I have a bad student and I’m not sure what to do. When I say “bad,” I mean “absolutely unprepared and incapable.” In the course I’m teaching, quantum mechanics, it is expected that you are coming in with proficiency in basic calculus, and things like trigonometry and algebra are absolutely second nature. It’s a highly mathematical subject, there’s no way around that.
Unfortunately, this kid, who is a senior, hasn’t got a clue. 8th grade algebra is a challenge, trigonometry is an enigma, and calculus is a distant dream. Nonetheless, he persisted. And of course is getting none of the material. I’ve had talk after talk with him, and he persists in his delusions of adequacy. To try to put a point to it, I had him up to the board to do a simple calculation (for geeks, it was “normalize the wavefunctions for the particle in a 1-D box model”) which should take an average student about 5 minutes. He was there for the whole class period, flailing away, drawing random brackets around the equations I put up, mumbling about the math courses he’s passed, and whining about the advanced math I’m making them do. At the end, he was no farther than when he started.
This did not give him the message.
I gave an exam. He scored 5/100, and even that was an act of mercy. More talking to him. More hitting a blank wall. My wonder at this point was, maybe I’m just a shitty teacher? So I talked to the other profs. “Yeah, he’s… not very well equipped, mentally.”
“You mean he’s stupid?”
“Mmm, possibly, but more like intellectually lazy, never bothered learning the basics, just skated through. Nobody can get him to understand the material.”
“So how did he get past all the courses up to now? And how did he end up in quantum mechanics?”
“Well, he needs that class and thermodynamics (OMWC: which I teach next semester) to graduate. We told him that he wasn’t ready for those classes but he just sort of bulldozed his way into registering for them since they were graduation requirements.”
“But he’s now in his 4th year. And everyone seems to know that he hasn’t got even an elementary proficiency in math, physics, chemistry, and engineering.”
Uncomfortable looks passed between the profs, Progs to the man. “Well… he’s a (checkbox) so we can’t really fail him.” Followed by stories of plum internships and awards he’s won, passing over some actual smart and hard-working kids.
And this is all OK.
So since I can’t convince him to drop the course (“I need this to graduate this year”), I need to choose: fail the kid and start a massive uproar about discrimination and delay his departure by a year, quietly pass him and make him someone else’s problem, or a creative option I haven’t thought of yet.
Other things that are all OK are birthdays, which today include a guy who spawned generations of talented substance abusers; the poor man’s Jules Verne; the poor man’s Richard Wagner; a guy who taught generations of kids that violence is hilarious; a guy who kept his emotions bottled up; a terrible voice which somehow was perfect; a terrible voice which somehow was even more terrible; the poor man’s Carl Kasell; the best part of Candid Camera; the guy who left more than one baggie of coke in the White House; a guy who has written perhaps two good books and one good movie but unfortunately has written dozens of books and movies; one of the very few near-guarantees that a movie will be good; a guy who wasn’t as good as Trump in picking his enemies; another near-guarantee that a movie will be great; a radio guy whom you can always count on to yell idiotic things as his signature; an actress who in real life will never be First Lady; and one of the numerous Obama retreads still pulling the strings- badly.
We can choose Links, if we like.
“There is a diplomatic path.” Which is French for, “Surrender, you Jews are inconvenient.”
Every hotel I stay at seems to be owned by a Patel. This closes the circle.
One more where I hate everybody involved.
He is shocked, SHOCKED. No-one else is.
When your band covers shit like this, you are far better than the Old Man ever dreamed of being.
What profession is he going to enter? If he’s going to be in a role where his incompetence has a chance of causing actual harm, fail him. Otherwise, also fail him… but you know, that’s up to you.
Forward his resume to Boeing.
This.
Fail the kid.
Seconded.
Force the issue.
You know, on further contemplation, I come out even more strongly in favor of failing the kid. And Solzhenitsyn explains why in Live Not By Lies:
We needn’t necessarily martyr ourselves in a one-man revolt. But don’t accede to untruth.
At the end of the day you have to live with yourself.
An honest man’s pillow is his piece of mind.
Ask one of your NPR ladies what they would do. Except disguise the kid’s victimhood …say the kid wears a MAGA hat to class or has a “Don’t tread on me” sticker on his backpack. I think you’ll get the right answer to your dilemma.
