Teaching gets a lot of lip-service from politicians, but when you freeze raises and hiring, you end up with teachers teaching 130 students per semester, and then it's really hard to make sure all the noses are on the right grindstones, much less to assign challenging work (which is challenging to grade).
Other factors apply too: I ended up with one class this semester in which I couldn't even fit in the room with my students. I taught my first few meetings from a chair in the doorway, until two students dropped and freed up the "teacher's" desk for my narrow ass. Last semester I taught in a building slated for demolition and so old that I had to stand perfectly still when lecturing, or students couldn't hear me for the floorboards creaking. I'm not kidding; that was the damndest thing I'd encountered on a campus.
Even small issues like photocopying have become an issue. I can't make a lot of instructional handouts because I'm not allowed sufficient copies on the departmental photocopier.
Ugh. I could go on. No raise for me this year, even though I got "excellent" on my student and peer evaluations. There's a pay freeze, so I need to keep figuring out how to live bringing home two grand a month with student loan payments beginning. Frankly, I don't know how I'm going to do it.
I can't speak to the sciences too well, but in literature, the main costs for textbooks are copyright fees, printing, and publisher profits. That's why it's hard to get textbooks with lots of contemporary literature and why textbooks with poems tend to only have short poems--Walt Whitman being represented by a dozen-line poem, for example.
In the sciences, I do know that the actual cost of the book's printing is significant because they tend to use a four-color process, and that's pretty expensive. It's actually amazing to me that you can get a thousand page biology text book in color for less than a $100, especially when a thousand page black and white literature text with no current copyrights applying costs $175 (I'm thinking of the Emily Dickinson variorum from Harvard UP.).
The one person I knew at my last university, a Big 10 research school, who edited a literature text did it not for money but for publication credit. When I've submitted editing work for a textbook, I got $0 compensation. My compensation was my name in the fine-print acknowledgements page, which increases my chances of getting a decent-paying job by 0.005% or so.
I had my mom's little brother's 8th grade grammar book when I was in 8th grade. Sadly, in the case of grammar books, that was a much better text than ones used now. I would love to have a class of college English students in which everyone could identify the subject of a sentence or even be sure what nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs are. It's damn hard to teach poetry classes without students having that sort of basic knowledge.
I'm a Tennessee State Employee (university faculty). I corrected the Wiki on Mohammed Ali recently (grammar error) and realized that I might get in trouble because the state government is cracking down on such "waste." In this case the concern isn't "government control." And, I may be paranoid, but if the government wanted to do some astroturfing, they probably would hire it done by a consultancy.
It's easy to get people exercised over waste and "The Gubmint." But I doubt that wikipedia editing amounts to even the tiniest hill of beans compared to more obvious problems like Rupert Murdoch and his schilling and/or the ops of the NSA or whoever and the telcos.
Blind antiauthoritarian suspicion of the government joined bread and circuses a long time ago as one more way to hoodwink the populace. There are plenty of examples, from egregious to relatively benign, from America's Reagan years to 1930s German politics and on back to the English Civil War. Heck, it's all over Shakespeare, at least in Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and maybe even in the Henriad, depending on how you want to read it. Agh, and Milton and the Eikon Basilike.....
First, thanks for the feedback on my ideas for how to handle this issue. Appearing authoritarian IS one of my concerns, and I'm going to be floating this idea with my current classes.
That said, the scale of the issue seems to demand some sort of action. I understand that my students are adults, but I do think of them as students not as clients. As students they are in status somewhere between employees and clients. I can't simply poor information in people's heads because they cut the university a check. They have to work for it.
When someone is watching a basketball game on his MacBook or reading Ebaumsworld on his Dell or just farting around, it IS distracting to others. But it's just as important to me that I'm not fulfilling my obligation to keep that person focused on his work. I am in a tricky position. On the one hand, yes, my students are adults, but on the other hand students are sometimes immature, shortsighted, or irresponsible, just as we all are. And I'm supposed to deal with that when it occurs.
Having yammered on at some length, how would you ask students to be responsible for their behavior? I could use some advice.
I teach courses in literature, most frequently poetry, at a major Southern university.
