The Academics Thread

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

THIS is why I hated grading essays and wanted to switch to math. 

 

Spoilered for minor language. 

 

Spoiler

 

[Pariah]

What the actual...?

[L. Marcus]

... Bleep ... ?

[Cancer]

That's a trolling exercise, not an essay.  Tell him to report to the disintegration station.

[Pariah]

I assign a lot of writing assignments for a science teacher, primarily because I think everyone (including an aspiring scientist) needs to be able to communicate effectively. I've seen some rough submissions, but nothing that egregious. The two worst examples I can readily recall:

 

1. I had assigned a research project (5 paragraph paper) on one of a list of 30 or so industrially-important chemical elements, including hydrogen. One kid chose hydrogen, and because water includes hydrogen, he did a report on the recent activities of Somali pirates.

 

2. I had one girl submit a report that was maybe 1/3 her own work, the rest was clearly plagiarized.  (Because students think I can't differentiate between professionally published scientific material and the writing skills of an average first-year science student.) But hers was spectacularly awful because for most of the plagiarized material, she hadn't even bothered to change it from the original font. At that point I could hardly even muster any anger, just pity.

 

Sometimes all you can do is shake your head.

[Starlord]

41 minutes ago, L. Marcus said:

... Bleep Perchance?

 

FTFY

[L. Marcus]

Swedes never say perchance!, unless it's a state occasion.

[Cancer]

Is perchance like peroxide, but with extra (or diminished) probability?

[Bazza]

Re Mario essay. That was fun reading it. Basically, he has a solid point about the realism/idealism of fictional characters but his use of language is mere abuse. 

[tkdguy]

That essay was painful to read.

[Michael Hopcroft]

I didn't learn how to write a term paper really until college, and I wrote some pretty bad ones that nonetheless got good grades. Thing was I was a natural procrastinator.

 

In my junior year, when I was clearly disintegrating, I was studying Sociology, and had very poor impulse control. Finally I stopped coming to class because I was making everyone uncomfortable, including myself, but I still did the homework and took the exams. I took down an A for the term. Not that it did me a wholelot of good, since I didn't get to finish my degree.

 

For the active teachers on the list -- what would you tell a student with a great gift but a severe mental illness to help them succeed as best they can and get the most out of the experience possible, even if you know they will not get to graduate?

[Pariah]

My senior year in high school I had a class called Research, taught by one Ms. Schulz. Ms. Schulz had been one of two faculty advisors to the graduating class a year ahead of mine. As a going away gift, they bought her a t-shirt that read "To err is human, to forgive is out of the question." She had a reputation, academically speaking, for being a complete hard-ass. She wouldn't have had it any other way.

 

Research was a one semester English elective that you got into only if Ms. Schulz thought you could handle it. And what did we do in this class? We wrote research papers. Four of them. That was the entire semester. And there was bloody near not enough time to do it all.

 

Keep in mind, this is long before Google or anything of that nature. For our research, we had to drive to the local university library (~25 minutes away) and use the card catalog and abstract collections to find articles. Our instructor had us keep our citations on index cards, along with topic sentences and other structural details of the paper. I used maybe 200 index cards that semester.

 

It's also important to remember that this was well before most people had access to word processors. So I typed up multiple drafts of each paper on a typewriter my parents found at a pawn shop. It was not one that came with a correction ribbon, so I had to use the little correction film where you would slide it in and hit the same letter key to erase it. It seems to me that I used correction fluid on the first draft of the first paper, and got a comment back that said something about their being more correction fluid than actual paper. Which, given my incredibly lackluster typing skills back in the day, was probably not much of an exaggeration.

 

My little podunk high school didn't offer AP classes, so this was universally acknowledged as the hardest course taught in the school. Our class valedictorian earned an A. She was the first in 4 years. I took my C and happily got the heck out of Dodge. 

 

But I will say this: I've never earned a grade lower than a B on any paper I've written since.