Discrimination? Is he a POC? A QWERTY?
Not failing somebody who didn’t learn the material is a disservice to everybody from the ignorant student to their classmates, to the potential future employers, to the general public, to the university itself. While I have no sympathy for the university, No good comes of passing a lie.
Document all of the basics he could not do and present them when the inevitable whining comes along. If he’s getting 5% on exams there is no way to interpret that as deserving to be there, let alone passing.
Yes. Fail him so hard that he bounces.
Happy birthday Timothy Leary?
Happy birthday Michael Crichton?
Steven King?
That was the correct guess.
Crichton was my guess.
That was my guess as well
or a creative option I haven’t thought of yet.
Make the final exam an experiment that will kill whoever performs it. Everybody else recognizes this and refuses to do the experiment, thereby passing the test.
Also, this claims New York is a one-party consent state for recording, so do secret tapings of the other profs saying they only passed him because demographic check-box.
Well, that would end OMWC’s career. Even if legal under NY law, it might violate university policy. No other faculty would want to interact with him. The university would find pretext to fire or rubber-room him. And nothing would change except for that one person.
It’s the societal implications of this are scary: Imagine being treated by an incompetent (checkbox) MDs who couldn’t cold pass a freshman biology exam, driving over a bridge designed by an incompetent (checkbox) engineer, etc. We know that the societal response will be “institutional racism.” Nobody wants to bell the cat, as it were.
We are so fucked.
“Nobody wants to bell the cat”
that will make it easier for the Haitians to find it.
You say this as if it’s a bad thing.
It was, of course, not entirely serious.
The First Commandment of Academia is “Thou Shalt Not Flunk The ___s”.
So they are never flunked. I’m surprised you are surprised.
It will also lead to more racism. Trying to find a doctor? Well the guy who looks like X had to study and bust his ass through med school. The others, well, you’re rolling the dice.
Mrs. Suthenboy used to push me quite a bit to teach.
No thanks.
1. Push these two half-spheres of enriched uranium together.
Not a fluorine sniff test?
*I watched a kid in inorganic lab sniff the chlorine gas out of a test tube…deliberately…after being told countless times about lab safety and specifically handling chlorine. I never saw him again. I wonder what ever happened to him.
Quit?
Seriously… I don’t know how you stand that environment.
Oof. Had that in high school. Lost most of it. I even have one or two “math for programmers” books. I should crack one of them open. Because I really liked math for a while there.
As we approach the one year anniversary of the region being at war on account of some wayward youths doing some silly things at some kibbutzim near some disputed boundary or something.
All of the blah blah blah. Whatever. They should all shut the fuck up. The time for gibberish ended Oct. 7 last year.
Escalation will end when Hamas surrenders unconditionally.
Dead people tend to do that. Hamas, their masters, funders, planners and supporters as well. What is going on there is absolute undiluted evil and should be stamped out, burned to ash and their lands salted.
https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1837440358130561498?t=mz1l7UC4BJT786E_HR4wUA&s=19
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/israels-competence-penalty/
See also https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/hezbollah-history-lesson/ and https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/hezbollah-has-fired-8000-rockets-at-israel-since-october-7/
Guess I had 1 too many links in my last post – awaiting moderation. BTW…for quotes…what is the method for keeping line breaks/paragraph breaks in place?
“As we approach the one year anniversary of the region being at war on account of some wayward youths doing some silly things at some kibbutzim near some disputed boundary or something.”
One year? It’s been about 80 years.
OMWC, if your student can read this, he’s lucky. My tenure as a Student Teacher reminded me too much of my own public (government) school experiences. I never had any class…
I guess he may have been a high school football player, NTTAWWT but so was Gerald Ford
So was John Urschel and I’d give a few vital organs to have someone like him in my class.
Against the death penalty…bingo. I am not against it. I just cant think of anyone qualified to dispense it, the state being first on that list.
The more that the power to speak is disseminated to the population of humans the more some of them attack it. While seeing it in the rest of the world is not surprising to me this horseshit has to come to an end in the US.
