Yeah, the carob thing, I was thinking about that the other day. I can only guess it was some kind of "letting kids have caffeine is evil" thing from the 1970s, but then again, cola has caffeine, so....i don't know.
And I like carob okay on its own, but I also like chocolate. I don't want carob instead of chocolate, it is a different flavor.
I have seen brownie recipes calling for mashed up unseasoned black beans, which seems more reasonable to me than beets, but if I'm going to go to the trouble to COOK black beans (so as to have them unseasoned - the canned ones mostly have garlic and stuff), I might as well go the rest of the way and make black-bean soup or something instead of expending the effort on brownies.
But if you make reverse chizza (that is, pizza crust and sauce BUT WITH fried chicken - heh, maybe "chicken tendies" - on top of it), wouldn't that be new?
then again, bbq chicken pizza has been a thing since before I had to give up eating salty commercial pizza, so.
(the kind I make -without celery or gross green peppers in it - is pretty good, or so I think).
the real abomination is insisting one's steak be cooked well-done. If we are gonna have a civil war over stuff like that, I am already assigning myself to Team Rare.
The Chizza looks like nothing more than a bad chain-restaurant chicken parmesan without the pasta on the side. I'm not sure why people are so upset this is not a US thing. (Standard disclaimer: I could make better for myself at home)
As for free-range eggs: so they're not "better" for you. Neither are they worse, and they TASTE better (and yes, I notice a difference). That's reason enough for me to want them. And there are few enough things I still "can" eat that I want those things to taste as good as they can.
I buy eggs with brown shells because it seems easier for me to spot and remove that fragment of shell that follows along every time I break an egg. I don't fancy eggshell bits in my food.
I see it as reminding myself that the things of this world don't have control over me.
(Also, I really do need to drop at least 10 pounds....stress eating since last fall).
I know the original tradition was "offering up" your suffering as some kind of sacrifice, but I like better to think of it as "no, this thing is not really that important to me, I can put it aside for 40 days." (And unlike a friend of mine, I'm not going to cheat and say "But Sundays aren't part of Lent" - they aren't, but....)
I was gonna give up cussing, too, but I cleaned house today and the first time the fishing trash-can liner fell into the fishing kitchen trashcan - well, I broke that one straight off.
I dunno. In my faith tradition it's more common to take on something "beneficial" (service or prayer or the like) than to give up, but I've already started sharply cutting sweet and carbohydrate consumption (to lose weight, and hopefully so my bloodwork later this month will be good). So maybe I go with that.
In past years I tried giving up getting irritated at the little things (like when someone ahead of you in the checkout line has a ream of coupons, argues with the checker over the price of something and THEN pulls out their checkbook and starts hunting for a pen) but I was not that successful at it.
I gave up frivolous spending for a while but I found that made my general attitude worse, so....I'm not sure the aim of this is for me to be grumpy and cranky. (Then again: the "giving up frivolous spending" was not for a limited time, it was "until the budget retrenchment here ends" which is probably "never," so)
Yeah: giving up sweets is easier for me than giving up the occasional purchase of a yard of fabric or a book. So I'm going with that.
Yeah, this is part of it. When I moved down here, my parents helped me move in, and we decided the first night we were going out to dinner. So we asked the apartment manager where she would recommend.....her recommendations were all chain restaurants 1/2 hour (one way) away....
that's the biggest thing I can't get used to about living in what is essentially the rural West - no one thinks it's a big deal to drive an hour's round trip for even terribly ordinary restaurant food (one of the restaurants the manager recommended was Applebee's.)
(Things have not changed greatly in 15 years, except there is now an Applebee's in my town but so far I haven't driven the 7 or so minutes cross-town to eat there....)
I just wish we had a decent large supermarket that was not wal-mart. But I seem to be in a minority there.
"warmart"? Freudian slip or intentional? Either way, it's awesome.
My objection to wal-mart is not political either; it's that the one I have experience with is poorly run, usually dirty, poorly-stocked, and prone to carry a product I like for about six weeks and then abruptly drop it and replace it with a far worse brand. (They used to carry a brand of real-meat reduced-sodium sausages I loved; that freezer space is now given over to a Quorn product, which my allergist told me could possibly kill me. I can't imagine they sell much Quorn)
I'd rather go hungry for a day than shop at Wal-mart on a payday Friday.
