My dean at Appalling State University is famous for saying "Your students deserve a grade." To an extent there was pressure at one big R1 at which I taught, and at another big R1, pressure was, well, here's a story about it: I gave a kid an F, which he richly deserved, for cheating his bright shiny little buns off. His father, Daddy Donor, called up, and the department chair spent half of Friday calling me to apprise me of this, concluding each call with "But there's no pressure." I caved around 2pm. Note: I was teaching on a year-to-year contract and had a wife and a new baby, so I'm moderately proud I stuck it out through several phone calls.
Everything you say is true except for those two words (or one hyphenated word) "tax-funded"; public university these days is tax-supported. The majority of funding no longer comes from the taxpayers but from tuition. That's why tuition is so high and ALSO one reason why schools are inflating grades. We have to keep you enrolled to get your cash. Failing you out means we're cutting our own throat. So, sure, we do all sorts of remediation and development, but we also admit students who simply are very unlikely to make it. (Their money is still green, after all.) AND, we also compete with other schools. So each school tries to be more accommodating than the other, and it ends up in a downward spiral, at least in terms of the demands we make on students. This is an unfortunate outcome of the students-as-consumers model for education. (As opposed to education as a public service, public good, public necessity or whatever noun you want to throw after the adjective public.)
I am serious. As in a colleague left for another place, and the new school issued him a cell phone for his students to use. He's supposed to be available and answering that phone between 8am and 8pm. He doesn't have an office, but a table in a room with other professors. His starting pay is $55k/yr.
That's a nice theory, but you ignore the fact that the incentives are reversed. Employers are incentivized to lower evaluation scores so that they can justify lowered wages or not raising wages. Educators are incentivized to pass students and raise grades. Faculty retention, raises, and promotion are all tied to this, and so is funding for the whole school and/or school-district. That's why you're seeing scandals like the one in Atlanta, where public school administration and faculty are being busted for cheat-changing grades UPWARD in order to keep the funds to keep their schools open.
Not a babysitter? I sure wish you'd talk to my department chair, my dean, the Provost and the state legislature. Because they're all convinced I need to be the students' babysitter. Guess what happens to my chances at retention, raises, and promotion if I just treat everyone like adults and fail those who don't do the work? Keep in mind: people who know the material already are the exception to the rule. The ill-prepared and, sadly, indolent student is more common. And I'm expected to babysit those students. Some schools are even requiring faculty to carry cellphones and be on call so that when Little Johnny Baseballhat realizes he needs an answer, we can turn to and present. So, yeah, I'd like to live in your world. It would be nice to have people like yourself who are self-starting and ready to move on to more advanced topics.
Thinking about this question, I checked the folder in which I keep research and notes for my primary area of study. It's 2GB and just under 2,000 separate files. Many of these are OCRed PDFs, some mp3, some.doc,.rtf. Mac OS X's indexing lets me do adequately quick find-by-content searches, and a relatively simple organizational schema for subfolders let me consult categories of data swiftly. I also use a reference manager program that probably has close to a 100 keyword tags, and Finder lets me get to stuff as quickly, so I'm assuming creating some sort of metadata beyond filename, date, and filetype is really unnecessary. I'd say just relax and throw the stuff in a folder in Finder, and back that up somewhere while also using something like SpiderOak. My work requires frequent and specific searches over this fairly large data set, so if this system works for me, it would probably work for you, unless you plan on getting OCD with your OCR and scanning every Wally World receipt. Anyway, my advice is to keep it simple. Life is too short to diddle around with stuff like this.
"Isn't their JOB to TEACH?" Not completely, sometimes barely at all. At an R1, the typical humanities appointment is 25-40% teaching, 50% research, and the balance to service. Some faculty may only teach one class a semester, if they're administrating a department or subdivision of a department, or if they're running a onerous committee, like a hiring committee. At a teaching school, your "main" job is teaching, but you're still required to produce some token level of research and serve the university in other ways, such as by working on committees, being a public figure, and other stuff that you might not consider right away. So, at my job, at a teaching school, about 70% of my time goes into teaching. The rest goes into mandatory requirements to publish, present papers, do committee work, assist developing colleagues, and perform community service. (Note that in my annual performance review, I'm only allowed to indicate that teaching was a maximum of 60% of my effort, and this at a teaching school. This may be atypical, but I suspect it's not.) Now, in the sciences there are faculty with no teaching requirements. And in the humanities, at R1 schools, faculty get a year or a semester off periodically during which time they are expected to complete a research project, typically a book.