[Old Man]

The research paper I am most and least proud of was the twelve page riff on artificial intelligence I wrote in my junior year of college. Most proud because I banged it out in two hours directly on the typewriter with no drafts or outline based on what I already knew about the field.* Least proud because I didn’t even attempt to do any actual research.  I had to run to the library first thing the next morning and jot down some likely sources to cite, then run back to my room and type that up. It might have taken longer than the actual writing of the paper. 
 

It being a computer science class, many of my classmates were ESL students so compared to them I imagine my paper must have read like Hemingway. I can’t explain the grade otherwise. 

 

* Artificial intelligence also lends itself to a certain degree of speculation and hand waving, especially thirty years ago. 

[Bazza]

I’m sure Old Man is aware that AI is more correct nomenclature would be “artificial reason” as there is no intelligence in “AI”. 

[Cancer]

When I first started at my present institution back in 2005, I had students do something like a classical book report, but on a Scientific American article of relevance to the course.  The results were Not Good, and I dropped that idea because I didn't want to have to play Grammar Nazi. 

[Ternaugh]

8 hours ago, Pariah said:

My senior year in high school I had a class called Research, taught by one Ms. Schulz. Ms. Schulz had been one of two faculty advisors to the graduating class a year ahead of mine. As a going away gift, they bought her a t-shirt that read "To err is human, to forgive is out of the question." She had a reputation, academically speaking, for being a complete hard-ass. She wouldn't have had it any other way.

 

Research was a one semester English elective that you got into only if Ms. Schulz thought you could handle it. And what did we do in this class? We wrote research papers. Four of them. That was the entire semester. And there was bloody near not enough time to do it all.

 

Keep in mind, this is long before Google or anything of that nature. For our research, we had to drive to the local university library (~25 minutes away) and use the card catalog and abstract collections to find articles. Our instructor had us keep our citations on index cards, along with topic sentences and other structural details of the paper. I used maybe 200 index cards that semester.

 

It's also important to remember that this was well before most people had access to word processors. So I typed up multiple drafts of each paper on a typewriter my parents found at a pawn shop. It was not one that came with a correction ribbon, so I had to use the little correction film where you would slide it in and hit the same letter key to erase it. It seems to me that I used correction fluid on the first draft of the first paper, and got a comment back that said something about their being more correction fluid than actual paper. Which, given my incredibly lackluster typing skills back in the day, was probably not much of an exaggeration.

 

My little podunk high school didn't offer AP classes, so this was universally acknowledged as the hardest course taught in the school. Our class valedictorian earned an A. She was the first in 4 years. I took my C and happily got the heck out of Dodge. 

 

But I will say this: I've never earned a grade lower than a B on any paper I've written since.

 

I went to a private elementary school, and we learned how to write research papers starting in the 4th grade. For grades 5 through 8, we were required to participate in the annual DAR Essay contest. The experience was similar to yours, with the exception that the papers didn't need to be typed*. In eighth grade, I won an honorable mention for my paper on Cornwallis at the Battle of Yorktown.

 

 

*Eraser-Mate pens were the favored writing instrument, but I am left-handed, so the ink would smear if I didn't keep a piece of paper folded up under my hand. I'd still have to go over the finished paper and erase the occasional smudge.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

 

I think I have actually done that before. 

[Cancer]

It often occurs from people using the Optical Reconnaissance strategy of taking exams. 

[Cancer]

Quote

Hello Professor Cancer,

 

I've just finished up my moon lab and found my calculations to be off. My process is correct but my answer doesn't line up with what I searched up to be the lunar day of the moon. Should I redo the lab to get a closer answer and a better grade or will an inaccurate answer not affect my final score?

 

Quote

Submit what you have.  There are lots of good reasons (of which I have told you none) why you shouldn't get the right answer.  You aren't graded on whether you get the right answer.  People who do get the right answer, frankly, get investigated for having "dry-labbed" it, that is, faked their data, for which the penalty is the same as if you didn't turn it in at all.  That phenomenon used to happen a lot more before I put in the "picture of moon as you measured it" requirement.