(I often refer to it as Voldemart. And yeah, it sucks, but in small towns sometimes it's the only choice absent a long drive or waiting on something to be shipped to you.)
And I used to love Land's End but then they lost their way. I guess L.L. Bean is still halfway decent even if a lot of their stuff is made overseas (which makes me concerned about the qualities and corner-cutting)
My mom said, sadly, on more than one occasion, "I raised you kids to be too nice." ("Nice" = somewhat pacifistic, and generally deferential to authorities)
She's probably right. I've never been able to tell people who richly deserved it to "stuff it" or similar; I'm more prone to crying instead.
and here I am, praying MY local wal-mart doesn't drop carrying the organically-raised milk I prefer....different Walmarts are different.
(I wish I knew where the "rich folks" in my town shopped. There HAVE to be some and I doubt they drive the 90 minutes and back to and from Dallas every week for groceries)
I used to like Kohl's but after a few years of their women's clothing re-running the worst of what I called "70s malaise colors" and a bad incident with what HAD to be a mis-marked blouse (there is no way an extra-large should not fit me, but at the time I ended up in tears because I was on my last nerve and just needed a plain white blouse, and there was exactly one style in the entire store), I haven't really been back to them.
I said I didn't buy online but actually I have bought several loose-fitting dresses from Vermont Country Store and been pretty happy - the problem comes when it's clothes that have to be bodyskimmming or something like jeans where there are different aspects to the fit (hip, waist, and inseam). Most of my jeans actually come from the farm store now; they're cheaper and they have a wide range of sizes.
One of the worst epithets on the schoolyard was to imply someone’s clothes came from Kmart
Ouch. I remember that insult from schoolyard days. (I took a LOT of crap because my parents, being frugal, bought me a pair of Wrangler jeans - this being around 1981 or so when the designer jeans fad first hit, and hit hard. For part of seventh grade my nickname was "Wrangler," said with the most snobby sneering intonation you can imagine. The thing is? Had we lived where I live now, Wranglers would have been at the very least acceptable, and more likely would brand me as a "rodeo chick," and therefore, cool. But I grew up in a snobby elitist town).
And yeah, I remember Penney's as sort of the midrange store....though where I grew up, we also had O'Neil's, which seemed like a cut above in the quality of what it sold (I don't remember how prices compared; my parents mostly paid for my clothes until I was in college). Sears was also seen as "kinda okay" though generally maybe a little unhip. (O'Neil's sadly, was engulfed by the Macy's beast some years back and I can only assume the old O'Neil's where I bought clothes as a kid are now closed-up Macy's.)
I also hate shopping for clothes online; I like to try stuff on before I buy and I don't care how generous anyone's refund policy is, it's a PITA to have to box that "large" that is too large back up and drive out to the PO or the UPS store and send it back....
Where I live now shopping is kind of woeful unless you go to the super-upscale store (I can't afford it); otherwise you're stuck with driving all over Creation because how how shopping areas are laid out - Kohl's in one strip mall, Penney's in another, Lane Bryant in yet a third, and the Dillard's is way over in the dying mall I would normally never go to....
I actually do most of my clothes shopping when I am up visiting my parents, where they still have a REAL mall with more than one store of a type in it. Not these silly glorified strip malls consisting of three or four "big box" stores where you then have to drive crosstown if you can't find what you want.
Add in that the things I listed above are part of the reason I took this gig, and are a big part of why I stay here: the ability to see someone go from a scared freshman who doesn't quite know what they're doing to a senior who has med school/grad school acceptance and knows how to write a proper paper is far, far more satisfying than sitting in my office and clicking buttons to "interact" with students I've never met.
I'll just leave here that back in the late 80s/early 90s I had a number of friends who were either immigrants from, or children of immigrants from, India.
They took a fair amount of crap for being who they were. In some cases it was probably a skin-color thing. In other cases I strongly suspect it was some kind of inferiority-complex thing in the white people who were harassing them - they were good students and were poised to achieve a lot with their life, and that seems to be a common "positive stereotype" of people from India. I vaguely remember one case of what was probably a hate crime against an Indian student (not someone I knew; it was a big campus) at my undergrad university. They were beaten up and a slur that was clearly anti-Hindu/anti-Indian culture was used. (Some of you may know which one; I'm not going to repeat it)
So the "brown skinned person with accent is Other" thing isn't new, though it may be increasing over time.
