Monday, November 23, 2009
Dante From Durango Gets All Up In the Homework Thing And Puts the Blame Where it Belongs, On Stupid Fucking Parents.
Anyone with good critical reading skills (which, unfortunately, excludes Sherri and Tom Milley) can see what's really going on in this buzz about ending homework. A few choice quotes should suffice to illumine things for the less perceptive:"Sherri and Tom Milley were exhausted by the weepy weeknight struggles over math problems and writing assignments with their three school-aged children. They were fed up with rushing home from soccer practice or speed skating only to stand over their kids tossing out answers so they could finish and get to bed."
"But after many long stressful nights of getting 18-year-old Jay through his high school homework, they weren't prepared to repeat history with Spencer, 11, and Brittany, 10. Being lawyers, she and her husband decided to make it official."
"For the Milleys, this means a school year that would make many homework-stricken parents envious: they are free to hang out as family without long division and English comprehension questions hanging over their heads."
"And there were plenty of frustrating nights, she said, when her kids were so tired, “we'd stand over them, saying, ‘write this, write that.' ” If that's what families are doing, she asked, “how do the teachers even know whose work they are marking?”
So who is this really about? That's right, dear readers, it's not about precious little snowflakes Spencer and Brittany, but self-centered Mommy and Daddy! Mommy and Daddy (who, in the course of their training as lawyers, have amassed more expertise in teaching than the trained professionals who instruct their children) think that soccer and speed skating are more important than drilling important facts and practicing freshly-acquired skills.
It would take far, far too long for these self-proclaimed experts to HELP their children with their homework (i.e., review the child's answers, then make them figure out where they went wrong), so why make little Brittany work through each step of her math homework when they could simply "toss out answers" and tell her to "write this, write that." In other words, these parents think their kids have too much homework largely because THEY'RE DOING ALL OF IT FOR THEM. I'd probably be overwhelmed myself if, after a full day of real work (not merely going to school, mind you), I had to sit down and do Algebra and Geography. But then, I'd do right by my children and teach them to solve things on their own; Daddy's not going to wipe their little butts for them their whole lives.
[I particularly savor the mother-lawyer's reasoning: "We help our children cheat by doing their homework for them, therefore the entire system is invalid." I can just imagine her arguments in court: "Your honor, since it is a known fact that guilty people have escaped punishment, the entire system is invalid. I demand that all charges against my client be dropped immediately."]
Naturally, THEY know what's best for their children- it would be foolish, if their children are having trouble finding time for their homework, to cut out their extracurriculars. No, no, it must be HOMEWORK that's to blame. I can only hope their children are struck down with some hideous disease- that'll show 'em:
"Well, Mr. and Mrs. Milley, I'd like to make a diagnosis and prescribe something, but I know that Mrs. Milley has spent 2 years 'collecting studies' from Web MD, so I'm certain that your dilettante-level of information easily trumps my years of medical training and experience. Just do whatever you think is best- maybe you can make a 'Differentiated Infection Plan' with the illness, so the symptoms only manifest when your children are at school- that way you won't have to actually take care of them when they're at home."
And for all the rest of you RYSers - you might think this is just a fluke, but this anti-homework thing is an entire movement, and they're perfectly willing to twist, manipulate and misrepresent the data (it's not surprising that the two parents mentioned in this article are lawyers) to achieve their goal.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Our Reviews! Our Reviews Are In!
Most of what you post here is complete shit. But I really enjoyed Paul from Providence's long posting on athletes and cheating.At my own Div I powerhouse, that kind of thing happens to this day, although mostly athletes end up in "football-friendly" classrooms with sycophantic (older and white men) faculty who get a little boner out of having a star RB or FS in their class.
But anyway, I don't like much of what is on this page, but that article was awfully damn good.
Do more like that.
A Quickie For Thurston From Beaker Ben.
Yes, Thurston, the videos are worthless. That's why they are free. Having conquered Econ 101, let's move on to history. You claim that you were published more often in the misty depths of time than you are now. Probably because I started sending in funny stuff a couple of years ago. RYS upped their game with better posts and your shit didn't make the cut. You were good enough for training camp but got cut. As they say on ESPN, welcome to the NFL.
Adrian from Aiken on Homework.
I felt compelled to respond to this article, even though I'm probably preaching to the choir, because I am probably one of the few regular readers who teaches high school children. I'm an ESL teacher overseas preparing the elite of a developing nation to be your future students in American universities.I always laugh when I hear the argument that teachers give homework because they're lazy. The real learning should happen in school. Otherwise you're wasting my taxpayer money!
I get 45 minutes a day with my students. That's nothing. That gives me exactly enough time to introduce a new vocab set or grammar form, practice it with them in a controlled context to make sure they have it, explain any nuances, and then give them some kind of real world context to practice it in.