—“I just cant think of anyone qualified to dispense it, the state being first on that list.”—
Philosophically, I have no objection to the death penalty. Practically, I am opposed to it until there is some way to be SURE. I arrived at this position as a result of the Timothy McVeigh case. I do not doubt that he was guilty and deserved the death penalty. But at the last minute, boxes of evidence that should have been turned over to the defense were found (within days of scheduled execution) to have been withheld. None of the evidence was in any way exculpatory, but that is not the point.
It got me thinking. With the hundreds of agents and lawyers involved, they couldn’t get it right. What chance does some Schmo have in that situation? The average defendant can get steamrollered and without access to the many lawyers McVeigh had, they would be screwed.
McVeigh’s express lane from conviction to execution did a lot to feed the conspiracy theories surrounding the bombing. It was almost as if the whole thing was a foregone conclusion from the moment he got pulled over in the Mercury Marquis.
As I like to joke, even Marisa Tomei knows they have to hand over that evidence to defense counsel.
Philosophically, I have no objection to the death penalty. Practically, I am opposed to it until there is some way to be SURE.
My idea: If a prosecutor wants to have the death penalty considered at sentencing, he says so during discovery. This raises the burden of proof the jury must consider when reaching a verdict. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” is no longer sufficient. You need something like irrefutable proof. A video of the crime happening clearly showing the defendant. Undeniable DNA evidence. Something like that.
The tradeoff for seeking the death penalty is that, should the jury fail to convict, then the defendant is acquitted. No bargaining for lesser charges during the trial or lowering the burden of proof once the trial begins.
I would think prosecutors will only seek the death penalty rarely, which would at least increase the chances of only the guilty being ended.
The trouble with being sure is that those cases allow the not so sure cases to continue. Politics plays into it too much. It should be done away with entirely.
If I surprise some blood soaked fiend in the midst of dead babies while it is taking a bite out of a half eaten one I am probably going to shoot him. I suppose that makes me a hypocrite. Oh well.
It should be done away with entirely.
Then what do you do with all the Lifers Without Parole? Stick them in genpop with people you hope to rehabilitate? GLWT. You get a bunch of people who know they’re never going to leave prison fucking up the chances of people who actually might want to return to society.
My father was a corrections officer for a bit over 20 years. The inmates who weren’t ever leaving prison had all the time in the world to file frivolous lawsuits, attack guards with anything not nailed down, provoke fights with (or just flat out murder) other inmates — the outcomes of which only negatively affected the people with finite sentences — after all, you can’t stay in prison longer than forever. What incentive is there for lifers to not be fuckheads?
Then what do you do with all the Lifers Without Parole?
They get their own special prison. The STUPIDEST thing we have ever done in this country in terms of correctional institutions is the one-size-fits-all genpop you mention. First-timers should all be in first-timer-only prison. Same with second-timers. But that’s your last shot at rehabilitation – your next stop is one that says you refuse to learn.
—“It should be done away with entirely.”—
If I may make a proposal: Moratorium (say 10 years) on enforcing the death penalty, no to be confused with not sentencing anybody to death. If, during that moratorium, one person is falsely convicted for any crime, the clock starts over. With such power in their hands, the courts have to prove they can handle the power responsibly.
I feel like i can comment on this.
FTR wife has been arrested and charged with two felonies by the indian nation court system.
It took 3 months to schedule a hearing on dismissing these charges.
The lead prosecutor wrote a brief of three pages. In it he got lots of stuff wrong, almost deliberately so. IF he had looked at the police video he would have to have known this. He could not recall how many misdemeanors were charged against her. He simelatously said that discovery was complete, but expected more circumstantial evidence.
They want to have a trial for her in November of this year. They have 2 weeks of court time, 4 weeks of work even before my wife’s case. My wife cannot understand how the prosecutor can lie to the judge so easily.
I think i am against the death penalty because the prosecutors have to much power but no responsibility.
prosecutors have to much power but no responsibility
Prosecutors should always be liable for the same punishment they are seeking on the accused. That would end the death penalty right there.
I am not opposed to the death penalty in principle. If you don’t trust the legal system to get it right, so you’re opposed to it on those grounds, then do you trust the state to administer any criminal penalty? The decades somebody spends locked in prison are just as unrecoverable as the death penalty. Locking someone up for life-no-parole is just the death penalty in slow motion.