I fully expect to see the Othering get worse before it gets better. And not just of people with "not white" skin - lots of different people who fit into lots of different groups.
a. Our drawing card traditionally has been small, high-personal-attention classes
b. We have an "underserved" student body, as in, people who don't have a lot of family experience with college, and so "how to college" is part of our instruction
c. Some of our more-rural kids have crummy internet access
And yet, we keep hearing how this is going to save us, and I am just very skeptical. It feels to me like we're trying to do what "everyone" else is doing instead of trying to focus on what makes us unusual.
I dunno. We try to stay inexpensive but state appropriations keep getting cut (we are down to about 30% of our budget from state sources, from much higher when I started this gig) and I think people are flailing in fear that we're gonna lose the rest of that.
I have a ~5 minute commute. The tradeoff I pay for that is that "good shopping" (e.g., not walmart) is an hour's round trip away.
Some days I feel like "it would be so nice to live in a town with a decent grocery store." Other days, I really like being able to run home for lunch when I don't have afternoon classes.
at times I suspect I might be mildly dyslexic; I have occasionally done the "b for d" substitution and the like while writing, and if I'm tired I find reading a lot more difficult.
Tachistoscopes! We did that in seventh grade. I hated it because there was that pressure to read and digest the SINGLE line you were offered before it clicked on to the next one. It felt to me like a very unnatural way to read, and it also reminded me of that old Charlie Chaplin movie where he got stuck in giant cogwheels.
I'm still not sure how it helped anything. I was a good reader - an avid reader - but my comprehension tested more poorly with the stupid tachistoscope things because of the stress they gave me and also because I couldn't look back to check something like I would with, you know, a real book.
I wrote about it on my blog once and someone commented that a similar technique was used to train plane-spotters in WWII. I could see THAT being useful because being able to identify quickly based on a glance would be important for knowing "friend or foe" but it seemed pretty stupid as a reading tool.
the math thing sounds like SRA for reading, which I remember.
I kind of liked SRA, even though I realize now it lacked any discussion between students because we were all on our own levels.
And yeah, the human-interaction thing is one reason why I am an online-learning skeptic: people are already bad enough at humaning with other humans, we don't need to isolate them more.
That's not to say I don't think the (perceived) cost-savings and flashiness of online education is going to lead to some universities closing or going 100% online, or greater pressures for faculty to teach that way.
My dad tells me "Oh, this is just like IETV in the mid 1970s" and I hope he's right (in that IETV went away) but I'm enough of a pessimist to fear he isn't.
Yeah, but online learning often overlooks the lab component, or pushes for virtual labs. This is the bugbear my department is currently debating.
Personally, I HATE virtual labs and would resist doing them if I were a student. And as a faculty member, I have had a few students come through my classes who did virtual labs for their lower levels, and they are the ones I have to go through the whole litany of glassware with ("This is a beaker. It is for holding liquids. It is not accurate for measuring liquids; for that, you want a graduated cylinder, which is this...")
But I can totally see those who are into the idea of "the most at the cheapest" figuring whatever is lost in virtual labs isn't worth keeping.
I have 12 years before I can make full retirement and every day that passes I wonder if my job is going to last for that long. And that's sad, because I really love teaching (when it goes well). And labs *are* the most fun part of teaching.
But the whole "but online education" thing has been going on for years; we are regularly subjected to lectures, I am not sure why, as to how MOOCs or online classes are the wave of the future, and there will be something like ten "superstar" professors in the whole nation, and the rest of us will work as minimum-wage graders, at least until a good grading algorithm is developed. As I said, I'm not sure why we get that anti-pep-talk at the start of every fall semester but we do. (Perhaps to make us grateful for the jobs we currently have? Even with no pay raises for 10 years and additional duties we're told to take on? idk.)
I worry about this at my parents who are retired professors and they laugh off my concerns, but they're not out in the workforce and I don't think they fully see how AI is going to change every aspect of employment....
I once opined we like superhero movies for similar reasons: we all hold the fantasy of doing something Big and something Good when most of us are stuck on a treadmill of work that is marginally meaningful at best.
