Did I hear this right

Okay. So Donald Sterling, the soon-to-be former owner of the Clippers, was taped by his mistress, whom he was suing for embezzlement, making some vile racist statements.

And so now he's banned for life, and has to sell the team? (Though considering the profit he will make...)

I think of what my dad used to say: that the beauty of free speech is that the jerks out themselves. Should Sterling be banned? I don't think so. Should individuals decide not to go to Clippers games in protest of him? That's their right. Should sponsors drop him because they don't want to be associated with him? That's their right. Should some of the players leave for other teams? If they want to, and they get an offer, that's their right.

I suspect that even without the banning and forced sale, Sterling would suffer some pretty serious consequences. And yeah, I suppose he should. Though then again: of those of us who know 80 year old or older guys, how many of them HAVEN'T said something cringeworthy about another race. Or about women. Or about gays. Or immigrants. Or whoever?

I don't like the idea of doubleplusungood speech leading to immediate life banination. Let consequences work themselves out: sponsors drop the guy, maybe some players decide, "Hey, I want to go work for another team instead," loss of fans. Because beginning to attach extra-special-bad penalties to speech you don't like....well, I fear that leads down a bad path. Thoughts become, if not crimes, dang close to it.

Edited to add: On further thought - if there was some kind of a clause in the contract he signed to become an owner that prohibited certain actions, then OK. Though I know those things can be nebulous and can be interpreted more loosely or tightly, depending on how much some leadership entity wants to be rid of a person.

There are certain things I can't do and keep tenure. Oh, some of them would be pretty bonehead things - if I were convicted of a felony, for example. But some of the other things are more nebulous. What, for example, is "moral turpitude"? I have heard of faculty (not here) having affairs with undergraduate students. In my book, that would qualify as turpitude for several reasons. And yet, the people concerned kept their tenure....

Though I suspect at this point the guy is so tainted by what's happened, by the "gotcha" journalism, that he's gonna have to bow out.

Yes, what he said was vile. If an older male relative of mine said it, I'd walk out of the room and later tell him I didn't appreciate what was said. But it sounds like there's plenty of vileness to go around in the situation. (And for that matter, there are NBA stars who have said and done some fairly vile things).

Mostly this just makes me sad. Not just for what Sterling said but for the fact that it involved a much younger mistress (I wonder how his wife feels) who was allegedly embezzling and who set up taping in order to entrap him in saying something that apparently she could use against him. No one in this situations is dripping with virtue.

I confess, sometimes I think about that old Simpsons episode, where something bad is going to happen to the earth, and there are two spaceships: one with the Useful People on it (where Lisa gains a seat for her skill in proofreading - which would probably also be how I got myself on such a ship) and another one, bound for the sun, with the Useless People on it. And well, okay, I'm not as bloodthirsty as that, if there were two ships, one bound for a New And Better Earth and one bound for a Survivable but Just Meh Earth, I'd put Sterling, his mistress, and most of the people who called for his head on a platter on that second ship.

People. They never fail in their capacity to disappoint me.

"How's that workin' out for you?"

One of my chronic-skipper students once again earned the lowest score on an hourly exam. I don't really look forward to seeing (or not seeing, as the case may be) this person in class again next semester.

I also have one person who always has excuses, problems, whatever, and "has" to take the exam a day or two late. They have also failed to hand in most labs and any of the papers in the class. They seem to be that kind of person who just has trouble making it through life.

And I don't know about that. There seem to be some people who just can't get, or keep, their stuff together adequately to succeed. And I wonder how they will make it in the working world - if you can't meet a single deadline for a class, including deadlines you knew about on DAY 1 of the class, how do you meet deadlines in "real life." (I hate the "real life" vs. "college" dichotomy, as it implies that college is NOT real life, and therefore is either not to be taken seriously, or things like rules and deadlines are illusory in college and you don't need to worry about them.)

I mean, I get having a bad semester or having problems in your life - but from talking with this person, this seems to be an ongoing issue. I'm just hoping I don't get a call from an administrator like I did a few years back, telling me to accept the late paper without penalty. Though this time I'm prepared - I had a chat with our ADA compliance officer.

Apparently this is a minor issue, and one he was not aware of - there is a particular admin on this campus who, when a student comes with a sad story, takes it upon themselves to pressure the faculty into granting accommodations the student isn't entitled to. And because it's an upper administrator, and even tenured profs like me are faintly afraid of what an upper admin could do, we comply.

Well, the ADA guy has told us not to do that any more. He thinks that the administrator is not TELLING us but ASKING us, but I will tell you that it sounded damnsure like "telling" when I had that conversation.

And a colleague of mine got called up by this admin, and he has said he is "just going to give a C" to the student in question that he got called about, which makes me all kinds of crazy, and I've tried to argue with him how it sets an ugly, ugly precedent, but he just wants to go along to get along ("My goal now is to get to retirement without being sued." Yeah, great).

Well, if the admin calls me up again about a student, I'm simply going to say, "I need that in writing and from the ADA guy." And then do my best not to budge. Because this is ridiculous - just as I feel a right chump when I follow the rules and am responsible and then find someone else got all kinds of rules bent for them, and they actually got a better outcome than I did, it's unfair to the majority of students who DO work hard to keep bending the rules BEYOND the baseline accommodations. Accommodations are to give everyone equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. The problem is, there are apparently some folks who can't deal with the fact that some of their "favorite" students (or maybe students with aggressive parents, I don't know) can't make it through college even with the playing field being leveled.