There’s no good options when it comes to dealing with criminals. The death penalty is on my list of good-enough options. The legal system administering it seems to be the real problem. That will never be perfect, either, of course, so the question becomes – is it good enough?
—” The legal system administering it seems to be the real problem. That will never be perfect, either, of course, so the question becomes – is it good enough?”—
A conundrum. To me, there is a difference between putting somebody in prison or executing them. There are many instances that somebody needs to be removed from society (temporarily or permanently). I understand that some may be falsely imprisoned and will never get the time back, but as usual in our society, they can be compensated. Not a perfect solution I admit. If an innocent person is executed, that is final and there is no way to compensate for that.
But with all of that said, I believe that there are individuals who have torn up their membership card in humanity and need to be dealt with. People who are obviously guilty of heinous crimes and even confess to them. I just don’t trust the current system to accurately sort these people out.
Because nobody ever noticed that American Jews break 70+% for Democrats before.
There is an article somewhere linked recently entitled ‘Why smart people believe stupid things’.
C’mon, man…Gimme a break…
In a nutshell: Being smart their reasoning and articulation skills allow them to convince themselves that what they want to believe is true is indeed true. It is nearly impossible to talk that person back to reason.
Dunning-Krueger
Research supports the idea:
I’m about halfway through
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind
“Being smart their reasoning and articulation skills allow them to convince themselves that what they want to believe is true is indeed true”
That’s basically everyone.
slumbrew: Yes, but with the cognitively impaired the reasoning is very clearly flawed..i.e. obvious idiocy.
With the cognitively sophisticated they can often nearly convince you.
I particularly like this sentence: “The so-called bias blind spot arises when people report that thinking biases are more prevalent in others than in themselves.
Fourscore: Yes, Dunning-Krueger
King Crimson video…I have seen that location before. Under the Rocks I think?
I think the death penalty should be used very judiciously, preferably only in cases with overwhelming evidence of guilt. But by the same token, goddamn near every death penalty case in my lifetime has been heralded with splashy headlines proclaiming the innocence of the accused. So either our justice system is even worse than I ever thought, and we nearly exclusively put to death innocent people, or the lawyers for a lot of death row inmates coming up on doomsday do a media gish gallop in a last ditch effort to save their clients’ lives.
What amazes me is that this one ISN’T apparently a contrived lawyer argument. No forensic evidence. None. Conviction based on testimony of an alleged accomplice who was incentivized (and that was hidden from the jury). And the testimony was recanted.
So of course the State killed him.
Still not as bad as the case documented in The Thin Blue Line.
This one does seem particularly egregious.
Momentum is a hell of a thing.
https://knowledgeofsea.com/stopping-distance-turning-circle-ships-manoeuvring/
There is a reason that some drunken fool 2500 years ago used the phrase ‘ship of state’ and its sister metaphor ‘ship of fools’.
Saint George Floyd of the spotless reputation.
We have an ongoing one in TX right now (Rodney Reed) that underscores how craptastic the legal system can be. Without going into specifics, prosecutors who hide evidence should face the same penalties as the accused.
Amazingly, they’re making a racial case out of it. 🙄
“This is why I am anti-capital punishment”
Capitol punishment could be administered by the ballot box but never seems to be.
I would put the decision, and execution, in the hands of surviving family. But please god not a popularity contest.
Oddly enough, Chuck Pahalinuk had to do that with his fathers murderer.
Fail the kid.
I have observed over the past year, both as faculty and as a student, that academic standards are much lower than they were 30 years ago. This has to change.
I failed 2 kids who were similarly incapable. Administration was supportive, and there weren’t any consequences to me. YRMV. Also failed a couple for brazenly cheating on the final exam, which got them removed from the program. All told, a quarter of the class.
Did the kids you failed tick the right (wrong) demographic checkboxes?
They were diverse.
I see the same thing and it’s not just nostalgia. Last semester when I taught statistical mechanics, I was warned that the students’ math was weak. But there was one student that the other profs praised to the skies. “He’s great at it, he’ll be two steps ahead of you, his math skills are superb.”
And indeed, he was better than the rest, but… in the stat mech course I took as an undergrad, he would have been in about the middle of the pack. And this was at a public college branch campus, not an expensive private liberal arts university.