This semester I've been trying to decide how to deal with students texting in class and with students who use laptops recreationally in class. I haven't come up with an ideal solution, but I'm leaning toward banning cellphones. The laptop thing is harder; many students use them to take notes and for reference, which is laudable. I think I might tell students using laptops to be prepared to e-mail me notes on demand at the end of class so that I'll know who's using a laptop to take notes and who's goofing off.
So that's background. I'm posting in response to some ideas from the student perspective that I see repeated here.
Several posters say that students are capable of multi-tasking. This is true, but research indicates that you're not capable of doing anything well nor of retaining it when you multi-task.
Several posters suggest that they should be allowed to be the judge of what's worthwhile. I'm all for agency, but if you decide to tune out, you might miss something that would interest you. Furthermore, some material isn't so exciting, and though a teacher should attempt to generate interest, some students expectations are unreasonably high when it comes to the entertainment value of literature. Maybe, too, it would be well to look on a lecture as a form of work.
A few people say they can pass without paying attention in lectures. That is probably true. I often find myself dumbing down my lectures, assignments, and exams so that students who have tuned out during class can pass. If I fail too many students, my enrollments go down, my evaluations suffer, and I may even lose my job, as I am on one-year contracts and get rehired based on student evaluations. If I do that, for fear of my job, the content of the course suffers.
Finally, a few people here say lectures are outdated and that content should be online. What about procrastination; would students just shrug off all this content until finals? What about dialog; will all exchange in your life take place via chat? What about seeing others modelling an interest in material only understood or valued by a minority? Do you want to give those faculty who are already distant from students one more excuse to tune you out completely?
I guess I'll conclude by saying that the small minority of students who text in class or play on their laptops in class are the worse students in my class. They waste a lot of my time asking me about things covered in class or begging for favors and special attention. And they tend to earn poor grades. I wouldn't want to be their boss and certainly not one of their fellow employees. Though as their boss, I could fire the lot of them, and that would be very gratifying.
Trespassing on railroad lines to shoot bottles and cans with a BB gun is a federal crime, or so I was told at 13. I don't know if that's true, or if they'd take a swab from a kid. There was a student at a university I taught at who was really bitter about politics in the US. He wrote a short story in which Prez Bush is assassinated. The teacher told campus security, campus security told the Secret Service, and the kid was held incommunicado over the weekend before being released into his parents' custody for "psychiatric evaluation." I bet they'd swab him.
I want to offer some reasons that this suit might be reasonable.
First, the students were copying verbatim the professors material to sell for a profit. That's not fair use, and this isn't about duplicating facts or creating original notes or interpretations--it's about repackaging someone else's work for sale.
Second, it's easy to be idealistic and fight against any notion of intellectual property, but the reality is that professor's livelihoods depend on it. It's reasonable for someone to try to protect their livelihood.
Third, some people are saying he shouldn't post his work; others are saying he's going against the core ideas of teaching by trying to restrict his work at all. I'd say that the prof and many like him, including myself, are trying to find a balance between not getting paid for our work and disseminating it as widely as is possible.
Fourth, many here seem to be writing under the assumption that profs are rich. Well. A new associate prof at the University of Iowa in the English department got paid $39-42k/yr in the years 99-01. That's after 5-8 years in a PhD program at up to $18k/yr tuition. A lecturer in English currently gets paid $30-34k/yr at the University of Tennessee, LSU, or U. of Georgia, given what I saw on the job listings yesterday; anyway that's a 50+ hour work week. Tenured faculty in English get paid $55-75k/yr, and endowed chairs in English get $125k/yr and up. Of course, that's just English, which is my field. The engineering and medical profs I knew of in Iowa got paid somewhat more, around 10-25% more.
My agenda:
I work about 52 hours a week, and I bring home 2 grand a month, which leaves me with about $50 at the end of the month after I make my payment on $40k of student loans, rent, utilities, medical insurance, retirement. Mock my decision to be an English prof; I do. But someone has to do this work, so it's lucky for the students that some of us are financially foolish enough to take it on.
