The Academics Thread

[Old Man]

If the apparatus is suspended near a black hole or neutron star, then there might be enough of a gradient in the gravitational field for L to be heavier than U. So the question is hopelessly vague.  

[Cancer]

You can grade these gottverdammtescheisse papers then!!

[Bazza]

Finally… 

 

(  )

[L. Marcus]

Eighteen months, prof! Eighteen months ...

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

[Bazza]

 

[tkdguy]

 

[Cancer]

Possible: 105.  High: 101.  Low: 6.  Several (more like seven rather than three) papers yet to be graded.

[tombrown803]

Did the low score actually try to get that low on purpose?

 

[Cancer]

Frankly, I suspect that one is a mistake by the Admissions Office, i.e., someone who really should never have been admitted (or, perhaps, re-admitted) to the university in the first place.  I have seen a few of these in previous years, including a couple of tragic cases where I know (she told me) or strongly suspect organic brain damage had occurred to the student.  Another possibility is someone who somehow got around the advising process and enrolled in the class without any of the appropriate background.  They;ve overhauled the registration process recently and if they left a stray corner case or two out of their new process I imagine that could happen.  I have raised a ticket over in that bailiwick.

 

That said, (1) there's another five papers I have yet to pick up from Disabilities Services, and (2) there's a clutch of people with scores in the 20s.  My exams tend to have very broad score distributions.  Since I curve everything I don't really care about that in principle, though it leaves me with questions about what's going on.

[Cancer]

Also, I got a rather strange email about one student with the statement

Quote

This student will miss classes on Feb. 25 to participate in a required administrative proceeding. 

 

Never seen that one before, and I can only speculate what that's about.

[Old Man]

It means the ritual is on the 25th. Be sure to pick up your robes from the dry cleaners by then. 

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

And bring your sword. 

[Cancer]

Well, for me it's an ankh and a flail, but I know the drill.

[Cancer]

Meanwhile, my other course seems to be full of red-purple slackers, as I look at those exams now and consider the no-submission rate for an assignment due last Friday.

[Pariah]

1 hour ago, Cancer said:

Well, for me it's an ankh and a flail, but I know the drill.

 

Actually, I'd prefer the drill.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

7 minutes ago, Cancer said:

red-purple slackers

 

I don't know what this means, but it's very colorful imagery. Pardon the pun. 

[Cancer]

re: Paraiah's drill: Depends on the ritual.

 

re: colorful: red-purple == maroon, i.e.,  Morons.  And slackers because there's a bunch of people who didn't bother to turn in something due last Friday.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Ah! Gotcha. Almost like cockney rhyming slang there. I like it. 

[Bazza]

Intellectual Freedom in Medieval Universities

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/02/intellectual-freedom-in-medieval-universities

Quotes: 

1) "The traditional job of a university was to transmit learning, not to encourage free thought."

 

2) "You would have thought that so strict a regime, which we moderns would surely experience as highly repressive, would have stifled intellectual curiosity and debate. Instead, the opposite happened. Over the next hundred years, European universities fostered the most creative period of philosophical speculation in the West since the Hellenistic era 1500 years before. The universities produced major philosophers like St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham."

 

3) "The focus of debate, even more surprisingly, was the thought of a pagan Greek philosopher, Aristotle, whose writings were by no means easy to harmonize with revealed truth. Thus, while their brothers were off smiting the paynim in the Holy Land, back home in Western Europe university masters were studying their Aristotle with the aid of Muslim philosophers like Avicenna and Averroës. While King Louis IX was burning thousands of copies of the Talmud and expelling the Jews from France, theologians like Aquinas were reading Maimonides."

[Perplexing…one almost needs a guide…]

 

4) "How did this amazing efflorescence of philosophy occur in an institution that, from our point of view, was so strict in regulating thought? And why were early universities so tolerant of non-Christian thought? 

 

One reason, I would suggest, is the lack of professional administrators, a feature of universities that lasted into modern times...It is a general principle of successful institutions that the people who run them are the ones most committed to their missions and most responsible for their success. A professional administrative class, by contrast, spends much of its time evading responsibility for failure and taking credit for other people’s achievements." [Putting this in for Cancer to nod along to]

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

[Cancer]

Gotta reward 'em for creativity, especially when it's amusing.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Absolutely. 

[archer]

Subscribe to a brand-new K-8 science education podcast for a free mug from Amplify.

 

Available to teachers and administrators.

 

https://go.info.amplify.com/science-connections-podcast-subscribe-mug? 

[Cancer]

Meanwhile, in the Solar System astronomy course for nonscience students, I have the distinct impression that they did not take my exam seriously.  Essay format; Eight questions worth 20 points each; only the best five count for their score; and they were repeatedly warned about the nature of one question.  Several people with scores under 20.

 

I believe that it is going to come as a shock to them tomorrow to find that vague general responses supplemented with content that is from the "everyone knows that" (but although they might "know" it, it's WRONG) bin are worth zero out of 20 points.

 

I am used to having to break Accomplished High School B------t Artists of the conviction that lexical analysis, repeating the reworded prompt, and an admixture of platitudes will let them coast by with an A once they get to college, but I half expect that in the fall quarter, not in winter.  It would be nice to think that college students of 2022 would be a bit more flexible and willing to learn than the British Imperial General Staff of 1915, but alas, they have redone the equivalent of the Battle of Loos, which was not a contest to gain privileged access to the Porta-Potties, shall we say.