It's not fair, though, to a professor near the end of exam week to tell them, "This late paper that you hadn't heard any thing from the student about? You need to accept it and grade it."And it's not fair to the other students who worked hard and got their papers in on time.

I still think it's a bad idea

I watched a few of the news stories on "4/20" day in Colorado. (4/20 is some kind of stoner holiday; supposedly it originated with some kids who would go after their high school let out - at 4:20 pm - and go smoke dope).


I still think legalization is a bad and dumb idea. If even one more person starts using because "Hey, it's legal...." I think it's a bad idea. (I'm more okay with decriminalization - not locking up small-time users. But legalization, in a lot of people's minds, is tantamount to the government saying "This is A-OK to do, folks.")

Granted, the news stories showed the worst offenders and the most outrageous people - the ones who claimed they didn't want to do anything, ever, other than get high.

And if that's true, if that's not just the weed or the fact that they're on tv talking, that makes me sad. All you want to do is get high? You don't want to make a contribution to the world? You don't want to be a good parent to a child? You don't want to create something? You just want to sit in a haze that seems to me not all that different from the people in the long-term care centers with reduced brain function?

Makes me think sometimes we should charter a plane to a big island somewhere, put a sign on it saying "FREE POT INSIDE!!!!!" and then fly everyone who gets on to that island, drop them off, and leave them to figure out how to stay alive.

Me? I want to work for a living. I want to feel - at least on my good days - like I'm making some kind of contribution to society, that I'm trying to make things better. And in my free time, I want to create stuff. Or learn stuff. Or make music.

And yeah, yeah, I am sure a lot of that can happen when a person is at least minimally high, but it seemed to me the people intent on partying were pretty inert other than for smoking.

I know I am unduly harsh about this. But I've dealt with people with drug issues - bad neighbors I had one year, a student who came to class hammered, a TA who got kicked out of school for using and for stealing drugs. And I have little patience for any of that. Yes, people should be free to live their lives and I don't freakin' care what someone does EXCEPT when it's so loud in my neighborhood at 3 am that I can't sleep, or I have to throw someone out of class because we're doing a dissection lab with scalpels and he might pose a danger to himself, or when I was depending on someone to cover a class for me when I had jury duty, and they just totally flaked and never showed up.

Many things a person does create ripples in the life of others and it frustrates me when someone else's drug use makes my life much more difficult - or, in the case of the AWOL TA, makes ME look bad, like I was the one who flaked.

So, my experience is: heavy drug or alcohol use makes people selfish and irresponsible. And I don't have time to deal with people like that in my life. (As much as I love my relatives? If one of them was a user, I'd cut them out of my life - tell them I didn't want to see them until they were clean, and I wasn't going to help them out financially or anything).

I will say I'll be interested in seeing how much the black market for marijuana is affected by the Colorado legalization and "official" sales places. I know a lot of other states are kind of slavering over the possibility of "more tax dollars" but I wonder, are there still the low-level dealers who undercut the "official" centers because they don't charge state tax? (And is this going to affect the cartels at all? If legalization totally eliminated the cartels and their violence, I might be more grudgingly willing to accept it, but I suspect the cartels will either double-down on violence, or move on to producing and distributing meth or bath salts or something else.)

The other thing - governments have a long history of taxing "undesirable" behaviors (drinking, smoking, and even some would say, buying gasoline), but when those behaviors are reduced, the government finds they are as addicted to the tax money as the people previously were to the substance. So I'm not sure how that will pay out.

The other issue, as I've worried about before: what if some people take up pot smoking when it becomes "more normal," and then find themselves out of a job or addicted or otherwise unable to work? Are they going to want to go on the dole, and then chumps like me - who work hard and don't want to smoke the stuff - wind up paying their living expenses, and maybe even paying for their weed, seeing as they now claim to "need" it. (I've seen contradictory results on the addictivity of pot, but I can't help but think some people must become at least psychologically dependent on it.)

I don't know. As I said before, any other state that is considering legalization should sit back for five or maybe ten years and carefully study what's going on in Colorado, and decide "Is this worth it to us?" and "What unintended consequences are arising?"

Edited to add:

Because I kind of AM unpopular-opinion puffin, at least a lot of the time.

dear world

So apparently Jewish people are now being asked to 'register' their existence (and how many material goods they own) in eastern Ukraine.

Dear world: Please choose ONE AND ONLY ONE terrible decade we are fixing to relive:

1850s
1910s
1930s
1970s
or "other."


Also, I thought "never again" meant "never again."

I wouldn't hire 'em

Some of the students in one of my lab classes, I mean. I can't get over how some of them are utterly unable to follow directions that I both speak aloud and have written on a page, and how many can't remember from one week to the next the lab procedures - which are pretty much the same for most of the labs.

My top ten lab issues:

10. "Please wash the glassware you use. PLEASE wash the glassware you use." I don't have a lab slave teaching assistant for this class, so unwashed glassware means I have to stay after and do it, if I don't catch the person and shame them into doing it themselves.

9. "The lab exercise for this week is up on BlackBoard. (heavy sigh). Go to the computer lab and print out a copy." (This is for people who either chronically forget theirs, or skip class regularly enough not to get the handout)

8. That one guy who always shows up just late enough to miss the ENTIRE pre-lab lecture and then doesn't know what the butt he's doing.

7. "Beakers are for containing. Graduated cylinders are for measuring." Just put that on my tombstone, okay?

6. "NO WHAT ARE YOU DOING DON'T PUT THAT PIPETTE IN THERE!!!" as I fly across the room to knock the pipet they just used for one reagent out of their hands before they use it on the next reagent. "NO CROSS CONTAMINATION" could also go on my tombstone.

