The Academics Thread

[Cancer]

Need to put up this one again, too.

[Cancer]

Months ago, the various committee heads who command others' time nailed their meeting times in other people's  Outlook calendars.  Back in January I had two such things installed in my calendar for today.

 

Of course, no committeelord ever looks at the actual calendar when they do this.  So it came to the various committeelords' attention earlier this week that they had made a mistake.  This being a Jesuit institution, both  Good Friday and Easter Monday are days off.  With perhaps most classes being on a MWF meeting schedule, that means that the committeelords could, if they canceled their meetings for today, have a five-day weekend rather than a four-day weekend, and only their own authority prevented this from occurring. 

 

One of my meetings scheduled for this afternoon got canceled on Tuesday.  It took until 3PM yesterday for other one to rationalize himself into a concept which had never before occurred to a committeelord ("I respect your time"), but that meeting also got canceled.  So as I anticipated about this time last week, I have de facto today off as well.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Students are being done a great disservice. 

 

 

[Cancer]

After blundering across it again, I am seriously contemplating doing this next year.

[Ternaugh]

39 minutes ago, Cancer said:

After blundering across it again, I am seriously contemplating doing this next year.

 

Back in high school, my US History teachers used to run slide shows and talk about each picture. They'd occasionally go off-script to see if anyone was still awake in the class.

 

Click. "And here's a picture of Dolly Madison, a great woman entrepreneur. She had a fleet of trucks that delivered baked goods throughout the South."

 

Click. "And here's one of the new rides being developed at Disneyland." (I'm pretty sure that it was this picture of the Steamship Caroline going over Niagara Falls)

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

[Bazza]

He got it in one. 

[archer]

For those of you who give essay tests:

 

https://www.officedepot.com/cm/print-and-copy/shredding? -scroll down to get a coupon for 5 Free Pounds of in-store paper shredding at Office Depot stores. Expires 4/23.

[Old Man]

On 4/17/2022 at 4:19 AM, Logan.1179 said:

This is precisely what my oldest’s AP US History class is like, only the teacher means all of it and tests his students on it, because he hates them. 

[Cancer]

I admit I think that class would be so much better if the AP stood for Armor Piercing.

[Pariah]

Armor Piercing Chemistry = Fluoroantimonic acid 

[Bazza]

Armour Piercing Philosophy would be rhetoric. 

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Quote from Neil Postman's "The Disappearance of Childhood"

 

 

 

[archer]

16 minutes ago, Logan.1179 said:

Quote from Neil Postman's "The Disappearance of Childhood"

 

 

 

 

Shouldn't that be a quote from "The Appearance of Childhood"?

 

My earliest memory is of my mother plopping me down in a strawberry patch as she picked strawberries by hand, along with dozens of other people, for pay. 

 

As soon as I was old enough to identify a fruit or vegetable, pull it off the vine, and put it into a container rather than in my mouth, I was expected to help.

 

When we got home, we worked in our own garden because we depended on what we were growing in order to have something to eat. When it got too dark to work outside, we were inside doing stuff like shelling beans and washing produce in preparation for canning or freezing.

 

After gardening season, we were busy outside cutting and loading firewood, either for sale or to keep ourselves from freezing during winter.

 

School was leisure. We had air conditioning most of the time inside and recess (with no work) outside. In elementary school, I worked in the school cafeteria before school started (mostly mopping floors) in order to pay for my school lunch. But other than that, school was childhood and leisure.

[Old Man]

So, serious post time. 

 

Over the weekend I got an email from the school saying that there had been a social media threat against the school and that the necessary precautions were being taken.  I hadn't seen the threat but I asked my son (whose native habitat is social media) and he said that it was your run of the mill gonna-shoot-up-the-school online threat.  He didn't seem too bothered by it and, having grown up in an era of school prank bomb threats, neither was I.  So on Monday he set off for school as usual.

 

Then we got a text message from the parents of one of his friends letting us know that they were keeping their son home from school that day.  And it turns out they were in the majority--2/3 of the students stayed home from school on Monday.  If my son wasn't bothered at first, he sure as hell was when his classes were largely empty and there were a dozen cops roaming the campus.

 

Now it is Wednesday and half the students still aren't going to school.  We are getting emails from the teachers begging parents to send their kids back to class.  (And bravo to the teachers for being there, I certainly don't get death threats at my place of employment.)  The place is still teeming with cops.  No one has any information about the threat that they can tell us, because there is an ongoing investigation.

 

So I guess this bothers me on two levels.

 

First of all--seriously wtf kind of worst timeline is this, where people can literally threaten to kill kids, and we have to take those threats this seriously?

 

Second, as a parent, what do I do?  I try to impress the importance of education, I have literally shown my kids how schoolkids in Afghanistan risk their lives to go to school.  But is it negligent to send him to school?  Is it making a mountain out of a molehill to keep him home?  What's the solution here?

 

(Note that I am posting here rather than the Political Thread because I just don't have the energy to fight that particular battle, again, right now.  This is just somewhere between a vent and a plea.  Because this has all become very real, even if nothing has actually happened yet.)