In all seriousness, I think the two years we stole from them in a panic about a disease that barely affected that demographic absolutely destroyed their brains.
The dumbing down was on a long, long trend – the COVID panic just accentuated that.
This doesn’t surprise me. I am shocked and appalled at how few books my kids are required to read in school, and that it’s taken for granted that most kids will be listening to the audio book. I have a senior who’s got very high grades and has never had to write a paper longer than 4 pages. The school allows retakes on all tests and your scores are averaged with the original test. Most classes don’t administer a final exam and if they do it doesn’t count for much.
I had none of this. We were reading 2 books at all times for school, had long papers due on a regular basis, 10 pagers with footnotes etc due 1-2 times a year, missed homework got a zero, no test retakes, and the final was 25% of your grade – equal to a full cardmarking.
Now, I get the emphasis on learning the material over focusing on busy work or allowing one bad test to slag your grade, but don’t tell me a kid with a 3.8 today is the same as it was when I was in school.
Pioneer is right. The damage that passing this kid will do the institution is much higher than the damage that will occur when the protests come. They will pass, as most people have the brains (HA!) to see there is a reason for the failure.
That said, you need all of your cucks in a row before starting on this path.
Music is good. I had a girlfriend back in the day who was a dancer, and she did a couple routines to that song.
In addition, all the other students would know. They busted their ass(es) and see the academic class clown getting a similar reward.
Are the exams blind-graded? It’d be hard to argue with you if he fails the exams.
They’re not, but OTOH, the nice thing about courses like this is that there’s no subjectivity- you either calculate the energy correctly or you don’t, your wavefunction is normalized or it isn’t, the electronic distribution matches what happens in the atom or it doesn’t.
Reality is an oppressive concept isn’t it?
I look over my father’s transcripts. He got a bachelors of metallurgy from Rolla school of mines in 1965. Looking at those transcripts today he would be called ‘Doctor’ in chemistry, physics or any of the various earth sciences. The difference in standards was very striking to me.
I imagine standards were higher before everyone “had” to go to college.
The difference is, though, not that the courses are harder, but for that doctorate, you have to do original research and defend it. So Masters at best.
That said, even the original research part has been degraded, not because of the schools but because of the ongoing pernicious influence of the government pretty much taking over academic science via dependence on government grants, professional organizations, and Federal DEI requirements.
He asked his father for life advice and his father said “YOU ARE GOING TO COLLEGE”.
It wasn’t the prevailing opinion at that time like now but my grandfather was a different breed. He was born in ’87 on a family farm. When he was 18 he hitchhiked from Catahoula parish to Baton Rouge by himself to attend LSU and became a successful civil engineer.
Let me put it this way: What today takes 15 minutes by car, Manifest, La to Jonesville, La in 1905 was an exhausting all day trip – before sunup to after sundown.
Ride a mule for hours from Manifest to Rhinehart. Hitch a ride on the train which went walking speed to Jonesville. The train stopped every time some hayseed stepped out of the bushes and waved it down for a ride. Also keep a few pennies in your pocket for the robbers that inevitably stopped the train near French Fork. “They got you coming’ and going’ as he put it.
For an 18 yo to make the trip from Manifest to Baton Rouge in those days was quite a feat. He was determined to escape the life of a serf bound to the land and he wasn’t going to see his son return to it.
My father went to college.
He did…he perfected some combination of the cyanide/gold concentration with the arsenic/gold extraction process. I guess until about 1980 if yo u wanted to build one of those concentrators you called him.
Amazing is how quickly ‘world experts’ in obscure things like that become yesterday’s news.
even the original research part has been degraded
I’ll disagree in part. Publish or perish has nothing to do with govt funding. The development of trivial academic fields is also a product of multiple factors, govt funding being a very small one.
Selection for competence was abandoned in education long before DEI was ever dreamed up.
JI, I beg to disagree. A huge part of funding decisions is tied up in publication record and metrics like h-index and other similar constructs. The other end of it is the pet interests of grant officers leavened by the interests of the funding agency to expand government power. If my proposal is to show the massive threat of PFAS and the need for government action, that can get funded; if my proposal is to show that it’s not a significant risk and we need to move on, funding opportunities are zero.