5. "No eating or drinking in lab." Seriously, some of you are industrial-hygiene majors. Why do I have to say this multiple times every week?

4. "If you spill a chemical, please let me know." I had a massive formaldehyde spill today. Luckily it was under the hood. But the person who committed the spill DID NOT TELL ME and that is NOT COOL.

3. "The plastic vial is for doing the extractions; the glass one is for the colorimetric tests." Seriously, we have done these procedures five separate times in the semester, why do you not know it yet?

2. DON'T PUT CHEMICAL WASTE DOWN THE DRAIN. No, we are not Wichita Falls and may be recycling our greywater to drink, but that day may be coming and I really don't feel like getting even trace amounts of heavy metals and cyanides added to my diet. Also I set out labeled waste bottles for a reason.

1. "No, it's too cloudy. Filter it again." Also I have said this multiple times to multiple people; you'd think they'd learn. They have to be able to get 100% transmittance on the colorimeter and there is ONE and ONLY ONE reason why that would not happen: cloudy samples. And yet every dang time, it's like a new surprise and it's me being hateful telling them to re-filter.


Three more weeks. Three more weeks and I'm done with this crew. I just hope this is an unusual lab class and not a harbinger of what future classes will be like.

humanity is ugly

So, some guy, allegedly a member of the KKK (I can't even believe they still exist in this day and age but they do) and a white supremacist decides to go and take out his rage at a particular group of people.

He winds up killing three people.

One of those people was a 14 year old kid who was an Eagle Scout. (An Eagle Scout at 14. And that puke wound up killing him).

This is where I get really uncomfortable with the whole hate-crimes legislation deal. If what this guy did is ruled "not a hate crime," that doesn't make the people any less dead. It doesn't make their families any less destroyed. It doesn't make the community they lived in any less hurt and questioning.

I've long said that to commit a violent crime against another person, you have to have hate in your heart. Oh, I get that hate-crimes legislation was designed to try to deter people who hated a particular group of people from acting on that hate, or perhaps to allow extra-special punishment for people who DID act on that hate.

But, as I said: it doesn't make the people killed any more or any less dead.

I really go back and forth on the death penalty. But I admit I come back to the idea that there are some people so dangerous that they need to be removed permanently. This guy would be one example: if he got let go, I wouldn't be surprised if he did the same, but even worse. And he's 73, so claiming any kind of leniency for him because he's "elderly" is ridiculous. (Also, why was he not in prison already? Apparently he has a huge rap sheet.)

group dynamics

I swear next semester I am *assigning* lab partners in my intro lab class. I'm done with this.

In my lab class, I currently have 14 students. Eleven of those are dilgent, hard working people. They mostly work in pairs and there is one group of three. They work together, if one person doesn't understand and someone else does, that person explains to them. They pay attention to my pre-lab lecture and know what to do. They get done in good time, hand in their papers, and then they get to scram.

And I'd get to scram early, too, if it weren't for my one last group. Two women and a man. One of the women has an enormous sense of entitlement. She also bitches about three times per lab period about how this week's exercise is "stupid." It matters not what the exercise it, it's just "stupid."

Um, you're majoring in this, right? So this is what you plan on doing with your life? If you don't like the super-basic labs where stuff is far, far less hard or tedious than it can be, well, I recommend switching majors.

I actually remember some of the labs from my basic bio class (which was high school AP bio). One big one I remember is the onion root tip. Most basic classes do some form of this: you either make and stain yourself (as we did) a slide of an onion's growing root tip, or use a prepared slide. You find 100 cells in the zone of active cell division (the meristem). You identify them to stage of mitosis. Then, based on the number of cells in each stage and how long the cell cycle generally takes, you can compute how long each stage takes. I remember doing that and thinking, "Whoa, cool. I didn't think about doing it that way but it works."

But to a lot of today's students (or maybe just to a lot of students who aren't really into science and who don't have a high tolerance for repetitive tasks like I do), counting 100 cells - well, you might as well put an orange jumpsuit on them, give them a sledgehammer, and tell them to go out in the hot sun and break rocks for 12 hours. Seriously, people act as if counting and identifying 100 cells is just short of torture.

And I'm like, wait until you get to grad school, 100 cells will look like a coffee break.

Of course, many of them are looking at med/dental/PA/whatever school, but still: I'm sure there are incredibly tedious things there.

And I do understand that probably counting onion cells seems irrelevant to someone who wants to be a surgeon or a physical therapist - but there's value (I tend to think) in anything you learn, and the idea of the technique (you have a process you can only see "stopped" stages of, now you need to estimate how long each stage takes) could be applied to other things.

But I get really tired of that one group - they tend to ignore the pre-lab (if they talk, I stop and shut them up, or I look at them and go "Do you have a question?" which I find usually shuts up in-class talkers. I've given up on the smartphones - I figure, if they want to dink around on their smartphones while everyone else pays attention, that''s  their loss. Except it's kind of mine, too, because they are always hounding me with simple questions I answered in the pre-lab lecture, and also, it takes them longer to finish and leave, so I am less likely to be done with lab early.)

But I see this increasingly much in college students: they think they know everything already, they think they've figured out what's important and what isn't, and they deem any class that is not narrowly focused on the one thing they are going to do with their lives as irrelevant and therefore to be ignored or complained about. The thing is - lots of people change their focus. I originally, as an undergrad, wanted to be a geneticist, but that gradually shifted to becoming a botanist over time, for various reasons (a big one: I didn't want to spend my research life trapped in a lab). Or you fail at something important. Or you don't get in to med school. Or you realize at 20 that becoming a doctor, under the new way medicine is done, is no longer appealing to you.