I thought the reason Carroll stepped down was because of her connection with Allied Veterans, the supposed charity for veterans that turned out to be a huge scam?
"Never proven" only in that too many people don't want to touch it. Everything else about the "October surprise" is a matter of record, from the arms sales to the skullduggery and drug trade that financed part of the deal. But it's too uncomfortable to talk about how the Presidency is actually attained. Same deal with Gore's concession. The U.S. as a whole, from the top to the bottom, is extremely reluctant to think about this sort of thing. And when they do, it's only thru someone like Oliver Stone, who is wacky enough to be dismissed.
RE: "There is no way in OS X to increase the size of the system font. Let me say that again. There is no way in OS X to increase the size of the system font."
Method 1: CLI modification of parameters
Method 2: GUI app modification of parameters
Sure, it's not in System Prefs anymore. But you can still get to it.
The birth of my 3rd child: baby born about two hours after getting to the hospital, the doctor in the room 5 minutes, no cutting and no anaesthesia, enforced stay thru the next day: total cost billed to my insurance just over $10,000. So from 4pm one day to about 2:30 pm the next day is "worth" ten large. Just on the off chance that the doctor would be good for something other than saying "there's no need for that" to my wife when she screamed. A constant parade of make-work inspections, and then there was the steady parade of "offers" from photographers and other shills; my wife couldn't get any rest. And the food wasn't as good or healthy as a school cafeteria. And they wanted to keep us for an extra day. Had to call their bluff about my insurance refusing to pay if we left early. Only got the duty nurse to sign us out when I said I was ready to call my insurance company and ask for their guidance. I'll just stop now before my blood really gets boiling. Needless to say, my opinion is that US hospital care is too-often lacking and is certainly a festival of price-gouging.
Anyone who wants to blame "sex negativity" on the left wing needs to do some reading. Yes, some feminists are anti-porn, but that was one issue where conservative and liberal feminist women agreed. There's history there I too damn shiftless to cite. But, hey, I'm responding to AC here anyway. I'll also point out that, in general, it's your conservative types who are sex negative, with a burning itch to get their little bible-thumping paws up in our no-zone and an associated wide stance on censorship.
In 1987, I took my first college math class. It was advanced analytical geometry, basically pre-calc with a dash of real calc at the end. It was the first class for which I could receive credit toward my degree. Algebra 1 and 2 were considered remedial, and were not helping you toward your degree. This was true for both of my majors, independently. One was Environmental science (calculus heavy); the other was English (yeah, right). I'm a professor now, and I've taught at two major research schools and am now at a small state school. All three of them granted credit-to-degree for Algebra 1. For some majors, you can even get degree credit for bullshit "Principles of Numbers" classes that teach things like elementary set theory, number theory, and freaking arithmetic. (And jeebus, don't get me started on what Environmental Science seems to mean now. It seems to be something about hemp underpants.)
Subjective? So you're telling me that American literature from the Federalist period is the same as the stuff written a few years later when Romanticism had reached the USA? That a poem by Emily Dickinson means whatever you want it to be? Or that a sentence can be incorrect or correct, stylistically effective or ineffective, just based on my mood or the health of my bowels? Good lord. I wasted so many years studying. Where were students like you when I needed such an easy answer. Or maybe it's just that you're a bonehead who didn't pay attention to your teachers?
Everything the parent says is true, in my own experience as an English teacher. To put it more briefly, K-12 isn't getting it done, and college professors have to pick up the slack. We do it by working harder. And frankly, the harder work doesn't always pay off. And double-Amen on the NCLB.
That's easy. Declining public funding of public education has driven universities to rely more and more on tuition dollars. So we increase enrollments, and we have to keep students happy. We measure our success at making students happy by administering evaluations. Basically higher education is becoming more and more about customer service. Hell, my university insists on calling students customers and forces me to attend several customer service workshops or training sessions each semester. I really enjoy being told how to do my job by a person who has a BA in business! I really enjoy serving my students! (These statements will be revised after I am fully tenured and promoted.)