And as any of us in the grant game know, all outcomes are pre-determined. One of the big lies is that “this agency wants to fund high risk high payoff research.” Only the latter is true.
OM, no disagreement about the dysfunction that govt funding produces. And fair enough, the warning about this (with science in particular) goes back to Eisenhower.
Naturally the bureaucracy funds research that serves the bureaucracy. The problem has less to do with the dollars than with the bureaucracy in the first place.
None of that goes to the two things that outside of science research (and its funding) – first the specious fields and second the [more recent] administrative bloat.
I thought it was obvious and accepted that Netanyahu is trying to start a major regional war and pull in the U.S. Iran and Hezbollah aren’t cooperating because the neo-cons are impatient and are trying to start wars with Russia and China. So they’re waiting until we’re committed elsewhere.
Netanyahu’s other problem is that his ruling coalition breaks up the moment peace breaks out. At that point he’s facing jail time for corruption.
Meh, Bibi’s always under a cloud of indictment. The Israeli left hates him as much as the American left hates Trump.
Yeah, it’s hard to find neutral information about the nature of the corruption charges.
It’s possible he’s extra-corrupt by political standards; after all, one of the previous PMs (Olmert, IIRC) was found guilty on corruption charges. But all the coverage comes across as about as informative as coverage of Trump.
You really need to read some less unhinged opinions.
Why would Hezbollah be the one and only of the Iranian proxies not stepping up actions against Israel? It’s really irritated me the last several months how many people have taken the opinion of “fuck international shipping lanes so I can get a Pyrrhic victory over the Western foreign policy establishment”.
I was under the impression that Hezbollah was already at war with Israel. You know, lobbing rockets across the border?
Hasn’t the regional war of Israel v Iran/proxies been going on for quite awhile now? I don’t see how Netanyahu is starting anything.
He’s just a fashionable boogieman.
Just saw a Kamala ad informing me that Donald wants to put women back in chains.
She really is a piece of work.
I would settle for back in the kitchen.
Not for nothing, but when were women placed in chains, and when were the chains removed? Biden may be senile, but at least when he delivered the same line it was vaguely related to the institution of chattel slavery.
Oh she used different words but it boils down to the same thing.
Can we get more details on that plan? I’m intrigued.
As long as the women all get gold bikinis with the chains.
On the surface, I like this, but as I look outside, there are a lot of women I don’t want to see in gold bikinis.
Adam Corolla had a bit he used to do saying that if this country really wants to solve its weight problem, we need swimsuit Fridays instead of casual Fridays. Every other week, you had to come to work in a swimsuit. No exceptions.
You’d have the obesity epidemic licked in about a year.
Wow.
I don’t remember reading about those times.
Fuck that. I’m still waiting for my handmaid from the first Trump administration.
I had “Tom Waits” but yours works too.
Heh. I stayed at a Best Western in NYC a few weeks ago that was literally the worst hotel experience I have ever had.
The Indians running the place were super nice but one of them really needed to stop showering in Axe every day.
“‘to stop showering in Axe every day.”
You don’t want to know what he smelled like without it.
Many years ago I stopped at a motel in Van Horn TX. As soon as I opened the door to the lobby/registration, I knew. The smell of curry can not be disguised, the room, however, was fine.
Words fail. I *think* he has no shot at the prize he wants, if only because he probably can’t be controlled by the Obama blob.
But my goodness, he is evil.
Babylon Bee already called Newsom out and he has no intention of challenging them in court, where he would be crushed. Instead he’ll thrill the pack of zombies that hate on Musk.
Ok, it’s been fun but back to the salt mines for me now.
Have a great day! We’re dropping my kid off at the airport this morning. It was a really nice visit.
Me too. It’s been fun reading the comments today.
” I need to choose: fail the kid and start a massive uproar about discrimination and delay his departure by a year, quietly pass him and make him someone else’s problem, or a creative option I haven’t thought of yet.”
You have an actual moral duty to fail him is you think he may ever be put in a position to affect someone else. Which he probably will (chemical engineering major?).
UCS – watching the Bricky/Poorhammer Space Marine 2 stream – it sounds like they recommend controller over keyboard without exception.