I give homework because it makes kids repeat the information which helps them retain it. It also lets me evaluate each kid individually. (This is where my training in an ed program comes in handy--I learned that repetition is key to memory and that individual work is important to the learning process) In class I don't have time to ask for every answer from every kid. Homework gives me feedback from every one of your special little treasures so I can give them all that attention you want them to have. Not only that, but in class the kids help each other or some eager beaver shouts out the answer. At home, they should be doing the work themselves. Of course if the parents are just tossing the answers to them, I guess not so much. But if my students' parents are doing that, man do they have dumb parents.
And yes, I do think about which activities I do in class and which I give them for homework. See, I could give them dry boring worksheets in class. I would love to. Then I could come into class, hand out the worksheet, and sit down in peace and quiet. That would be almost as good as just watching a movie with them! But that would be a waste of their time and mine. The best way to use their time with a real-life breathing teacher is in explaining things, giving them feedback, and asking/answering questions. But look, if you want to pay me to sit on my ass and play with my iPod, I'm happy to do it.
And let me tell you, if I gave my kids homework to cut out things from catalogs and add up the prices, they would build a monument to me as the easiest teacher in the world!
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Poor Taste Award Of the Year.
Hey, fellow bio job seekers. Looks like there's a job open in Chicago! And I bet your office will have a new computer!
[+]
Columbia College professor charged with transporting child pornBY NATASHA KORECKI
from the Sun Times
A Columbia College professor with a Ph.D in molecular biology was ordered held in a federal lockup Thursday after he was charged with transporting child pornography.
Kevin G. Fuller, 41, of Oak Park was arrested Thursday afternoon, and federal investigators searched his home, allegedly recovering images on his computer of infants and prepubescent children engaged in sexually explicit activity. Upon his arrest, Fuller allegedly confessed to sending sexually explicit images of children, according to charges.
Fuller is listed as a professor in the Science and Mathematics department at Columbia College in Chicago.
Full article.
"Sometimes a Pipe Is Not A Pipe." Wicked Witchy From Wichita Writes, and We're Just Dank With Dew About It.
As an attractive, athletically built, meticulously dressed twenty-something, I feel both my (apparent) youth and my womanhood exposed whenever I step foot on campus. At this point, I don't even think twice before whipping out my faculty ID at the Registrar's for fear of being mistaken for a bubble-gum undergrad who thinks that she could submit a "Change of Grade" form without her professor's approval. I am no longer surprised when asked by an awkward 18-year-old on the first day of class whether it be my first time teaching since, evidently, six years of slaving away at Grungy College and seven years of grad school have not aged me at all, or given me the gravitas, fear, or just plain tact that my older, out-of-shape, color-blind, and shabbily-garbed male colleagues seem to inspire. Oh, and then there's the occasional flirtation, especially when this jock, the day after I had ripped him apart in an athletic report, finally realizes that his academic standing might affect his baseball scholarship and makes a feeble attempt at a joke, and we both smile and pretend that this might score him some extra credit. Don't get me wrong; I don't mind the backhanded ego-stroking. I've read _Dorian Grey_ enough times to have a visceral reaction at any mention of old age or ugliness. But it's not really consistent. I would not be so resentful if all three of my hard-earned hot-chili peppers had not been not'ed and replaced with acute observations about how sadistic I was with my sharp red pen. I would much rather see a comment about the length of my skirt or the girth of my biceps or the flatness of my abs, because then I would know that at least someone is paying attention. Or at least include something kinky and, preferably, with a whip. I am thinking of patenting a new Pink line of dress pants with "Sexy Teach" written across the ass or mid-riff blouses with "I give As for chili peppers" across the rack. I also had the cunning plan of showing a tattoo saying "Get it here," but that might be a little unprofessional, and besides, the allusion would be totally lost on them.
I'm obviously not at all bitter about it. But this time it's not really about me--or, at least, I really, really, really hope it's not about me. I cannot help wondering if, despite my out-of-campus dirty mind and despite all that rubbish about flattery and long legs, and because of the age and the schooling and the slaving, I have become really conservative...?
When I read the first batch of papers this semester about the Chinese _Book of Songs_, I was speechless. No; I laughed, cried, and only then did I hit aphasia. I couldn't even write about it to RYS at the time, but made copies of the most piquant of those specimens in case I ever felt the urge. Tonight, another student paper, this time on Catullus--who actually does deserve an erotic beating, I mean, reading--finally broke the silence. This one was in reference to the wonderfully descriptive word "cocksmen" (all 300+ of whom were, post break-up, banging Lesbia back in Rome) in a raunchy Catullan invective against his beloved; this guy wrote, in a strike of pure analytical genius, that it "means something that is in the line of a man who is well endowed and is equally blessed with the sexual skills to accompany his impressive appendage." Who knew that the term needed a definition, let alone a whole paragraph.