The other oar I have in the water on this is that my former university is trying to post all theses and dissertations online for free access. This includes the work of creative writers. So, any of us graduating won't be able to get our work published. Hiring and tenure is based on publication, and creative writers' income is based on royalties. So I've been seeing the really ugly side of the "information wants to be free" argument, the side that might prevent me from moving up out of this $30k/yr morass I'm in with my little MFA/PhD. To me, it's sort of like what Atlantic did to Stax records.
This is an issue for people at the U where I work. Part-time lecturers and grad teachers are housed in cubicles in a public building with no lock to the floor they are on. These folks have to drag around their laptops all day when they're not in the the cube because of high rates of theft. And they of course are not given computers by the school but must use their own machines. It would be nice if there were some good option for securing their personal items, but there really isn't, barring lockers, which the U is too cheap to install. Maybe a locking closet? I dunno. But it's a real issue in some environments. I hope no corporations are as cheap as this university.
Let's get those skeletons out of the closet. I'll start. I masturbate. I have soiled myself on occasion. And I frequently inhaled in the presence of pot. I drank before I was 21, and I often exceed the speed limit. I regularly roll through a stop sign near my house. And I am greedy when it comes to sweets.
Now they've got nothing on me. See how good it makes you..... Wait a minute, someone's at the door, brb.
From what I gather, the pilot(s) saved the situation by rapidly pointing the nose down to avoid a stall and then yanking it up to avoid a nosedive into the ground. At least this is what all the articles say, including TFA #1 here.
I'm surprised at how many people here are proud of not going to the library, but that's more about me and my age, I suppose. I was born in 1969 and grew up in the rural South. We didn't even get cable in my town until 1980. Anyway, I grew going to the library, checking out a dozen books a week, a mixture of fiction and technical books. I lived in Memphis and Iowa City for years. Memphis libraries were horrible, because under-funded. Iowa City's library was incredibly good, and that's where I started using a library to check out DVDs, a week with a DVD for "free." Since I was a grad student, that was the right price.
But I'm Knoxville, TN now, and it's hard to get much use out of the library. There's one copy of "brainy" books for the whole library system, and the local branch will have several copies of some book I wouldn't wipe my ass with, some bodice-ripper or craptastic "philosophy" book like The Secret of some pseudo history by an author like that The Irish Saved Civilization jingoist. Those books were always there and will always be around, but if you cut funding, you stop getting multiple copies of Neal Stephenson, any copies of astronomy or engineering books, and you don't have room anymore for the old copy of Joyce's Ulysses. And I don't know if you can find poetry in a public library at all.
But you can find broadband, and generally there's a spotty-faced kid or a poopy-pants homeless guy looking at boobies. Or teenagers in chatrooms. There's seldom anything of value going on in the computer area, I mean nonmasturbatory value--unless you consider the chatting about who likes who and who's cute all that valuable. But computers are the NEW thing. I'd prefer we still spent the money on books. It may be a dead tech to many of you, but there's no need to rush the transition.
For those of you who consider your local bookstore a library, please remember that most of our population can't afford to view it that way. Even a crappy mass market paperback is $8 these days. And not all communities even have the markets to support a bookstore.
YMMV -- but give the old B&M library a try. At least you can encourage with your own interests that they cater to some poor kid somewhere who doesn't know yet that he wants to turn out liking the same stuff as you.
Head over to the wiki. Gen Xers were born in the 60s and 70s. When the idea first popped in the 90s, I was under the impression that I was just barely a Gen Xer, being born in 69. But I guess they broadened the category.
But more importantly, why should we pretend we care? It's just more of that asinine Time Magazine pseudo-demography.
Check out the Enclosures of the late 18th and early 18th centuries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure. The human cost of these enclosures was great. People starved. Many emigrated. The public response was often violent.
I'm an English prof. My shelves are full of books that regurgitate the facts of the books they address. They're called "reference works." A lot work goes into them, and they're often quite useful. Yet they can in no way replace the books they are about. Novels and such are textual works of art. Reference books are not. They are references to works of art, useful for study, which is what I'm guessing Rowling fanatics do with this info on Hairy Pooter. But those reference books, useful they may be, just aren't the thrill of reading the Real Thing(tm).