I tend to think that very little if anything you learn is ever a waste of time. I wish my students also felt that way.

you know what?

I'm sick of political "purity tests" for people.

You know, if you hint that maybe, just, you know, maybe, it might be kind of okay if a photographer with strong beliefs to the contrary doesn't want to take on the job of photographing a same-sex wedding, you suddenly become one to be shunned as a wrong-thinker.

Or, if you mention shopping at Hobby Lobby, because that's literally the only craft store within 100 miles, you're told "Oh, they oppress women (because, apparently, they won't give their workers the Plan B pill for free). You shouldn't shop there."

Those are extreme examples but increasingly I hear that kind of talk - that no matter what else you do, if you disagree, even slightly - or maybe fundamentally agree but note that there are complexities to the issue - you're an awful person.

Here's the thing - I've known people who would pass the most progressive "purity tests" out there - and they were huge (forgive the word but it's the only one that fits) douchebags. Just awful to other people, selfish, ungenerous, snarky.

And I've known people who said stuff about certain minorities, or about gay people, that made me cringe quite a bit - but then, it turned out, when they actually wound up working alongside a man they knew to be gay? They weren't awful to him. They didn't say anything. Because, you know, individuals matter. And while the person I'm talking about didn't agree with the way the man was living his life, they were smart enough to know that there are things you don't butt in about.

I have friends who are gay but I admit I'm still conflicted on the idea of requiring,by law,  say, an extremely devout Catholic to cater their wedding* because....well, because. On the one hand, yeah, discrimination is wrong and if this same Catholic person refused to cater a black heterosexual couple's wedding (or a black guy marrying a white woman's wedding), I'd be very unhappy and probably not ever want to patronize that caterer.....but matters of faith get difficult and prickly.

(*same-sex marriage is not recognized currently in my state, and anyway, this couple, I don't know that they'd want to do the big wedding thing. And at any rate: they're too nice of people to go to some caterer who would be uncomfortable with the idea and say "You WILL cater our wedding or we will call the government on you.")




I don't know. I tend to take the opinion that I go where I'm wanted, and don't go where I'm not. I'm a single woman. When I eat in restaurants, much of the time it's by myself. Some restaurants and some waiters understandably don't like that. (I do tip fairly generously). If I go to a restaurant and get the vibe of "We really would vastly prefer you were with a party of three others, or part of a family" I go "meh" and cross them off my list of places to go to again. But I don't go in, guns figuratively a-blazing, and demand that they serve me, and they serve me NOW and they put me at the BEST TABLE IN THE HOUSE. Because that's being a (sorry, again) douchebag.

And really, a restaurant that doesn't want me there? Why am I paying them? Why not go to the other fine establishments around here who actually seem happy to see me when I show up? And yeah, I get it: in some cases that baker may be the only baker in town. Or the only one worth going to. And that's unfortunate.

But, I don't know. I get so tired of being told, "Do this" or "Don't do that" when my reality suggests those things aren't really possible. Or that all the other good I do with my life is magically undone because I sometimes buy groceries at the wal-mart rather than driving the two-hour (!) round trip to get to a Central Market or somewhere. (And I guess Whole Foods is now no longer so ideologically pure? Am I remembering right?)

The whole thing just makes me freaking tired. Like I said: I tend to judge people on how they treat other individuals: are they generally nice to other people or are they generally jerks to other people? Or are there particular people they're jerks to because that person is a member of a certain group? But I tend to think that deciding someone's a jerk because they really, really need some rick-rack for their daughter's dress, and they really need it NOW, and the only place to get it is the Hobby Lobby....well.

Life is complicated and I think the problem is that people are trying to simplify it down to sets of binary choices that don't necessarily apply.

unionizing college athletes

So apparently this is going to be a thing.

Well, I say, let's sit back and watch the unintended consequences roll in.....

1. Possible loss of amateur status

2. IRS wanting to treat their scholarships as "income"

2a. The fact that then, arguably, some of the athletes will make a higher "salary" (on paper) than some of their profs

3. The possibility of them going on strike (??? no idea if that's possible)

4. Their time getting eaten up even more than it is now by union meetings

5. Their having dues go to some union boss.

This actually might be a good education for some of these kids.

It won't affect me because I teach at a public uni (and one with such poor teams, by and large, that it wouldn't be worth unionizing them).

But I do remember that the old "may you live in interesting times" was actually intended as a curse...

some thoughts on current news

I've been troubled by the existence of a particular Kansas-based group that claims to be a "church" since I first heard about them. For one thing, it seems to me that they make the job of other Christians harder - people looking for a reason to dislike or dismiss or snark on that faith can bring up this so-called "Baptist" group as an example.

When they really aren't. When they are really pretty much the opposite pole of what a lot of Christians believe and want to do.

It also bothers me that they seem to want to exploit people in deep grief for....what? Their own agenda, their own attention, to get on the evening news? What good does it do anyone to throw salt in the wounds someone is suffering because their son, or their husband, or their brother (or their daughter, wife, sister) was killed while in military service?

I prefer not to add to the burden of sadness that already exists in the world.

And yes, there are bright lights: the Patriot Guard, for example (one semester I had a student who was a biker, and he volunteered with them when he cold. I was proud of him for that). Or the other people who form a human screen between the protestors and the family and try to protect the family from the ugliness.