Rousseau connected writing with onanism, "the dangerous supplement"; both involve the summoning of an absent image whose contours, now made present through memory, one can etch out. And drool over. And otherwise get wet. No, no; I didn't immediately think of this particular student's summoning my image as he carefully weighed those family jewels (though that would be flattering, and I was, after all, the reason for his reading about cocksmen in the first place), but somehow he nailed it with the "appendage." I mean, hit it right on the head. Ah forget it.
Once the ball got rolling, I couldn't stop imagining my students as creepy onanists thinking with the wrong part of their body because, really, that would be the only way to explain the crazy shit they manage to think up. "Many believe that modern associations with sex stem all the way back to ancient times," one young woman doth protest too much, and, without any manifest evidence of a (however underdeveloped) superego, I have no reason not to assume that her paper is, like myths were for the ancients in Freud's interpretation, key to her apparently unrepressed psyche. "There is proof in Poem 4 that sexuality was very 'out in the open' during Chou Dynasty. The narrator is a woman who speaks of a man lasciviously and explicitly talks about their sexual encounter out in the open. The line 'the dew makes wet as rain' symbolizes not only the place where the act is taking place, but the state of the sexual organs involved. The narrator also says that she met 'by chance' her lover, making it more than clear that she was having casual sex and enjoying it. The tone of the poem is both lustful and joyous, given the narrator seems pleased with her sexual encounter and ends the poem with the words 'mutual felicity'. Not shockingly both stanzas in the poem climax with a synonym for happiness, 'felicity' and 'joy'." Climax, right. Morning dew is obviously always a euphemism for semen; after all, doesn't it symbolize the ejaculation of a male sky-god all over an innocent female earth? Besides, it is, as my burgeoning Sinologist points out, spoken about "explicitly." But wait; there's more: it paints a wonderful picture of ancient Chinese Woodstock: "This gives the idea that women during Chou Dynasty enjoyed a large amount of freedom in terms of sex."
I'm no specialist here, and, as someone who has spent both her entire academic career studying Western classics, I feel immensely underprepared to teach this stuff (though that is a matter for another verbal outpouring altogether), but I am just not so sure that women during the Chou Dynasty were not only fucking strangers in a wet field all night long but also survived to write about it. Explicitly. Please, somebody, enlighten me! This woman claims that she got her shit online. Written by whom? An opium-eating-sex-crazed moron whose presentist cabin fever led him to (re)imagine the exotic Oriental woman as a downright whore?!
Still, maybe I am the close-minded idiot. Maybe I don't know history. Maybe, after years of interpreting texts and reading queer theory, I am still too normative and just too plain dumb to see that a pipe is sometimes not just a pipe. Maybe my other student, a very quiet young man of Chinese origin might know better. (And yes, I know all about "native informants," and I am too smart to assume any prior knowledge among my students, though also too naive not to expect them to care enough about the material to study it carefully on the off-chance that it might make them learn something about their own culture.) "Throughout the entire poem, the poem stays consistent with happiness because of the speaker's spontaneous encounter with a man. It can be assumed that the speaker is female based on the imagery used to depict eroticism. The setting is in the middle of the night." So far so good, I guess. I even forget that both of my classes thought "to court" meant "to have intercourse with." Everything is about sex, right? But why am I so bothered (baffled? hysterical?) when I read that "[t]he [female] speaker uses a metaphor to express the woman's vagina: 'Mid the bind-grass on the plain / that the dew makes wet as rain"; or, that " [e]rotically thinking, it is easy to imagine the plain as a woman's vagina. Bind-grass is a type of flower, and flowers are a sign for women. The speaker became happy when she met a keen men by chance. The 'wild grass dank with dew' can be metaphorically represented as wet pubic hair, hinting that the speaker and the man engaged in intercourse throughout the whole night." Poem 7, of the same pornographic _Book of Songs_, traditionally said to have been edited by horny old dude Confucius, is read in a similar light with yearning represented by the girl's gift--a red flute--which, obviously, represents an "erect penis," because the Chou Dynasty was so incredibly (un)repressed that every single word they uttered must have been a euphemism. Or, perhaps, it was Arthur Waley, translator and renowned Sinologist, who was so incredibly (un)repressed? Fuck. I am now really tempted to read his influential translation of the _Monkey_ (also Journey to the West), since, having reread my students' comments and reevaluated my theoretical blindness, I am sure this book must be a pretty saucy tale of bestiality; in fact, I might have to spank one myself when I finally get my hands on it.
And this is the crazy shit I think up while grading my students' work. Erotically thinking, thank god I don't have to write a paper about it.
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