Or Harry Potter, for that matter: the fantasy of being something special.
And yeah, I know in another thread I talked about rejecting the Chosen One narrative, but really, deep down, I would kind of like to be that one who had the power to make things a lot better. And not just the platitudinous "but you're helping shape the next generation of doctors" crap better.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Morning Ed: Food {2017.03.02.Th}”
Yeah, the carob thing, I was thinking about that the other day. I can only guess it was some kind of "letting kids have caffeine is evil" thing from the 1970s, but then again, cola has caffeine, so....i don't know.
And I like carob okay on its own, but I also like chocolate. I don't want carob instead of chocolate, it is a different flavor.
I have seen brownie recipes calling for mashed up unseasoned black beans, which seems more reasonable to me than beets, but if I'm going to go to the trouble to COOK black beans (so as to have them unseasoned - the canned ones mostly have garlic and stuff), I might as well go the rest of the way and make black-bean soup or something instead of expending the effort on brownies.
"
But if you make reverse chizza (that is, pizza crust and sauce BUT WITH fried chicken - heh, maybe "chicken tendies" - on top of it), wouldn't that be new?
then again, bbq chicken pizza has been a thing since before I had to give up eating salty commercial pizza, so.
"
that sounds like my kind of meatloaf.
I also often make lamb loaf, lest people accuse me of being too stolidly Middle American. Mmmm. Lamb loaf with Cumberland sauce....
(I'm 3/8 Irish and I grew up in a part of the country with many Greek and Slavic immigrants, so lamb is a familiar meat)
"
I have had sausage made with cherries (it's a Traverse City thing) but no one can convince me raisins would improve a hamburger.
"
Not All Meat Loaf.
(the kind I make -without celery or gross green peppers in it - is pretty good, or so I think).
the real abomination is insisting one's steak be cooked well-done. If we are gonna have a civil war over stuff like that, I am already assigning myself to Team Rare.
"
Or break a got-dang tooth, which is what I worry about.
also it's just super unaesthetic and yes that matters to me.
"
The Chizza looks like nothing more than a bad chain-restaurant chicken parmesan without the pasta on the side. I'm not sure why people are so upset this is not a US thing. (Standard disclaimer: I could make better for myself at home)
As for free-range eggs: so they're not "better" for you. Neither are they worse, and they TASTE better (and yes, I notice a difference). That's reason enough for me to want them. And there are few enough things I still "can" eat that I want those things to taste as good as they can.
I buy eggs with brown shells because it seems easier for me to spot and remove that fragment of shell that follows along every time I break an egg. I don't fancy eggshell bits in my food.
On “Lent!”
I didn't say 'fish'......
(heh. am now flashing back to "A Christmas Story" and how Ralphie "didn't say fudge....")
"
I see it as reminding myself that the things of this world don't have control over me.
(Also, I really do need to drop at least 10 pounds....stress eating since last fall).
I know the original tradition was "offering up" your suffering as some kind of sacrifice, but I like better to think of it as "no, this thing is not really that important to me, I can put it aside for 40 days." (And unlike a friend of mine, I'm not going to cheat and say "But Sundays aren't part of Lent" - they aren't, but....)
I was gonna give up cussing, too, but I cleaned house today and the first time the fishing trash-can liner fell into the fishing kitchen trashcan - well, I broke that one straight off.
"
I dunno. In my faith tradition it's more common to take on something "beneficial" (service or prayer or the like) than to give up, but I've already started sharply cutting sweet and carbohydrate consumption (to lose weight, and hopefully so my bloodwork later this month will be good). So maybe I go with that.
In past years I tried giving up getting irritated at the little things (like when someone ahead of you in the checkout line has a ream of coupons, argues with the checker over the price of something and THEN pulls out their checkbook and starts hunting for a pen) but I was not that successful at it.
I gave up frivolous spending for a while but I found that made my general attitude worse, so....I'm not sure the aim of this is for me to be grumpy and cranky. (Then again: the "giving up frivolous spending" was not for a limited time, it was "until the budget retrenchment here ends" which is probably "never," so)
Yeah: giving up sweets is easier for me than giving up the occasional purchase of a yard of fabric or a book. So I'm going with that.
