Internet dating. It’s like being a kid in a candy store. A candy store full of poisonous snakes.
Fake profile of horrible person attracts swarms of suitors. (However: She’s cute). Any evolutionary psychologists want to weigh in on how it’s time for the human race to die out already?
“It’s riddled with typos. This girl clearly lacks the ability to read and write. In the opening paragraph, she kind of quotes Katy Perry and says her passions are krumping and interpretive dance … but as long as you love chili and art you’re golden! She also makes an off-handed racist comment. She then describes what she’s doing with her life in the most vague way possible, only sharing a horribly offensive 9/11 joke and that she posted on a picture of Willy Wonka. Then you get to what she’s really good at and she says iPods. What does that mean?? How are you good at iPods?”
Coffee makes us happy
A study from Ruhr University in Germany, finds that “caffeine enhances the neural processing of positive words, but not those with neutral or negative associations.”
It takes about 200 mg of caffeine, or 2-3 cups of coffee, to get those rose-colored glasses onto your brain.
Grades and ethics
Jane Robbins at Inside Higher Ed asks, Is Grade Integrity a Fairness Issue?
“It seems that when we stop looking at our own (internal) interests for raising grades [getting better evaluations, making our students look good to employers, avoiding fights with parents and grade appeals from students] it becomes harder to justify grade inflation because the benefits to us become a cost to others. If we lower the bar so that our students are in a more competitive position, does that make it unfair to those who earned the higher grades, or who went to schools that maintain higher standards? To employers who can no longer rely on us for an authentic—fair—representation of relative student achievement? To funders or policymakers who want graduates not merely in name? To students who will be left with an unrealistic sense of accomplishment, an arrogant sense of entitlement, or both, which may be a barrier to them in the future? To faculty themselves, who may feel coerced by the pressures to be lenient?”
I agree with her. I also have to say that it’s hard to uphold fair grading where every institutional incentive is designed to push you to grade leniently. These incentives include student evaluations, rewards for spending time on research rather than teaching and grading, hectoring calls from the Student Retention Office when one of their charges falls behind in your class, wanting to give a student a passing grade just so you don’t have to see him again in your class, and not wanting to get run over in the parking lot by that student who believes that his sheer genius entitles him to an A.
I try to grade fairly, and I have also borne the costs of doing this (and I am not kidding about that getting run down in the parking lot thing).
What do you think? When do you give up and bump the grade up? When do you hold firm?
eBay’s War on Spelling
I hate when that happens.
Go to eBay. Search clown doll.
Let the nightmares commence.
“If you don’t have enough jobs….you cannot train your way to victory.”
But training displaced workers doesn’t make jobs magically appear; not only that, the time spent retraining may have been better spent looking for employment:
“What is more surprising — because no one else has looked at this question lately anywhere in the country — is that the laid-off people around Janesville who went to Blackhawk [Technical College] are faring worse than their laid-off neighbors who did not.”
The Next Big Thing
As a New York City public school teacher, I’ve been attending meetings for almost three decades. There’s always an urgent problem that absolutely cannot wait.
Students need more test prep. Students need less test prep.
Teachers must stand. Teachers must not read aloud. Teachers must sit in rocking chairs and read aloud.
Students must do all writing in class. Students must do all writing at home.
Whatever the Thing is, we must do it immediately.
Frankie Bow’s first novel, THE MUSUBI MURDER , is available at Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes.
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Aaaaaaauuuuuugh! (Or, if you prefer, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!)
From Discover Magazine online: “Their research is already yielding surprising results. Pace’s studies of residential showers have raised serious concerns that showerheads may act as delivery vehicles for bacteria that cause pulmonary disease. Dunn’s microbial transects of the American house are turning up shocking similarities between the ecosystem of your pillow and that of your toilet (see “Mapping the Home’s Microbe Habitats,” page 5). And you don’t even want to know what is turning up in detailed analyses of public bathrooms.”
I am going to dip my entire house in boiling bleach now, starting with my pillowcase .
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