult now. If you don't want to be an adult please apply to someone who is, hopefully a family member, and see if they'll take care of you for the rest of your life."

Part of the reason for my tiredness is that I have a lot of stuff going on in my personal life right now that are just "suck it up and deal" moments. So my sympathy right now is kind of limited.

The other thing is, and I think students forget this: I have a total of five classes I am teaching. Between those five classes I have 115 students. That is far fewer than most profs in this nation but still, 115 people is a LOT of people to learn the names of. And it would be impossible to treat each one with the degree of specialness this person is requesting.

Yes, I am happy to do things like arrange for a 'quiet room' for testing for someone with a demonstrated disability. Yes, I can arrange to get a special chair for the person who's had back surgery. No, I have no problems with the person who has hip trouble sitting in the back so they can stand up periodically when it gets to bothering them. But I draw the line at playing emotional counselor to someone who probably needs to call their mom or their sister or their best friend.

And thank goodness I don't have the darn Readings class any more; that turned into a cluster fast after we decided to do it as a hybrid class. (it's a one-credit class, which SHOULD mean one hour of work and interaction per week, but the students never took that seriously. With the hybrid format I tried to force that and it wound up with a situation where I cared more about getting the class work done than my students did, which is generally a line someone teaching should not cross.)

Summer's over. Except it really isn't.

I finished with my summer classes last week. By and large they were really good. I find that the summer students we get are typically more motivated and hardworking, and earn better grades, than the regular semester students. (I suppose this is because it takes a special motivation to attend college in the summer: you have one more class required for graduation and it's offered in the summer. Or if you go in the summer, you can graduate faster than an ordinary student.  Or you are an incoming freshperson and you want to hit the ground running in the fall. Or you're attending another school but can get some transferrable credits cheaper and with more individualized attention here.)

My grades are done and in. I haven't had any pleas for mercy or extra credit. (In fact, one of the small number of people who did not earn a good enough grade in my intro class came to my office after the exam to ask me to help her enroll in the same class for the fall, because "Now I think I can pass it." I hope so.)

I'm taking about a week's break to go visit family and generally decompress. Though I will say summer helped cure some of my teaching burnout - it's not me, it's the students, that make me crazy sometimes, and this spring, I just had one class who gave so monumentally small of a damn that it really wore me down. Teaching the same class this summer and having people tell me, "I was kind of dreading this class but it was really fun and I learned a lot!" or "Thank you for teaching this this summer; now I can graduate and go on to the job that is waiting for me" makes a big difference.

Then I come back. The local public schools start August 12. We start August 18, but that week before is filled with meetings - four solid days of meetings, at least two of them 8 am to 4 pm solid days. (We get fed lunch one day, I guess. The other day we're "invited" to go eat at the cafeteria - no notification as to whether we are expected to pay or not, so I'll probably pack my lunch that day).

I don't know. Mid-August feels way too darn early to start school. I understand the reasons: we get a couple days mid-fall break, we get the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we finish up well before Christmas (and give exams before Christmas break. In the era my parents went to college, exams were AFTER Christmas break, which I would have hated as a student). In the public schools there are a lot of one-off days off. They get most of the Federal holidays (we do not: we get MLK, Jr. day, and Independence Day, and Labor Day, but that's it). They also get random days off for "teacher inservice" or also, I think "parent-teacher conferences." And I guess that last one is only fair; if you're going to expect your teachers to be available between 5 and 9 pm or whatever it is to meet with parents, maybe it's a bit much to expect a full day of teaching that day....but when I was a kid, that was how they did it. (I think the conferences were also optional? My parents always went and I remember a teacher saying something like, "The parents that DO show up, they are usually the ones where all I have to say is, "Your kid is a good kid; they are doing well in their classes" and the parents I NEED to talk to don't show up.")

