Here come the kids!
The Hilo March
No good deed
A former instructor blew the whistle on an English as a Second Language program that apparently tolerated substandard work and plagiarism from full-tuition-paying international students. The whistle-blower photocopied plagiarized student papers as evidence for her claims.
She “was charged by SUU police for misdemeanor theft of lost property on Monday, and barred from campus upon threat of arrest.”
Southern Utah is not to be confused with Utah Valley, where a professor lost his job after committing such offenses as asking (senior level) students questions in class “even when they didn’t raise their hands.”
r we getting dummer?
At the rate things are going, in three thousand years or so we’ll be a planet of imbeciles. Imbeciles without coffee. Enjoy life while you can, humans!
It helps that he has a model figure
72 year old Chinese grandpa models girls’ clothing for his granddaughter’s shop.
“Modeling for the store is helping my granddaughter and I have nothing to lose,” he said “I’m very old and all that I care about is to be happy.”
So I come to school with my shirt inside-out
…after going to my early morning community meeting, also with my shirt
inside-out. But the day was only starting. So I was in my office and I decided to take a break and read Gawker but just as I pulled the page up a student walked in to
ask about registering for a class, and when he left I realized that
this headline was prominently displayed on my 21 inch monitor.
I’m just going to make myself a cup of coffee and pretend that nothing
ever happened. And by make myself a cup of coffee I mean literally
become a cup of coffee so that when anyone comes looking for me
they’ll look in my office and say, “Nope, no one’s here, but someone
left a cup of coffee on the desk.”
Not usually a fan of rage comics, but I liked this illustration of linguistic differences.
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
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