But of course the group in question is back in the news because their founder (who was also apparently "excommunicated" at some point) died last week.

I'm hoping he found grace and mercy far exceeding what he seems to have shown here on Earth. And if it's not too awful of me, that he now regrets the way he behaved.

But I also found myself thinking this morning, in that sort of half-awake state when you first get up, of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. A recap: there was a very wealthy man, in a time and a place where there was really no social safety net, so the disabled or indigent had to rely on family or on the kindness of people in their town to survive. Lazarus was such a man; he apparently had a skin condition that made it impossible for him to work (he was probably ritually unclean, was the implication, I guess). The dogs would come and lick his sores (ugh). He would sit outside the rich man's gate and beg. The rich man could have helped Lazarus by letting him have the scraps from his table - but even that was too much for the rich man to do.

Eventually, as happens to all humans, Lazarus died. As the text states, he was taken to the bosom of his father Abraham - because he suffered here in this life (and also, in some commentaries, he was someone who trusted and relied upon God), he wound up in a pretty nice afterlife.

Then the rich man died. And he wound up going to "the other place" (as we used to call it when I was a kid). He's suffering. He calls upon Abraham and asks him to send Lazarus (not only is this rich man uncaring towards others; he retains a giant sense of entitlement even past the grave - considering he expects the former beggar outside his gates to bring him water) with a drop of water to cool the rich man's burning tongue. Nope, is Abraham's reply. Can't be done.

So then the rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus to the rich man's remaining family, to warn them to change their ways, lest they suffer the same fate as the rich man. Again, Abraham says no, it can't be done. And besides, Abraham adds, they have the Law and the Prophets; do they not read them? And the rich man explains that just as he didn't regard the Law or Prophets when he was alive, they do not. And Abraham argues that if they won't listen to the existing scripture, they will not be convinced by Lazarus....

And I find myself wondering if that founder is now casting about, wishing someone could be sent to his family, to tell them that they're going about it wrong, that they will not help anyone by telling everyone they're doomed and sinful and going to Hell, and instead they need to do something differently.

I don't know. It just frustrates me, how that group behaves.

Hm.

Ran across this little information-dump: Pot isn't so green, after all
.
I saw the last image in that list, and my first thought was: "I don't smoke pot. So can I have my incandescent bulbs back, please?"

(I really, really dislike CFLs. I haven't yet tried LEDs, which my parents tell me give better light, because they're SO EXPENSIVE and I sincerely doubt they will last as long as claimed).

I don't know. The little-l libertarian part of me says, "I don't give a flip if someone smokes pot, as long as they don't get out on the road after doing so (or as long as they don't show up stoned to my lab class the week we're using hazardous chemicals)" but I do think there are going to be serious unintended consequences to legalizing it for recreational use.

There are a few legislators in my state eyeing it as a possible tax cash-cow, and while normally I am all about taxes I can choose not to pay (like playing the lottery), I just think it would be better for all other states considering legalization to wait five or ten years and watch what happens in Colorado.

I also worry that legalization for recreational use will lead to more pot-users, and more users losing their jobs, and possibly disability claims of "I can't work because I 'have' to smoke pot and no one will hire me now" and then the rest of us will be on the hook to take care of those folks. I don't know how likely that is but it's something that makes me uncomfortable.

Also, I want the right to throw students who are high out of my class. I had to do it once with a drunk student; he stumbled in boasting loudly about how he was at a bachelor party the night before and was "still really hammered" and it was a week we were going to be dissecting starfish, and I just didn't want him taking a fingertip off with the scalpel, so I told him that he had to leave, that he obviously wasn't "feeling well." (Luckily, he did, without too much issue. And I knew he lived in the dorm, so it wasn't an issue of him driving somewhere.)

But I will say: I don't want any self-righteous pothead claiming how his habit is "better for mother Earth" than whatever habits I have (tea, chocolate, buying fabric....)

Laughing so I don't....well, you know.

I had contemplated giving up paying attention to world news for Lent, but now maybe that's not such a hot idea. I might wake up some morning and find the world had blown up while I wasn't looking.

I find myself wondering if we are poised to revisit the nineteen-teens, or the eighteen-fifties. I love learning about history, just not first-hand.

Yes, and yes.

Over the weekend, half-listening to another one of the endless "Is college worth it?" debates, I realized something:

"This is a mommy-wars issue."

In other words: it's one where each side stakes out their turf, makes the other side look as bad as possible, and uses hyperbole to defend their own turf. When, in reality, both sides are right sometimes, and wrong sometimes.

Yes, kids do better when there is a dedicated adult to stay home and care for them. But in some cases, the mom may not be the best adult to do that. (In my own family: my brother's career is more flexible right now, so most of the time, he is at home with my niece). In some families, a grandparent may suit better. Some moms just aren't as maternal, in some cases stepping off the career track might unfortunately mean she could never get back on, there might be financial constraints, so on and so forth. So it's not pure evil that some moms work instead of staying home. But it's also not true that stay at home moms are drags on the economy who don't contribute: stay at home parents have tremendously hard jobs, and they work longer hours, I dare say, than someone like me who doesn't have dependents but works full time outside the house.

But anyway. I see a similar situation with the "Is college worth it" argument. The answer is in some cases yes, and in some cases no. Or, "is it better to go to college or to get on the job training or become an entrepreneur?" Yes and yes and yes, depending on where your talents and interests lie.

It seems like debating "the value of college" as if it were an absolute yes-or-no question generates a lot of heat but very little light.