 

[Bazza]

 

[Bazza]

 

[Bazza]

"Weber’s embrace of asceticism, empirically grounded scholarship, and value pluralism in “The Scholar’s Work” invited immediate criticism. But a more prominent target in recent years has been Weber’s account of disenchantment, which puts “de-magicking,” or Entzauberung, at the center of a master narrative of the West. This narrative has become a popular foil in scholarly discussions of the tenacious persistence of myth, magic of all kinds, the occult, and religion in Western culture. That is, in identifying the continued existence of people who pray or claim to commune with spirits, scholars often claim to be unsettling a reigning comprehensive narrative largely attributed to Weber and “The Scholar’s Work.”

 

But Weber didn’t suggest that disenchantment was simply another name for secularization. Intensely pious 16th-century Calvinists, he argued in The Protestant Ethic, had helped disenchant the world by denying the Catholic sacraments their “magic.” Similarly, humanistic scholarship, such as philology, along with the natural and physical sciences, acted as agents of disenchantment by stripping literature and nature of certain mysteries and eroding the belief that the world has in itself, independent of any human activity, “any such thing as a ‘meaning’!”

 

Often overlooked is that in the very lecture in which Weber developed his most extensive account of disenchantment, he also discusses the longing for re-enchantment, transcendence, and utopia — both inside and outside the university. As Weber understood it, the very agents of disenchantment, such as disciplinary, university-based scholarship, had created a desire for re-enchantment, leading to a cult of “authentic experience,” especially among cultured elites and intellectuals, those most likely to be fully enmeshed in, if not enthralled with, the modernizing systems of rationality.

 

Nowhere was the desire for re-enchantment more evident than among those devoted to the modern humanities..."

 

Continued...

 

Max Weber Invented the Crisis of the Humanities

https://www.chronicle.com/article/max-weber-invented-the-crisis-of-the-humanities/

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

[Cancer]

Left out "incipient asteroid strike", but that might fall under Alien Invasion depending on the level of the students.

 

[Cancer]

==========================

 

7 hours ago, Bazza said:

"Weber’s embrace of asceticism, empirically grounded scholarship, and value pluralism in “The Scholar’s Work” invited immediate criticism. But a more prominent target in recent years has been Weber’s account of disenchantment, which puts “de-magicking,” or Entzauberung, at the center of a master narrative of the West. This narrative has become a popular foil in scholarly discussions of the tenacious persistence of myth, magic of all kinds, the occult, and religion in Western culture. That is, in identifying the continued existence of people who pray or claim to commune with spirits, scholars often claim to be unsettling a reigning comprehensive narrative largely attributed to Weber and “The Scholar’s Work.”

 

But Weber didn’t suggest that disenchantment was simply another name for secularization. Intensely pious 16th-century Calvinists, he argued in The Protestant Ethic, had helped disenchant the world by denying the Catholic sacraments their “magic.” Similarly, humanistic scholarship, such as philology, along with the natural and physical sciences, acted as agents of disenchantment by stripping literature and nature of certain mysteries and eroding the belief that the world has in itself, independent of any human activity, “any such thing as a ‘meaning’!”

 

Often overlooked is that in the very lecture in which Weber developed his most extensive account of disenchantment, he also discusses the longing for re-enchantment, transcendence, and utopia — both inside and outside the university. As Weber understood it, the very agents of disenchantment, such as disciplinary, university-based scholarship, had created a desire for re-enchantment, leading to a cult of “authentic experience,” especially among cultured elites and intellectuals, those most likely to be fully enmeshed in, if not enthralled with, the modernizing systems of rationality.

 

Nowhere was the desire for re-enchantment more evident than among those devoted to the modern humanities..."

 

Continued...

 

Max Weber Invented the Crisis of the Humanities

https://www.chronicle.com/article/max-weber-invented-the-crisis-of-the-humanities/

 

There's a smattering of entries in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (I own a copy somewhere in this midden) bearing on these ideas, perhaps drawing on the same sources.  There's a review of the Enc of F at https://www.jstor.org/stable/43308349  though only the first page of it lies outside the paywall.