On “Come Back to the Five and Dime, JCP, JCP”
Yeah, this is part of it. When I moved down here, my parents helped me move in, and we decided the first night we were going out to dinner. So we asked the apartment manager where she would recommend.....her recommendations were all chain restaurants 1/2 hour (one way) away....
that's the biggest thing I can't get used to about living in what is essentially the rural West - no one thinks it's a big deal to drive an hour's round trip for even terribly ordinary restaurant food (one of the restaurants the manager recommended was Applebee's.)
(Things have not changed greatly in 15 years, except there is now an Applebee's in my town but so far I haven't driven the 7 or so minutes cross-town to eat there....)
I just wish we had a decent large supermarket that was not wal-mart. But I seem to be in a minority there.
"
"warmart"? Freudian slip or intentional? Either way, it's awesome.
My objection to wal-mart is not political either; it's that the one I have experience with is poorly run, usually dirty, poorly-stocked, and prone to carry a product I like for about six weeks and then abruptly drop it and replace it with a far worse brand. (They used to carry a brand of real-meat reduced-sodium sausages I loved; that freezer space is now given over to a Quorn product, which my allergist told me could possibly kill me. I can't imagine they sell much Quorn)
I'd rather go hungry for a day than shop at Wal-mart on a payday Friday.
(I often refer to it as Voldemart. And yeah, it sucks, but in small towns sometimes it's the only choice absent a long drive or waiting on something to be shipped to you.)
And I used to love Land's End but then they lost their way. I guess L.L. Bean is still halfway decent even if a lot of their stuff is made overseas (which makes me concerned about the qualities and corner-cutting)
"
My mom said, sadly, on more than one occasion, "I raised you kids to be too nice." ("Nice" = somewhat pacifistic, and generally deferential to authorities)
She's probably right. I've never been able to tell people who richly deserved it to "stuff it" or similar; I'm more prone to crying instead.
"
and here I am, praying MY local wal-mart doesn't drop carrying the organically-raised milk I prefer....different Walmarts are different.
(I wish I knew where the "rich folks" in my town shopped. There HAVE to be some and I doubt they drive the 90 minutes and back to and from Dallas every week for groceries)
"
I used to like Kohl's but after a few years of their women's clothing re-running the worst of what I called "70s malaise colors" and a bad incident with what HAD to be a mis-marked blouse (there is no way an extra-large should not fit me, but at the time I ended up in tears because I was on my last nerve and just needed a plain white blouse, and there was exactly one style in the entire store), I haven't really been back to them.
I said I didn't buy online but actually I have bought several loose-fitting dresses from Vermont Country Store and been pretty happy - the problem comes when it's clothes that have to be bodyskimmming or something like jeans where there are different aspects to the fit (hip, waist, and inseam). Most of my jeans actually come from the farm store now; they're cheaper and they have a wide range of sizes.
"
Ouch. I remember that insult from schoolyard days. (I took a LOT of crap because my parents, being frugal, bought me a pair of Wrangler jeans - this being around 1981 or so when the designer jeans fad first hit, and hit hard. For part of seventh grade my nickname was "Wrangler," said with the most snobby sneering intonation you can imagine. The thing is? Had we lived where I live now, Wranglers would have been at the very least acceptable, and more likely would brand me as a "rodeo chick," and therefore, cool. But I grew up in a snobby elitist town).
And yeah, I remember Penney's as sort of the midrange store....though where I grew up, we also had O'Neil's, which seemed like a cut above in the quality of what it sold (I don't remember how prices compared; my parents mostly paid for my clothes until I was in college). Sears was also seen as "kinda okay" though generally maybe a little unhip. (O'Neil's sadly, was engulfed by the Macy's beast some years back and I can only assume the old O'Neil's where I bought clothes as a kid are now closed-up Macy's.)
I also hate shopping for clothes online; I like to try stuff on before I buy and I don't care how generous anyone's refund policy is, it's a PITA to have to box that "large" that is too large back up and drive out to the PO or the UPS store and send it back....
Where I live now shopping is kind of woeful unless you go to the super-upscale store (I can't afford it); otherwise you're stuck with driving all over Creation because how how shopping areas are laid out - Kohl's in one strip mall, Penney's in another, Lane Bryant in yet a third, and the Dillard's is way over in the dying mall I would normally never go to....