To hear some speak: encouraging some students to take a path other than college is tantamount to those old Communist countries that pre-determined everyone's careers and you had no choice. You're condemning someone to the life of being a Delta! Everyone should have a shot at being an Alpha!

No. Not everyone wants that. I once had a student who confessed to me that he was "trying" to flunk out of college so his parents would stop pressuring him and would let him work construction, which was what he really wanted to do. Why should someone be forced into a role they don't want, when they are happy - and maybe very good at - another role? We always need plumbers and electricians and mechanics and all the skilled trades: and those trades CAN'T be outsourced; you cannot send your car over to India to get its engine fixed.

And if someone who is in a trade or other career WANTS to take classes for his or her own enrichment, that's always possible. I admit, I harbor a secret fantasy of a nation of people where plumbers read poetry in their spare time and dentists have an interest in ancient history. Where people value learning stuff because it's FUN, not just because it gets them some bigger better credential that they can parlay into a raise or wave in someone's face. I realize that the current state of our society makes that unlikely, and that most people care more about what Robin Thicke is doing than what Shakespeare wrote, but whatever.

But to hear others speak - college is a waste of time and money, it's only "indoctrination," we need to destroy the system and the faster the better. And this attitude scares me. I've been known to talk back to those talking heads on the TV, saying, "Okay. Fine. Shut down all the universities; idle all the professors. Good luck finding a doctor or an engineer in 20 years!"

For some professions, college is essential. (And yes, I know, in the "old days," doctoring was learned by apprenticeship. But in the "old days" they also thought disease was caused by an excess of one of the four humors). Yes, there are some majors that will be harder to translate to a career - the "Anything" Studies fields, some of the more abstruse Humanities (I have a relative with a Ph.D. in medieval French poetry. He is currently teaching high-school French classes. He really wants to be a professor but these days, that takes waiting for someone to die at their desk AND the university to decide they can't outsource that teaching to adjuncts). And also, frankly, a lot of students graduate from college who aren't prepared for work. It happens, especially in the era of promotion of "retention" as an absolute virtue. And the attitudes of some of the students makes me twitch - while I haven't, thankfully, heard "D is for diploma!" quoted to me since the economic downturn (maybe some of the students are getting it, finally), still, I have an awful lot of folks who seem to want to get through doing the barest of bare minimums to get by. And frankly, since I have served on several hiring committees, people who have done the barest of bare minimums wind up on the bottom of the stack - the "We'll consider these applicants only if all of the ones who actually have internships or research experience turn us down."

And I think part of the reason that "college is now like glorified high school" (as some claim, and there is some truth to that), is that a lot of high schools - a lot of lower-level schools - aren't really doing their job.

I once had a student who didn't know how to compute an average. He stopped class DEAD and made me explain it. This guy was a junior in college (it was the first time I had had him in class). I was aghast. How does a person get through school without doing averages? I've also had students who had no grasp of fractions. I remember learning fractions in third through fifth grade, and while they didn't come easy to me at first, my mom helped - she took me in the kitchen and walked me through doubling and halving a couple recipes, and dealing with the half-cups and quarter-teaspoons and such helped me see it, and also see a *purpose* for fractions, which was probably also part of the reason I was resisting learning it.

So, the schools are partly responsible, but I suppose in some cases, if parents stepped up a bit more and pushed their kids in subjects the kids were lagging in, things might be better.

Also, colleges need to get out of the "remediation" business. If someone is unprepared, they should go back and re-take the high school class, period.

And actually, making trade schools and vocational programs and ALL those things more appealing might help with some of the unprepared-students issue. Though then again - I'm not sure how successful a mechanic you could be if you really stunk at basic math.

But it frustrates me a great deal to hear people on one side be calling for College for ALL (really? ALL? What kind of accommodations will we be expected to make for those who just aren't prepared or able or whatever?) and people on the other side seeming to suggest that college is a waste for everyone ("College for None"?).

But, more and more, I see that these hot-button issues that are shown as stark black and white on the talking-heads shows, never really are.

RIP, Harold Ramis

Sad to hear of Harold Ramis' death earlier this week. I feel kind of like I felt when John Hughes died - that someone who was really important to the movies I watched as a teen growing up was gone, and that things would be different, and we'd never quite recapture that same exact style.

Harold Ramis was a decent comic actor - he usually seemed to be the straight-man type, and I think a lot of nerdy people gravitated towards his characters (particularly Egon Spengler). But he probably shone best - or at least I think he did - as a writer. He's largely responsible for "Meatballs," and "Stripes" and "Ghostbusters," and "Groundhog Day" (those are just four of his films; he's done lots more than that).

Most of the movies he was involved with, there does seem to be an underlying sweetness - "Meatballs," for example, which I saw for the first time in its unedited form just recently (and admit, was a little taken aback at the language - oh, yeah, I'm sure some kids spoke like that but I would have been in beeeeeg trouble if I had). The whole subplot of Bill Murray's character trying to get some of the less-liked or "loser" kids to feel good about themselves - the pep talk near the end with the kid who was their camp's last hope to win the Camp Olympics with his cross-country skills. The whole "It just doesn't matter!" scene.

And "Groundhog Day" - which is on my short list of favorite movies - it's essentially a story about redemption, about learning to live outside our own wants and our own heads, and that's how we move on. (It's interesting - that underlying theme has some deep resonances with Christianity, but it could also be seen as sort of a Buddhist worldview, I think - and I know Ramis was quoted at least once about his interest in, and following of, the Buddhist philosophy as an adult). I find "Groundhog Day" a profoundly moving movie, even though it's also laugh-out-loud funny in a lot of places.