[archer]

1 hour ago, Old Man said:

So, serious post time. 

 

Over the weekend I got an email from the school saying that there had been a social media threat against the school and that the necessary precautions were being taken.  I hadn't seen the threat but I asked my son (whose native habitat is social media) and he said that it was your run of the mill gonna-shoot-up-the-school online threat.  He didn't seem too bothered by it and, having grown up in an era of school prank bomb threats, neither was I.  So on Monday he set off for school as usual.

 

Then we got a text message from the parents of one of his friends letting us know that they were keeping their son home from school that day.  And it turns out they were in the majority--2/3 of the students stayed home from school on Monday.  If my son wasn't bothered at first, he sure as hell was when his classes were largely empty and there were a dozen cops roaming the campus.

 

Now it is Wednesday and half the students still aren't going to school.  We are getting emails from the teachers begging parents to send their kids back to class.  (And bravo to the teachers for being there, I certainly don't get death threats at my place of employment.)  The place is still teeming with cops.  No one has any information about the threat that they can tell us, because there is an ongoing investigation.

 

So I guess this bothers me on two levels.

 

First of all--seriously wtf kind of worst timeline is this, where people can literally threaten to kill kids, and we have to take those threats this seriously?

 

Second, as a parent, what do I do?  I try to impress the importance of education, I have literally shown my kids how schoolkids in Afghanistan risk their lives to go to school.  But is it negligent to send him to school?  Is it making a mountain out of a molehill to keep him home?  What's the solution here?

 

(Note that I am posting here rather than the Political Thread because I just don't have the energy to fight that particular battle, again, right now.  This is just somewhere between a vent and a plea.  Because this has all become very real, even if nothing has actually happened yet.)

 

The chance that an event will happen at a school with more than half the students absent and with cops everywhere isn't very high at all. I'd be sending my kids to school.

 

Gunmen who are serious about killing students aren't going to show up while the (desired) targeted students wouldn't be there and there's enough police presence to stop them from achieving anything.

 

 

I'm reminded of bomb scares at the airline's HQ and reservations center in the 1990's. At the first one, they evacuated everyone and told them to go home with pay because it'd take hours to go through the buildings.

 

Then a few days later, there was another bomb scare just at the reservation center. And again they sent everyone home with pay.

 

Next bomb scare, sent everyone at the reservation center home with pay.

 

Next bomb scare, they made all the employees at the reservation center stand around in the parking lot for their entire shift. And the bomb scares stopped.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

[Bazza]

"This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn’s unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the problems that it raised but did not resolve. The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper “Scientific Knowledge as a Historical Product” and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, “The Presence of Past Science.” An introduction by the editor describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds and sheds light on its central philosophical problems. 
 

Kuhn’s aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. In his view, incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of the real world that science investigates, the rationality of scientific change, and the idea that scientific development is progressive."

 

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo181541288.html

[Starlord]

19 hours ago, Old Man said:

So, serious post time. 

 

(Note that I am posting here rather than the Political Thread because I just don't have the energy to fight that particular battle, again, right now.  This is just somewhere between a vent and a plea.  Because this has all become very real, even if nothing has actually happened yet.)

 

If this is a unique occurrence, perhaps hold them out of school for a day out of caution.  Although, with that many armed police protecting the school i think its safe to go.

 

Parenting these days is tough, man.  I empathize.  Heck, just properly monitoring social media and internet use for a child is a Herculean task.

[Old Man]

2 hours ago, Starlord said:

 

Parenting these days is tough, man.  I empathize.  Heck, just properly monitoring social media and internet use for a child is a Herculean task.

 

Lol I straight up surrendered on that last one during the pandemic.  They could be the next ISIS recruits for all I know.

[Pariah]

I was reading an article from The Atlantic on how use of the phrase "Hey guys" has become problematic. So from now on, I'll be using the phrases "Attention minions", "Eyes up front, simians", or "All right you primitive screwheads, listen up!" in class.

 

Just trying to do my part.

[Ternaugh]

1 hour ago, Pariah said:

I was reading an article from The Atlantic on how use of the phrase "Hey guys" has become problematic. So from now on, I'll be using the phrases "Attention minions", "Eyes up front, simians", or "All right you primitive screwheads, listen up!" in class.

 

Just trying to do my part.

 

How about "All You Zombies"?

[Cancer]

LISTEN UP, APES!

 

Now hear this ... now hear this ... (then follow it with this to see if they are paying attention at all)  (Bullhorn recommended)

 

AchTUNG!

 

Though for a gentler approach, you could try "O frickin' idiots who surround me"...

 

Or, just bring a whip to class and crack it.

 

 

[Pariah]

1 hour ago, Cancer said:

LISTEN UP, APES!

 

Reading this, my mind is conditioned to respond with, "You want to live forever?"

[tombrown803]

Now your going to get protests form the Apes and Monkeys! They are offended by being compared to stupid humans