Who really knows how religion came to be? The theory cited by the poster above is an old, old one that has been losing credibility since William James's day. Anyone who's curious about this would do well to check out the chapter in The Varieties of Religious Experience on mystical experience. Given research showing that certain types of mental disorders, most notably seizures of various types, can lead to experiences of the divine and that these experiences now can be induced, it might well be that the human frame is simply predisposed to this type of experience and that religion is an after-the-fact attempt to explain what is a powerful and puzzling experience. Further studies of so-called altruistic behavior in humans and animals suggests that there well may be evolutionary benefits in what we call moral or ethical behaviors. My apologies for not providing links and references.
Do you really expect a useful answer here? I'd start answering that question with searches at the Chronicle of Higher Education website and move out from there to other education journals, especially engineering ones. Now I'll take off my faculty hat and put on my/. hat to say: the foreign students I've met--in general--work harder. It's easier to get more motivated students if you're drawing from a global pool. I'll also add that basic skills levels of entering college students are declining in many states, so it may be that international students are getting more competitive in relation.
OK, disclaimer, I'm a budding English prof. But it seems a real rush to judgement to me to limit the utility of literature the way you do, to just examples or practice for creating further art. Firstly, there's research that shows that the sort of thinking demanded by interpreting art and literature is not only conducive to but necessary for more utilitarian or "rational" thought processes (Damasio's Descartes' Error is a good start). So it's useful developmentally. But there's truth too in the old liberal humanist saw that there are themes which are, if not universal, at least broadly applicapable to our lives. Your uncle may not kill your father for the throne, but you probably will suffer teen angst or find yourself at odds with society in some other way. Your contention that "most of life is boring" is the sort of sad belief or experience that can be altered by learning to appreciation the slower pace of the fine arts. It is not so easy in our society to learn to contemplate a sunset or the slow transformation of a flower or a lawn or patterns of frost on a window. Study of the arts inculcates such skills and predilictions. As a capping disclaimer, yes, I am a budding lit prof, poetry no less, but my bachelor's is in geomorphology, and my initial profession was in photography and computer programming for planetariums. So I didn't necessarily come to my current positions easily. YMMV, but at least be aware that your sweeping generalizations are, well, sweeping generalizations that likely spring from your attitudes and experiences, as well as possibly from your aptitudes. So be careful about laying down universal laws for humanity. Joy and satisfaction is where you LEARN to find it.
Google wuhan auto and you'll see why this is no surprise. I can't find it on the web for some reason, but when I was there in the 90s there was a GM plant. Or something labelled that, along with Dongfeng-Citroen.
I study literature, and at least in that realm copying was a two-way street. Dickens lost gobs of money to American editions of his work while Melville, Clemens, and others lost gobs to copying in England. There were no copyright agreements, so there was flagrant copying. In fact, our nations were at war with one another off and on during the nineteenth century. It might be best to not cry over spilt milk.
So what about going to a pothead college and having glam shots on a website makes your wife a philosopher? Is it something she does with your lazy, fat cat? Some sort of now-you-see-it/now-you-don't quantum indeterminacy schtick? I don't see any evidence on that website of anything but vanity.
the keyboard USB ports don't have the juice to run most USB keys reliably. Sometimes they mount, sometimes you get that "hey, ain't enough juice here, bud" dialog box. Quite a PITA, especially in my work setting where lots of folks are coming to look for a machine to print from. "Hey, Supercrisp, where's the USB port?' "On the keyboard duder!" "Nah, me droog, that no worky." (Yes, that's really how we talk about my work place. We're all fat with visible butt crease.
Poor Mr. Heston went to Columbine after the shooting to hold a pro-gun ralley. He's done that in similar places after similar horrors. Poor Mr. Heston is so concerned about losing his precious right to bear arms, as he and his pals interpret it, that they have no compassion for communities that have experienced such horrible events. Poor Mr. Heston, IMHO, deserves an ass-beating, however old he is. He's right up there with Fred Phelps in my book.