That's a popular idea. It's also been said to have started with the GI Bill, or colleges began to admit women, etc. In general, it seems that increased access to college education (greater admissions and/or lowered admissions standards) has meant decreased writing proficiency. I think that trend has accelerated dramatically the last ten years or so, as school funding has declined and has come to have various strings attached. The most problematic string is stuff like NCLB that hooks school funding to test outcomes. So you get people teaching the test rather than writing. If they don't, the damn school will have to shut down. And these places tend to be marginal schools anyway, serving impoverished areas where the parents likely don't have good education either. If I were boss, my solution would be: more teachers that are empowered to kick ass, take names, and tell parents to step the f*ck off. It also wouldn't hurt to pay enough to make teaching attractive to more people. But that's a dream world. As well all know, the real answers is iPads, Biblical Creationism, and sound free-market approaches to education funding.
The smallness of the amount is relative. My family of two academics clears about $200 a month, and we don't own a home, have car payments, cable payments, nor do we make any retirement contributions (and we're in our 40s). In other words, we live as cheaply as possible and are not in a good economic situation. And this fee would knock out a half of what we can save in a month. Of course, ideally, university's would cover the fees charged to their faculty for such publications, and that would likely be the case at most universities.
"Volunteer" has an odd meaning in the context of scholarly publication. I "volunteer" my services at three journals. I definitely would not do anything for one, maybe two, of them if it were not for the fact that such labor is required by the university that employees. So this is not an entirely voluntary sort of volunteering.
Well, sadly, you're wrong. Thailand was under French colonial occupation. And trade in Japan was opened at gunpoint, and post-WW2 Japan was "modernized" as part of a pacification program. I guess you could say those things don't count. But certainly Thailand fits.
You don't get it because you're completely wrong. JSTOR is a subscription service paid for by higher ed institutions for registered students. It's not paid for for the general public. Not saying that's right or wrong, just that your description of it as "public repository" couldn't be farther from the truth.
Ha! I'll see you on campus tomorrow! Another policy I like, at my university, which sounds just like yours, is this: create a flyer in Powerpoint, print it, then scan it so that you can e-mail it. Loads of fun!
Slashdot Mirror
"Get a job at a private university." Oh man. I'm kicking myself. Why didn't I think of that before?
My dean at Appalling State University is famous for saying "Your students deserve a grade." To an extent there was pressure at one big R1 at which I taught, and at another big R1, pressure was, well, here's a story about it: I gave a kid an F, which he richly deserved, for cheating his bright shiny little buns off. His father, Daddy Donor, called up, and the department chair spent half of Friday calling me to apprise me of this, concluding each call with "But there's no pressure." I caved around 2pm. Note: I was teaching on a year-to-year contract and had a wife and a new baby, so I'm moderately proud I stuck it out through several phone calls.
Everything you say is true except for those two words (or one hyphenated word) "tax-funded"; public university these days is tax-supported. The majority of funding no longer comes from the taxpayers but from tuition. That's why tuition is so high and ALSO one reason why schools are inflating grades. We have to keep you enrolled to get your cash. Failing you out means we're cutting our own throat. So, sure, we do all sorts of remediation and development, but we also admit students who simply are very unlikely to make it. (Their money is still green, after all.) AND, we also compete with other schools. So each school tries to be more accommodating than the other, and it ends up in a downward spiral, at least in terms of the demands we make on students. This is an unfortunate outcome of the students-as-consumers model for education. (As opposed to education as a public service, public good, public necessity or whatever noun you want to throw after the adjective public.)
I am serious. As in a colleague left for another place, and the new school issued him a cell phone for his students to use. He's supposed to be available and answering that phone between 8am and 8pm. He doesn't have an office, but a table in a room with other professors. His starting pay is $55k/yr.
That's a nice theory, but you ignore the fact that the incentives are reversed. Employers are incentivized to lower evaluation scores so that they can justify lowered wages or not raising wages. Educators are incentivized to pass students and raise grades. Faculty retention, raises, and promotion are all tied to this, and so is funding for the whole school and/or school-district. That's why you're seeing scandals like the one in Atlanta, where public school administration and faculty are being busted for cheat-changing grades UPWARD in order to keep the funds to keep their schools open.
Ah. Your anecdote contradicts all the research. I hasten to adjust my pedagogy!