(One thing I read in one of the obituaries - that he and Bill Murray had been "estranged" for a few years. I don't know why and it doesn't matter. But apparently, before Ramis' death, the two reconciled. And that makes me happy - I know too many people who didn't get that chance to reconcile with someone who had been important in their life.)

I think movies, even more than television or books, seem to be a cultural touchstone for people of my generation or my circle. I think most people have had the experience of quoting a movie line and having someone else in the group quote another line back to them - and there's a moment of laughter and recognition (and I don't know why I'm always surprised, considering how many hundreds of millions of people probably see the big blockbuster movies, but I am surprised, and suddenly feel like, "This is someone who gets me, at least a little bit.").

I can't remember the context now, but the line "Lighten up, Francis!" was once used (jokingly, of course) in a faculty meeting and it broke the tension and everyone laughed and went back to being cool. And I've said to students, when we're out doing fieldwork and they're working with 50' tapes to lay out transects, "Don't cross the streams; that would be bad" (meaning: don't get the tapes off parallel) and that usually gets at least a chuckle.

I do think for Generation X, between John Hughes and Harold Ramis - well, that's a lot of the movies that were important parts of our lives. And now both of them are gone.

RIP, Dr. Spengler. You'll be missed.

They may be trying to "train" me

So. I gave a first exam in one of my classes today.

As this is allegedly an 'advanced' class, I followed good pedagogy and made the test mostly essay.

Mistake, ricki. Big big mistake.

Essay tests take a LONG time to grade, and sometimes (though not this year) you get that person with the handwriting like a drunken spider, and you're squinting at the page, cursing them, as you can feel the rods and cones dying, and wonder if you'll be sitting on a street corner some day with a tin cup, saying, "It was....it was....EXAM POISONING!!!"

But this semester, I'm noting a disturbing trend. When a student can't answer a question, rather than doing what they can or even just leaving it blank, instead they answer a totally different question. Like, the question they'd like to see there. (Or, perhaps: the question that WAS there on last semester's exam. Yeah, that's why I write different ones each time).

I've had to use my "This does not answer the question asked!" angry grading notation more this go-round than ever before.

I don't know if (a) this is an unusually gormless group, (b) they didn't study hard enough (or had another big exam this week, or heard I was a pushover on tests, which is false) or (c) this is a trend.

If it's a trend, I'm really unhappy. My essay questions are NOT that devious. They are over topics that were both discussed in class and that are in the textbook. I also hand out a big long list of "topics you will want to study" (maybe I need to rephrase that as "topics you NEED to study"). My review sheet is NOT a joke, it's not a suggestion only, at least if you want a good grade.

(Cue me muttering that back when I was in college, we didn't even GET review sheets. Our NOTES were our review sheets. And we had to walk to school in 18" of snow, uphill both ways.)

But yeah. I don't get the "I'm going off on a tangent that has nothing to do with the topic at hand just because I don't know the answer and that makes me uncomfortable." Do they think I just look for filled in answer blanks without reading?

There are gonna be a lot of unhappy students come Monday. I hope that unhappiness serves as a goad to work harder, at least to some.

(Standard disclaimer: yes, I did have a few people earn As. So my exam was not impossible.)

But I wonder if they're trying to make me throw up my hands and go "Awww, screw it. All multiple-choice next time" because those are hella easier to grade.

Now I remember

Why I hate the oncoming spring and the changes in the weather.

I've had a near-migraine (not enough to justify a sick day, but enough to make working unpleasant) for three days. My teeth feel like they're going to fall out. (I have been chewing carefully on one side to begin with; I have an old filling I fear is eroding. I have a checkup in two weeks where I can either get that verified or be told that it's still sound and I don't want to have to make an emergency appointment before then).

Oh, and they've decided to do tree maintenance with chainsaws and stuff around my building on campus. Hooray!

This is better than it being 30 degrees below normal temperatures and icy, I guess, but my sinuses actually felt BETTER during that time than they do now.

And in a few weeks, the fornicating trees will literally start fornicating (well, releasing pollen) and my spring allergies will ramp up.

We're also having mold issues in my building but no one is DEATHLY ill so nothing is being done about it. I expect it will take someone contracting fungal pneumonia that is CLEARLY spread by one of the species growing in the building before they actually try to clean it up.

I've been sleeping a lot when I've been off work, because my sinuses feel so crappy and sleeping is about the only thing that helps them.

"The library's named after a DUDE!!!!"

You may have heard about the students at Columbia (or Barnard, some of the reports I've heard said Barnard) that filmed a porn video in the library, to protest a variety of things. (The radio news here spun it as "Because the library was named after a dude" but it sounds like it was also about "the expectations of female behavior on campus")

I dunno. Maybe I'm a Philistine here, but I don't think that's quite what Gandhi intended with "Be the change you wish to see in the world." I guess they're getting notoriety for it, but....if there's a culture on the campus of pressure for women to have sex when they don't want to, or if they think women are being objectified, I kind of think there are maybe more productive ways of directly tackling the issue.

Also, I have admit, the "It's only dead white dudes in the canon" argument doesn't generally sway me, at least not in the sense of "We have to throw all of them out and find replacements." It's a historical thing that most of the well-known writers were dudes....and most of them were white Europeans. In the past, generally men were ABLE to write because they had wives to take care of the day-to-day stuff. Most of the women writers of the past that I know were women who weren't married, and many of them came from well-off families. And until recently, most of the known books out there were by Europeans, or people of European heritage. Yeah, you may not like it, but it's kind of how history happened. And much of American culture still harks back to Shakespeare and Dickens and even sometimes people like Spenser....you can't change things overnight by declaring "Those guys are now taboo; here are the new cultural icons" because culture doesn't work like that.