Pioneer is right. The damage that passing this kid will do the institution is much higher than the damage that will occur when the protests come. They will pass, as most people have the brains (HA!) to see there is a reason for the failure.
This. You should forward that opening exposition, as written, to each member of the Board of Trustees.
Then… learn to
codecook.At best he’ll be swiftly promoted out of harms way and be a hated, incompetent manager.
A triumph of diversity!
FWIW: in some ways I have less of a problem failing seniors than freshmen. Without going into all the ins and outs, as people have noted above, most freshmen are in so many ways, not just academically, unprepared for college. For a senior, you’ve had four years to figure this out.
Institutions are also causing their own problems. Where I teach, there’s a lot of scrutiny on the percentage of students who either withdraw or fail their intro Gen Ed classes. But, the scrutiny is on the instructors. If those fail/withdraw rates are too high (nebulous term), then the question is “how do you plan to change your approach to teaching the class” never, “hmm, maybe our incoming students aren’t adequately prepared.”
I don’t know OWMC’s actual position there but it seems to me he’s the equivalent of an adjunct. At most schools, you don’t even have to fire adjuncts, you just “don’t have any courses for you next semester.”
I’m an assistant professor, “visiting,” which is not tenured but also not adjunct. Contract basis, so if they have no courses, they still have to pay me. My contract is up at the end of this academic year and at that point, I’ll try to go back to my old research position and never deal with classroom teaching again.
Ahh, ok, my mistake.
From a few more links yesterday – sounds like no season 2 of My Lady Jane for MLW to critique 🙁 Hilarious to see GRRM complaining about it.
Been wanting a custom gaming cabinet for decades but never got around to it. A legacy NeoGeo cabinet might still be an interesting option since they had the easily swappable cartridges and even the original cabinets sometimes had 4 or more game slots in the motherboards. I definitely need to get off my ass and get the little mini-sega genesis and mini-neogeo tv consoles to go with my mini-snes classic.
OMWC – definitely need to flunk the guy. It may be the only time he brushes against reality his entire time at college – could be a real eye-opener in a good way.
I did AP Calc in HS (got a 3), did Calc 1 my first semester in college. Didn’t need another math class really…but was still planning on an econ degree so I tried Calc 2…that wound up being my only flunked class ever. Disappointingly the first exam was right after the drop/add date (and I was already a little short on total credits for the semester) – I thought I had been doing alright based on the homework, but the exam proved me wrong. Recovered after my freshman year, but definitely hurt my overall GPA – not that it stopped me from a military career – other than the Air Force officer’s application…who GAF about college GPA for an officer application if you’re prior service with a valid security clearance, etc….?
I flunked a few classes of my own in college. In retrospect, it was obvious that I was choosing the wrong classes (hell, the wrong major(s)).
OTOH it was the late 80s and I am not diverse, so… no sweat off their backs.
No shame
A fired-up Vice President Kamala Harris adopted a rapid-response mentality to seize on the key issue of abortion rights this week.
Referring to people behind abortion bans as “these hypocrites,” she argued at a hastily arranged campaign event in Atlanta that some US communities now dealing with abortion bans have for years been neglected on the subject of maternal care. “Where ya been?” she asked.
The pivot to an intense focus on abortion rights evolved over the course of the week after the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica published a report on two Georgia women who died as a result of delayed medical care linked to the state’s abortion ban.
By Thursday, the mother of one of the women was in the audience of an event livestreamed from Michigan, telling the story of her daughter’s tragedy to Harris and Oprah Winfrey.
Climb up on those bodies.
If we don’t make abortion freely available, people will die!
“The pivot to an intense focus on abortion rights evolved over the course of the week after the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica published a report on two Georgia women who died as a result of delayed medical care linked to the state’s abortion ban.”
This is calculated. Later they’ll find the substandard care/deaths had nothing to do with abortion bans. Maybe sometime after the election.
linked to the state’s abortion ban
Only so linked by the mentally challenged. It was malpractice, and anymore you have to wonder if some proggie doctor isn’t willing to let a patient or two die just to make a point.
The malpractice was making the abortion drugs readily available without mentioning that the side effects may include a fetus rotting inside your body and going septic.