Not a babysitter? I sure wish you'd talk to my department chair, my dean, the Provost and the state legislature. Because they're all convinced I need to be the students' babysitter. Guess what happens to my chances at retention, raises, and promotion if I just treat everyone like adults and fail those who don't do the work? Keep in mind: people who know the material already are the exception to the rule. The ill-prepared and, sadly, indolent student is more common. And I'm expected to babysit those students. Some schools are even requiring faculty to carry cellphones and be on call so that when Little Johnny Baseballhat realizes he needs an answer, we can turn to and present. So, yeah, I'd like to live in your world. It would be nice to have people like yourself who are self-starting and ready to move on to more advanced topics.
Thinking about this question, I checked the folder in which I keep research and notes for my primary area of study. It's 2GB and just under 2,000 separate files. Many of these are OCRed PDFs, some mp3, some .doc, .rtf. Mac OS X's indexing lets me do adequately quick find-by-content searches, and a relatively simple organizational schema for subfolders let me consult categories of data swiftly. I also use a reference manager program that probably has close to a 100 keyword tags, and Finder lets me get to stuff as quickly, so I'm assuming creating some sort of metadata beyond filename, date, and filetype is really unnecessary. I'd say just relax and throw the stuff in a folder in Finder, and back that up somewhere while also using something like SpiderOak. My work requires frequent and specific searches over this fairly large data set, so if this system works for me, it would probably work for you, unless you plan on getting OCD with your OCR and scanning every Wally World receipt. Anyway, my advice is to keep it simple. Life is too short to diddle around with stuff like this.
"Isn't their JOB to TEACH?" Not completely, sometimes barely at all. At an R1, the typical humanities appointment is 25-40% teaching, 50% research, and the balance to service. Some faculty may only teach one class a semester, if they're administrating a department or subdivision of a department, or if they're running a onerous committee, like a hiring committee. At a teaching school, your "main" job is teaching, but you're still required to produce some token level of research and serve the university in other ways, such as by working on committees, being a public figure, and other stuff that you might not consider right away. So, at my job, at a teaching school, about 70% of my time goes into teaching. The rest goes into mandatory requirements to publish, present papers, do committee work, assist developing colleagues, and perform community service. (Note that in my annual performance review, I'm only allowed to indicate that teaching was a maximum of 60% of my effort, and this at a teaching school. This may be atypical, but I suspect it's not.) Now, in the sciences there are faculty with no teaching requirements. And in the humanities, at R1 schools, faculty get a year or a semester off periodically during which time they are expected to complete a research project, typically a book.
I thought the reason Carroll stepped down was because of her connection with Allied Veterans, the supposed charity for veterans that turned out to be a huge scam?
"Never proven" only in that too many people don't want to touch it. Everything else about the "October surprise" is a matter of record, from the arms sales to the skullduggery and drug trade that financed part of the deal. But it's too uncomfortable to talk about how the Presidency is actually attained. Same deal with Gore's concession. The U.S. as a whole, from the top to the bottom, is extremely reluctant to think about this sort of thing. And when they do, it's only thru someone like Oliver Stone, who is wacky enough to be dismissed.
RE: "There is no way in OS X to increase the size of the system font. Let me say that again. There is no way in OS X to increase the size of the system font." Method 1: CLI modification of parameters Method 2: GUI app modification of parameters Sure, it's not in System Prefs anymore. But you can still get to it.
The birth of my 3rd child: baby born about two hours after getting to the hospital, the doctor in the room 5 minutes, no cutting and no anaesthesia, enforced stay thru the next day: total cost billed to my insurance just over $10,000. So from 4pm one day to about 2:30 pm the next day is "worth" ten large. Just on the off chance that the doctor would be good for something other than saying "there's no need for that" to my wife when she screamed. A constant parade of make-work inspections, and then there was the steady parade of "offers" from photographers and other shills; my wife couldn't get any rest. And the food wasn't as good or healthy as a school cafeteria. And they wanted to keep us for an extra day. Had to call their bluff about my insurance refusing to pay if we left early. Only got the duty nurse to sign us out when I said I was ready to call my insurance company and ask for their guidance. I'll just stop now before my blood really gets boiling. Needless to say, my opinion is that US hospital care is too-often lacking and is certainly a festival of price-gouging.
Anyone who wants to blame "sex negativity" on the left wing needs to do some reading. Yes, some feminists are anti-porn, but that was one issue where conservative and liberal feminist women agreed. There's history there I too damn shiftless to cite. But, hey, I'm responding to AC here anyway. I'll also point out that, in general, it's your conservative types who are sex negative, with a burning itch to get their little bible-thumping paws up in our no-zone and an associated wide stance on censorship.