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Teaching gets a lot of lip-service from politicians, but when you freeze raises and hiring, you end up with teachers teaching 130 students per semester, and then it's really hard to make sure all the noses are on the right grindstones, much less to assign challenging work (which is challenging to grade).
Other factors apply too: I ended up with one class this semester in which I couldn't even fit in the room with my students. I taught my first few meetings from a chair in the doorway, until two students dropped and freed up the "teacher's" desk for my narrow ass. Last semester I taught in a building slated for demolition and so old that I had to stand perfectly still when lecturing, or students couldn't hear me for the floorboards creaking. I'm not kidding; that was the damndest thing I'd encountered on a campus.
Even small issues like photocopying have become an issue. I can't make a lot of instructional handouts because I'm not allowed sufficient copies on the departmental photocopier.
Ugh. I could go on. No raise for me this year, even though I got "excellent" on my student and peer evaluations. There's a pay freeze, so I need to keep figuring out how to live bringing home two grand a month with student loan payments beginning. Frankly, I don't know how I'm going to do it.
I can't speak to the sciences too well, but in literature, the main costs for textbooks are copyright fees, printing, and publisher profits. That's why it's hard to get textbooks with lots of contemporary literature and why textbooks with poems tend to only have short poems--Walt Whitman being represented by a dozen-line poem, for example.
In the sciences, I do know that the actual cost of the book's printing is significant because they tend to use a four-color process, and that's pretty expensive. It's actually amazing to me that you can get a thousand page biology text book in color for less than a $100, especially when a thousand page black and white literature text with no current copyrights applying costs $175 (I'm thinking of the Emily Dickinson variorum from Harvard UP.).
The one person I knew at my last university, a Big 10 research school, who edited a literature text did it not for money but for publication credit. When I've submitted editing work for a textbook, I got $0 compensation. My compensation was my name in the fine-print acknowledgements page, which increases my chances of getting a decent-paying job by 0.005% or so.
I had my mom's little brother's 8th grade grammar book when I was in 8th grade. Sadly, in the case of grammar books, that was a much better text than ones used now. I would love to have a class of college English students in which everyone could identify the subject of a sentence or even be sure what nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs are. It's damn hard to teach poetry classes without students having that sort of basic knowledge.
I'm a Tennessee State Employee (university faculty). I corrected the Wiki on Mohammed Ali recently (grammar error) and realized that I might get in trouble because the state government is cracking down on such "waste." In this case the concern isn't "government control." And, I may be paranoid, but if the government wanted to do some astroturfing, they probably would hire it done by a consultancy.
It's easy to get people exercised over waste and "The Gubmint." But I doubt that wikipedia editing amounts to even the tiniest hill of beans compared to more obvious problems like Rupert Murdoch and his schilling and/or the ops of the NSA or whoever and the telcos.
Blind antiauthoritarian suspicion of the government joined bread and circuses a long time ago as one more way to hoodwink the populace. There are plenty of examples, from egregious to relatively benign, from America's Reagan years to 1930s German politics and on back to the English Civil War. Heck, it's all over Shakespeare, at least in Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and maybe even in the Henriad, depending on how you want to read it. Agh, and Milton and the Eikon Basilike.....
I've had too much coffee.
First, thanks for the feedback on my ideas for how to handle this issue. Appearing authoritarian IS one of my concerns, and I'm going to be floating this idea with my current classes.
That said, the scale of the issue seems to demand some sort of action. I understand that my students are adults, but I do think of them as students not as clients. As students they are in status somewhere between employees and clients. I can't simply poor information in people's heads because they cut the university a check. They have to work for it.
When someone is watching a basketball game on his MacBook or reading Ebaumsworld on his Dell or just farting around, it IS distracting to others. But it's just as important to me that I'm not fulfilling my obligation to keep that person focused on his work. I am in a tricky position. On the one hand, yes, my students are adults, but on the other hand students are sometimes immature, shortsighted, or irresponsible, just as we all are. And I'm supposed to deal with that when it occurs.
Having yammered on at some length, how would you ask students to be responsible for their behavior? I could use some advice.
I teach courses in literature, most frequently poetry, at a major Southern university.