(Though honestly, in the future? Maybe we'll be hoping that people read, period, much less read Dickens and Shakespeare.)

Maybe I'm unenlightened. Or maybe my perspective is very different. But when I walk by the library here (which does happen to have authors' and philosophers' names on it, and as far as I can remember, yes, they are all dudes), I don't feel harassed or excluded or put down. It's just how things were. I'm grateful things are different now - if it were still the 15th century I might not be able to read at all - but I'm not outraged at how it is.

Scene from an exam

So I gave my first exam today. This is in a intro-level majors class; it's a class in which you have to earn the equivalent of a 70% to be able to take upper-division classes in my department.

It's also a challenging class. There's a lot of material. Oh, it's not impossible to earn an A; I have people earn As every semester. But a lot of people also can't handle the amount and speed of the material, because they either coasted in high school, or went to a high school that prepared them badly.

So we get lots of repeaters. I have three people from my last-semester class taking this one again, and one person who was in my lab section (but not lecture) last go-round.

So anyway, I gave the exam. And one of the repeaters, when he handed it in, went, "This is different from last semester's."

Uh, yeah. I'm not that stupid. And anyway, I know there are exam files floating around out there, and if you hand back your exams (some profs do not), you need to create new ones each semester.

But I am amazed at how some folks don't seem to learn from past mistakes. Maybe not so much Mr. "But you didn't just copy last year's exam," but I also have someone re-taking the class whose attendance was for crap last time, and it's bad again this time. Attendance correlates well with performance, and while it could be as much a measure of how much of a damn a person gives (that is, both attendance and performance are correlated with giving a damn, and that's what causes both to be high, rather than that attendance assures a better grade), still, he did pretty badly last time.

And I also once had the guy who plagiarized a paper, failed the class, retook it, and then plagiarized again. When I busted him, his response was, "I didn't think you'd check."

I just stared at him, amazed. I wanted to say, "Of everyone in the class, yours was the one I MADE SURE to check," but I didn't.

I don't know. I don't like to brag on how smart I am but I am smart enough to learn from my mistakes and not make them again. Hell, I'm smart enough to learn from OTHER PEOPLE'S mistakes, which is a much more fun way to learn.

The Waltons, again

I think I mentioned watching re-runs of this occasionally before.

I am quite sure my family watched it when I was a kid (when it was on in its first run) but I remember almost nothing of individual episodes....I just remember the "goodnight" ritual from the end, and the music.

(The music. The music is weirdly evocative to me; I think I remember music better than other things and I can hear the theme music and be 7 or 8 again....)

Anyway, I've been watching the re-runs the Hallmark Channel does of late, partly because there's so little current programming that inspires. (I once said to the television, "TV, stop sucking." It didn't listen to me.)

I find the show more interesting, and in a lot of ways, more uplifting (even though there's sad stuff that goes on) than a lot of stuff.

I also look at the family dynamic and wonder how different a person I would have turned out to be if I had grown up as one of seven children. (I was five before my only sibling, a brother, was born).

And I like the 1930s/40s era setting, it's inherently more interesting to me than a show set in a modern-day Everycity. (Even if I now find myself scrutinizing things in the background - there was a Red Cross poster in one of the episodes I saw last night that looked too "modern" to me; the typeface and style of how the wording was positioned seemed kind of 1970s.)

Another thing struck me last night: one episode featured Ma and Mary Ellen going to check on a young mountain woman whose husband was overseas in WWII and there was concern because she'd stopped writing to him. It turned out a scumbag guy had raped her. (I don't think "rape" was ever said, but it was pretty clear what had happened). And Ma tries to report him (though the lawman reminds her that the woman would be on trial as much as the man). And she does all this while worrying about John-Boy, who is MIA overseas.

And the scumbag guy shows up one day and harasses Ma, and looks like he might attack her, but she fends him off with a broom.

Ma Walton was pretty badass.

Of course, Pa was badass too - later on he goes and talks to scumbag guy and essentially tells him, "You're not going to trial because I think your victim is probably too scared and fragile to withstand what a rape trial is like, but you better get the hell out of here or I'll make your life miserable" and then picks the guy up and bodily throws him in a creek when the guy starts to get up in his face.

I think that's one thing I like about the show: the badass people (who are still good and decent and loving people) aren't afraid to be badass; they're not afraid to pick up a gun if that's what it takes to defend their families. But they're also very loving and can be incredibly gentle with hurt or damaged people.  (And also, on the Waltons - they weren't afraid to show the family saying grace over a meal).

(It's funny: I have absolutely zero interest in Duck Dynasty but from what I've heard, that family shares certain characteristics with the Waltons).

Something that made me smile.

One of the classes I teach is a gen-ed class, which means we're supposed to take attendance so we can immediately report people who stop coming, so they can.....well, "they" so far haven't done much about it, but we're supposed to report non-attendance.

So I take roll.

(How I feel about enforced attendance policies is another rant for another time. It's enough for me to say that the vast majority of D and F earners I have are people who skip class a lot. Whether that's because they're missing vital material or because they just generally have a bad attitude I don't know, but I don't need to give or take away "attendance points" because it seems to sort itself out)

Anyway, one day in my intro-levels majors class, I was taking roll. I got to one guy's name, and when I called it off, he responded by doing "jazz hands."

I never know if it's okay or not for me to laugh about stuff like that in front of the class, but I did kind of smile.