Safe and effective, amirte?
…was entirely predictable because the Dems have nothing else to talk about.
No, but abortion is a BIG thing to talk about.
That alone could buy them the election.
If the Dems win every election going forward because of fucking abortion, we might as well pack it in – the country is over.
That alone could buy them the election.
Which tells us something significant about American voters.
What, that they want freedom? And that they perceive the R’s as taking it away?
ZWAK, the Dems are better at painting the Reps as out of step with the electorate in general.
So the failure of birth control education then requires an abortion? Parents/schools and other influencers need to step up their game. It’s like giving out driver’s licenses/cars with no instruction manual.
Isn’t sex ed starting in first grade? DEI/Trans Ed/LG etc and comes with a Do It Yourself kit? Have I been misled?
You could double the size of the pro-life crowd if you included fetal development and abortion videos in sex education classes.
My takeaway is that OMWC is literally the only person on the entire campus that wants the kid to learn and be competent in his field. The rest are all KKK-level racists who think minorities are inferior and need to just be patted on the head like the adorable little animals they think they are.
Mine too. Pass the kid. Barely. It’s really not your problem to solve and it’s too late for him to learn anything from it and if he is (checkbox), wherever he goes, he’s going to be a DEI hire anyway.
And maybe you can safely traverse campus (or the golf course) without fear there’s a rifle poking out of the bushes in your direction.
Late to the thread again, but I think a lot of the people passing him before were scared of the DEI repercussions on them, not racist, plus not getting invited to all the good cocktail parties. The former is OMWC’s worry, too — not the parties, he has his own group of people for that.
Maybe by failing they will decide he shouldn’t be teaching, which is what he wants anyway.
For the record, I vote for fail, OTOH, I have never had a graduating senior so inadequately prepared. At least where I taught, I would have confidence the admin would back me up.
Grand finale
Biden has been receding from the spotlight as the campaign marches on. But he still holds the highest office in the land for another four months and Biden is trying to make the most of it.
Biden’s chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients, recalled the Sunday morning in July when Biden called to say he was dropping out of the race.
“He immediately turned to planning for the remainder of the term and he said to me, and I remember it distinctly, ‘I want this next period of months to be as productive or even more productive than any other period of the administration.’” Zients said.
——-
Biden has been working to shore up support for legislation that will be a big part of his legacy: the infrastructure bill, the CHIPs and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.
“I’m back again today to begin a series of trips and events showing the progress we’ve made together by our ‘Investing in America’ agenda,” he said.
He needs to cement his legacy of throwing money at every problem he can invent.
Unprecedented
A California firefighter was arrested on suspicion of arson in a series of small fires that burned in wine country in recent weeks, officials said Friday.
Robert Hernandez, 38, was accused of setting five fires between Aug. 15 and Sept. 14 while off-duty, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, said in a news release.
Hernadez, a Cal Fire apparatus engineer, allegedly ignited the blazes around Geyserville, Healdsburg and Windsor, the department said.
Well blow me down.
I would have guessed a greenie.
Hey…it’s a living.
the poor man’s Jules Verne
30,000 Leagues Under The Sea was boring.
one of the very few near-guarantees that a movie will be good
I really don’t get the adoration for this guy. He’s a good comic actor, not the second coming.
And yet… it’s tough to find a movie he’s in that isn’t on the good to great spectrum. Including his non-comic roles (like Lost In Translation). Caddyshack, Groundhog Day, Stripes, What About Bob, Ed Wood, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video…
I’ll grant that Tootsie was awful.
Scrooged? Razor’s Edge?
I maintain that Dustin Hoffman was far more convincing as a woman than Dylan Mulvaney is.
True, but I think it’s easier to pass as an older, somewhat homely, woman.
So, speaking of not prepared for college—that was me, 1986. I was unprepared in a myriad of ways which could have been overcome if I’d asked for help, from whom, and the right questions to ask, but I didn’t even know that much.
ANYWAY, what I’m bitter about NOW is that I was never taught the order of operations to begin with, and I went to a private school. So. Yeah.
Maybe I was sick that day.
Order of operations was almost an entire semester in Algebra.
I can’t help but wonder if the poor man isn’t getting the better end of the deal in both cases.