This semester I've been trying to decide how to deal with students texting in class and with students who use laptops recreationally in class. I haven't come up with an ideal solution, but I'm leaning toward banning cellphones. The laptop thing is harder; many students use them to take notes and for reference, which is laudable. I think I might tell students using laptops to be prepared to e-mail me notes on demand at the end of class so that I'll know who's using a laptop to take notes and who's goofing off.
So that's background. I'm posting in response to some ideas from the student perspective that I see repeated here.
Several posters say that students are capable of multi-tasking. This is true, but research indicates that you're not capable of doing anything well nor of retaining it when you multi-task.
Several posters suggest that they should be allowed to be the judge of what's worthwhile. I'm all for agency, but if you decide to tune out, you might miss something that would interest you. Furthermore, some material isn't so exciting, and though a teacher should attempt to generate interest, some students expectations are unreasonably high when it comes to the entertainment value of literature. Maybe, too, it would be well to look on a lecture as a form of work.
A few people say they can pass without paying attention in lectures. That is probably true. I often find myself dumbing down my lectures, assignments, and exams so that students who have tuned out during class can pass. If I fail too many students, my enrollments go down, my evaluations suffer, and I may even lose my job, as I am on one-year contracts and get rehired based on student evaluations. If I do that, for fear of my job, the content of the course suffers.
Finally, a few people here say lectures are outdated and that content should be online. What about procrastination; would students just shrug off all this content until finals? What about dialog; will all exchange in your life take place via chat? What about seeing others modelling an interest in material only understood or valued by a minority? Do you want to give those faculty who are already distant from students one more excuse to tune you out completely?
I guess I'll conclude by saying that the small minority of students who text in class or play on their laptops in class are the worse students in my class. They waste a lot of my time asking me about things covered in class or begging for favors and special attention. And they tend to earn poor grades. I wouldn't want to be their boss and certainly not one of their fellow employees. Though as their boss, I could fire the lot of them, and that would be very gratifying.
Trespassing on railroad lines to shoot bottles and cans with a BB gun is a federal crime, or so I was told at 13. I don't know if that's true, or if they'd take a swab from a kid. There was a student at a university I taught at who was really bitter about politics in the US. He wrote a short story in which Prez Bush is assassinated. The teacher told campus security, campus security told the Secret Service, and the kid was held incommunicado over the weekend before being released into his parents' custody for "psychiatric evaluation." I bet they'd swab him.
First, the students were copying verbatim the professors material to sell for a profit. That's not fair use, and this isn't about duplicating facts or creating original notes or interpretations--it's about repackaging someone else's work for sale.
Second, it's easy to be idealistic and fight against any notion of intellectual property, but the reality is that professor's livelihoods depend on it. It's reasonable for someone to try to protect their livelihood.
Third, some people are saying he shouldn't post his work; others are saying he's going against the core ideas of teaching by trying to restrict his work at all. I'd say that the prof and many like him, including myself, are trying to find a balance between not getting paid for our work and disseminating it as widely as is possible.
Fourth, many here seem to be writing under the assumption that profs are rich. Well. A new associate prof at the University of Iowa in the English department got paid $39-42k/yr in the years 99-01. That's after 5-8 years in a PhD program at up to $18k/yr tuition. A lecturer in English currently gets paid $30-34k/yr at the University of Tennessee, LSU, or U. of Georgia, given what I saw on the job listings yesterday; anyway that's a 50+ hour work week. Tenured faculty in English get paid $55-75k/yr, and endowed chairs in English get $125k/yr and up. Of course, that's just English, which is my field. The engineering and medical profs I knew of in Iowa got paid somewhat more, around 10-25% more.
My agenda:
I work about 52 hours a week, and I bring home 2 grand a month, which leaves me with about $50 at the end of the month after I make my payment on $40k of student loans, rent, utilities, medical insurance, retirement. Mock my decision to be an English prof; I do. But someone has to do this work, so it's lucky for the students that some of us are financially foolish enough to take it on.