In 1987, I took my first college math class. It was advanced analytical geometry, basically pre-calc with a dash of real calc at the end. It was the first class for which I could receive credit toward my degree. Algebra 1 and 2 were considered remedial, and were not helping you toward your degree. This was true for both of my majors, independently. One was Environmental science (calculus heavy); the other was English (yeah, right). I'm a professor now, and I've taught at two major research schools and am now at a small state school. All three of them granted credit-to-degree for Algebra 1. For some majors, you can even get degree credit for bullshit "Principles of Numbers" classes that teach things like elementary set theory, number theory, and freaking arithmetic. (And jeebus, don't get me started on what Environmental Science seems to mean now. It seems to be something about hemp underpants.)
Subjective? So you're telling me that American literature from the Federalist period is the same as the stuff written a few years later when Romanticism had reached the USA? That a poem by Emily Dickinson means whatever you want it to be? Or that a sentence can be incorrect or correct, stylistically effective or ineffective, just based on my mood or the health of my bowels? Good lord. I wasted so many years studying. Where were students like you when I needed such an easy answer. Or maybe it's just that you're a bonehead who didn't pay attention to your teachers?
Everything the parent says is true, in my own experience as an English teacher. To put it more briefly, K-12 isn't getting it done, and college professors have to pick up the slack. We do it by working harder. And frankly, the harder work doesn't always pay off. And double-Amen on the NCLB.
That's easy. Declining public funding of public education has driven universities to rely more and more on tuition dollars. So we increase enrollments, and we have to keep students happy. We measure our success at making students happy by administering evaluations. Basically higher education is becoming more and more about customer service. Hell, my university insists on calling students customers and forces me to attend several customer service workshops or training sessions each semester. I really enjoy being told how to do my job by a person who has a BA in business! I really enjoy serving my students! (These statements will be revised after I am fully tenured and promoted.)
That's a popular idea. It's also been said to have started with the GI Bill, or colleges began to admit women, etc. In general, it seems that increased access to college education (greater admissions and/or lowered admissions standards) has meant decreased writing proficiency. I think that trend has accelerated dramatically the last ten years or so, as school funding has declined and has come to have various strings attached. The most problematic string is stuff like NCLB that hooks school funding to test outcomes. So you get people teaching the test rather than writing. If they don't, the damn school will have to shut down. And these places tend to be marginal schools anyway, serving impoverished areas where the parents likely don't have good education either. If I were boss, my solution would be: more teachers that are empowered to kick ass, take names, and tell parents to step the f*ck off. It also wouldn't hurt to pay enough to make teaching attractive to more people. But that's a dream world. As well all know, the real answers is iPads, Biblical Creationism, and sound free-market approaches to education funding.
The smallness of the amount is relative. My family of two academics clears about $200 a month, and we don't own a home, have car payments, cable payments, nor do we make any retirement contributions (and we're in our 40s). In other words, we live as cheaply as possible and are not in a good economic situation. And this fee would knock out a half of what we can save in a month. Of course, ideally, university's would cover the fees charged to their faculty for such publications, and that would likely be the case at most universities.
"Volunteer" has an odd meaning in the context of scholarly publication. I "volunteer" my services at three journals. I definitely would not do anything for one, maybe two, of them if it were not for the fact that such labor is required by the university that employees. So this is not an entirely voluntary sort of volunteering.
Well, sadly, you're wrong. Thailand was under French colonial occupation. And trade in Japan was opened at gunpoint, and post-WW2 Japan was "modernized" as part of a pacification program. I guess you could say those things don't count. But certainly Thailand fits.
BTW, sorry for the "completely wrong" crankiness. I'm more respectful after my first cup of coffee. My rudeness was unwarranted.
You don't get it because you're completely wrong. JSTOR is a subscription service paid for by higher ed institutions for registered students. It's not paid for for the general public. Not saying that's right or wrong, just that your description of it as "public repository" couldn't be farther from the truth.
Ha! I'll see you on campus tomorrow! Another policy I like, at my university, which sounds just like yours, is this: create a flyer in Powerpoint, print it, then scan it so that you can e-mail it. Loads of fun!