Anyway. It's hot. It was very hot last weekend. It's going to be very hot when campus grinds back open all the way on August 18. Those first two weeks (heck, the first month or so here) are just kind of miserable because it's so hot. Oh, the buildings are air conditioned but it's unreliable - sometimes a classroom will be "out." Or the a/c will go out in the faculty-office part of the building. Or it will be so cranked up in one room that that room is freezing. And it's hard to adapt and I often walk around with a headache from the variable temperatures.

And frankly, I think a lot of the students are not ready to be back. When I grew up, I was used to a school schedule where school started after Labor Day and let out for the year in early June. And that seemed to make more sense to me. August is kind of an awful month and it tends to be the hottest month in the summer, no matter where you are.

And yeah, I've heard all the arguments in favor of year-round school and I even agree with some of them (and heck, what I do essentially is teach year-round school for college students), but also, I think in some cases, at least for some kids still, there's value in having a big chunk of time off. Or, at least there was when I was a kid - maybe it's different now with the Internet and video games and 500 tv channels. But when I was a kid, we spend the summers playing HORSE, or having big neighborhood-wide games of Kick the Can. Or we'd go looking for frogs or minnows in a stream up the street. Or someone would set up a sprinkler for us to run through. Or I'd get a big stack of books from the library and spend the biggest part of some days reading. Or my brother and I would beg wood scraps from our dad and "build stuff." Or we'd climb trees. Or go looking for weird bugs or snakes. Or I'd beg my mom to let me bake cookies and sometimes she would let me.

A lot of it was learning to entertain yourself left to your own devices. And there was a certain degree of learning to compromise in there - I didn't like playing HORSE that much because I wasn't very good at it and until I had a growth spurt around 12 or so, I was one of the shorter kids. But I played it in the hopes that later on people would want to play hide-and-go-seek or Capture the Flag, both of which I did like. Or, I played because the only other choice was to go figure out something to do on my own, and playing a game that wasn't my biggest favorite was better than going and digging in the sandpile or something.

We were also largely left to our own devices. There were no cell phones, so if someone got hurt or something, you figured out a way to get them back home (carrying one of my smaller friends when she sprained her ankle) or you ran to a neighbor for help (like when one of the older kids got into a hornet's nest and got stung a lot of times and we were worried he was going to have a bad reaction). You figured stuff out, you were fairly independent.

I don't know if kids today are like that or if they have become less like that. I suppose if we had had cell phones back in the day, I could have called Christy's mom and asked her to come and pick her up when she sprained her ankle. Or we could have called Tim's dad and asked for help on the hornet thing. But both of those situations turned out okay, even with us left to our own devices.

And I wonder...you see these occasional stories about a parent who gets in trouble because some busybody sees their kid left "alone" and worries on the parent's behalf that something bad will befall the kid. I have no idea how widespread that is, and if kids are more overprotected today. When I was a kid - in the late 70s and early 80s - by and large we were allowed to roam the neighborhood as long as we didn't do anything to dangerously stupid or anything criminal, and our parents trusted us to know the difference. (Well, smaller kids were expected to stay close to home unless a kid in their teens invited them to tag along, and the fact that one of the kids who babysat my brother and me was the oldest sibling in one of the families we palled around with probably had some influence on the degree of freedom we were given). But I remember walking the 1/2 or 3/4 of a mile to the "creek" as an 11 or 12 year old, going to catch frogs, and all my dad said was, "Don't fall in; it's really muddy right now." Maybe in an era now when there isn't a parent at home to kind of man home base, or maybe now when the world seems more dangerous than it was, it's preferable NOT to have long summer breaks anymore, I don't know.

(Though I wonder: is the world really more dangerous? I remember several high-profile kidnappings of young girls that happened in the early 80s, including one not too far from where I grew up. And they all ended pretty badly. But I don't remember my mom or my dad telling me not to go out, or preventing me from going places; they seemed to know that I was smart and canny and would come running back home (or to a trusted neighbor) if something seemed suspicious.)