The other oar I have in the water on this is that my former university is trying to post all theses and dissertations online for free access. This includes the work of creative writers. So, any of us graduating won't be able to get our work published. Hiring and tenure is based on publication, and creative writers' income is based on royalties. So I've been seeing the really ugly side of the "information wants to be free" argument, the side that might prevent me from moving up out of this $30k/yr morass I'm in with my little MFA/PhD. To me, it's sort of like what Atlantic did to Stax records.
This is an issue for people at the U where I work. Part-time lecturers and grad teachers are housed in cubicles in a public building with no lock to the floor they are on. These folks have to drag around their laptops all day when they're not in the the cube because of high rates of theft. And they of course are not given computers by the school but must use their own machines. It would be nice if there were some good option for securing their personal items, but there really isn't, barring lockers, which the U is too cheap to install. Maybe a locking closet? I dunno. But it's a real issue in some environments. I hope no corporations are as cheap as this university.
Let's get those skeletons out of the closet. I'll start. I masturbate. I have soiled myself on occasion. And I frequently inhaled in the presence of pot. I drank before I was 21, and I often exceed the speed limit. I regularly roll through a stop sign near my house. And I am greedy when it comes to sweets. Now they've got nothing on me. See how good it makes you..... Wait a minute, someone's at the door, brb.
From what I gather, the pilot(s) saved the situation by rapidly pointing the nose down to avoid a stall and then yanking it up to avoid a nosedive into the ground. At least this is what all the articles say, including TFA #1 here.
I'm surprised at how many people here are proud of not going to the library, but that's more about me and my age, I suppose. I was born in 1969 and grew up in the rural South. We didn't even get cable in my town until 1980. Anyway, I grew going to the library, checking out a dozen books a week, a mixture of fiction and technical books. I lived in Memphis and Iowa City for years. Memphis libraries were horrible, because under-funded. Iowa City's library was incredibly good, and that's where I started using a library to check out DVDs, a week with a DVD for "free." Since I was a grad student, that was the right price. But I'm Knoxville, TN now, and it's hard to get much use out of the library. There's one copy of "brainy" books for the whole library system, and the local branch will have several copies of some book I wouldn't wipe my ass with, some bodice-ripper or craptastic "philosophy" book like The Secret of some pseudo history by an author like that The Irish Saved Civilization jingoist. Those books were always there and will always be around, but if you cut funding, you stop getting multiple copies of Neal Stephenson, any copies of astronomy or engineering books, and you don't have room anymore for the old copy of Joyce's Ulysses. And I don't know if you can find poetry in a public library at all. But you can find broadband, and generally there's a spotty-faced kid or a poopy-pants homeless guy looking at boobies. Or teenagers in chatrooms. There's seldom anything of value going on in the computer area, I mean nonmasturbatory value--unless you consider the chatting about who likes who and who's cute all that valuable. But computers are the NEW thing. I'd prefer we still spent the money on books. It may be a dead tech to many of you, but there's no need to rush the transition. For those of you who consider your local bookstore a library, please remember that most of our population can't afford to view it that way. Even a crappy mass market paperback is $8 these days. And not all communities even have the markets to support a bookstore. YMMV -- but give the old B&M library a try. At least you can encourage with your own interests that they cater to some poor kid somewhere who doesn't know yet that he wants to turn out liking the same stuff as you.
Head over to the wiki. Gen Xers were born in the 60s and 70s. When the idea first popped in the 90s, I was under the impression that I was just barely a Gen Xer, being born in 69. But I guess they broadened the category. But more importantly, why should we pretend we care? It's just more of that asinine Time Magazine pseudo-demography.
From Snopes: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
Check out the Enclosures of the late 18th and early 18th centuries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure. The human cost of these enclosures was great. People starved. Many emigrated. The public response was often violent.
I'm an English prof. My shelves are full of books that regurgitate the facts of the books they address. They're called "reference works." A lot work goes into them, and they're often quite useful. Yet they can in no way replace the books they are about. Novels and such are textual works of art. Reference books are not. They are references to works of art, useful for study, which is what I'm guessing Rowling fanatics do with this info on Hairy Pooter. But those reference books, useful they may be, just aren't the thrill of reading the Real Thing(tm).
Who really knows how religion came to be? The theory cited by the poster above is an old, old one that has been losing credibility since William James's day. Anyone who's curious about this would do well to check out the chapter in The Varieties of Religious Experience on mystical experience. Given research showing that certain types of mental disorders, most notably seizures of various types, can lead to experiences of the divine and that these experiences now can be induced, it might well be that the human frame is simply predisposed to this type of experience and that religion is an after-the-fact attempt to explain what is a powerful and puzzling experience. Further studies of so-called altruistic behavior in humans and animals suggests that there well may be evolutionary benefits in what we call moral or ethical behaviors. My apologies for not providing links and references.
Do you really expect a useful answer here? I'd start answering that question with searches at the Chronicle of Higher Education website and move out from there to other education journals, especially engineering ones. Now I'll take off my faculty hat and put on my /. hat to say: the foreign students I've met--in general--work harder. It's easier to get more motivated students if you're drawing from a global pool. I'll also add that basic skills levels of entering college students are declining in many states, so it may be that international students are getting more competitive in relation.
OK, disclaimer, I'm a budding English prof. But it seems a real rush to judgement to me to limit the utility of literature the way you do, to just examples or practice for creating further art. Firstly, there's research that shows that the sort of thinking demanded by interpreting art and literature is not only conducive to but necessary for more utilitarian or "rational" thought processes (Damasio's Descartes' Error is a good start). So it's useful developmentally. But there's truth too in the old liberal humanist saw that there are themes which are, if not universal, at least broadly applicapable to our lives. Your uncle may not kill your father for the throne, but you probably will suffer teen angst or find yourself at odds with society in some other way. Your contention that "most of life is boring" is the sort of sad belief or experience that can be altered by learning to appreciation the slower pace of the fine arts. It is not so easy in our society to learn to contemplate a sunset or the slow transformation of a flower or a lawn or patterns of frost on a window. Study of the arts inculcates such skills and predilictions. As a capping disclaimer, yes, I am a budding lit prof, poetry no less, but my bachelor's is in geomorphology, and my initial profession was in photography and computer programming for planetariums. So I didn't necessarily come to my current positions easily. YMMV, but at least be aware that your sweeping generalizations are, well, sweeping generalizations that likely spring from your attitudes and experiences, as well as possibly from your aptitudes. So be careful about laying down universal laws for humanity. Joy and satisfaction is where you LEARN to find it.
Google wuhan auto and you'll see why this is no surprise. I can't find it on the web for some reason, but when I was there in the 90s there was a GM plant. Or something labelled that, along with Dongfeng-Citroen.
I study literature, and at least in that realm copying was a two-way street. Dickens lost gobs of money to American editions of his work while Melville, Clemens, and others lost gobs to copying in England. There were no copyright agreements, so there was flagrant copying. In fact, our nations were at war with one another off and on during the nineteenth century. It might be best to not cry over spilt milk.
So what about going to a pothead college and having glam shots on a website makes your wife a philosopher? Is it something she does with your lazy, fat cat? Some sort of now-you-see-it/now-you-don't quantum indeterminacy schtick? I don't see any evidence on that website of anything but vanity.
the keyboard USB ports don't have the juice to run most USB keys reliably. Sometimes they mount, sometimes you get that "hey, ain't enough juice here, bud" dialog box. Quite a PITA, especially in my work setting where lots of folks are coming to look for a machine to print from. "Hey, Supercrisp, where's the USB port?' "On the keyboard duder!" "Nah, me droog, that no worky." (Yes, that's really how we talk about my work place. We're all fat with visible butt crease.
You can get an inkjet for free. But I got a Brother laser printer that is very nice for $75 after rebate.
Poor Mr. Heston went to Columbine after the shooting to hold a pro-gun ralley. He's done that in similar places after similar horrors. Poor Mr. Heston is so concerned about losing his precious right to bear arms, as he and his pals interpret it, that they have no compassion for communities that have experienced such horrible events. Poor Mr. Heston, IMHO, deserves an ass-beating, however old he is. He's right up there with Fred Phelps in my book.