I actually do most of my clothes shopping when I am up visiting my parents, where they still have a REAL mall with more than one store of a type in it. Not these silly glorified strip malls consisting of three or four "big box" stores where you then have to drive crosstown if you can't find what you want.
On “Morning Ed: Automation {2017.02.27.M}”
Add in that the things I listed above are part of the reason I took this gig, and are a big part of why I stay here: the ability to see someone go from a scared freshman who doesn't quite know what they're doing to a senior who has med school/grad school acceptance and knows how to write a proper paper is far, far more satisfying than sitting in my office and clicking buttons to "interact" with students I've never met.
On “Dear Desis, We Don’t End Up Winning This”
I'll just leave here that back in the late 80s/early 90s I had a number of friends who were either immigrants from, or children of immigrants from, India.
They took a fair amount of crap for being who they were. In some cases it was probably a skin-color thing. In other cases I strongly suspect it was some kind of inferiority-complex thing in the white people who were harassing them - they were good students and were poised to achieve a lot with their life, and that seems to be a common "positive stereotype" of people from India. I vaguely remember one case of what was probably a hate crime against an Indian student (not someone I knew; it was a big campus) at my undergrad university. They were beaten up and a slur that was clearly anti-Hindu/anti-Indian culture was used. (Some of you may know which one; I'm not going to repeat it)
So the "brown skinned person with accent is Other" thing isn't new, though it may be increasing over time.
I fully expect to see the Othering get worse before it gets better. And not just of people with "not white" skin - lots of different people who fit into lots of different groups.
On “Morning Ed: Automation {2017.02.27.M}”
I think MOOCs are a bad fit for us, as
a. Our drawing card traditionally has been small, high-personal-attention classes
b. We have an "underserved" student body, as in, people who don't have a lot of family experience with college, and so "how to college" is part of our instruction
c. Some of our more-rural kids have crummy internet access
And yet, we keep hearing how this is going to save us, and I am just very skeptical. It feels to me like we're trying to do what "everyone" else is doing instead of trying to focus on what makes us unusual.
I dunno. We try to stay inexpensive but state appropriations keep getting cut (we are down to about 30% of our budget from state sources, from much higher when I started this gig) and I think people are flailing in fear that we're gonna lose the rest of that.
"
I have a ~5 minute commute. The tradeoff I pay for that is that "good shopping" (e.g., not walmart) is an hour's round trip away.
Some days I feel like "it would be so nice to live in a town with a decent grocery store." Other days, I really like being able to run home for lunch when I don't have afternoon classes.
"
at times I suspect I might be mildly dyslexic; I have occasionally done the "b for d" substitution and the like while writing, and if I'm tired I find reading a lot more difficult.
"
Tachistoscopes! We did that in seventh grade. I hated it because there was that pressure to read and digest the SINGLE line you were offered before it clicked on to the next one. It felt to me like a very unnatural way to read, and it also reminded me of that old Charlie Chaplin movie where he got stuck in giant cogwheels.
I'm still not sure how it helped anything. I was a good reader - an avid reader - but my comprehension tested more poorly with the stupid tachistoscope things because of the stress they gave me and also because I couldn't look back to check something like I would with, you know, a real book.
I wrote about it on my blog once and someone commented that a similar technique was used to train plane-spotters in WWII. I could see THAT being useful because being able to identify quickly based on a glance would be important for knowing "friend or foe" but it seemed pretty stupid as a reading tool.
"
the math thing sounds like SRA for reading, which I remember.
I kind of liked SRA, even though I realize now it lacked any discussion between students because we were all on our own levels.
And yeah, the human-interaction thing is one reason why I am an online-learning skeptic: people are already bad enough at humaning with other humans, we don't need to isolate them more.
That's not to say I don't think the (perceived) cost-savings and flashiness of online education is going to lead to some universities closing or going 100% online, or greater pressures for faculty to teach that way.
My dad tells me "Oh, this is just like IETV in the mid 1970s" and I hope he's right (in that IETV went away) but I'm enough of a pessimist to fear he isn't.
"
Yeah, but online learning often overlooks the lab component, or pushes for virtual labs. This is the bugbear my department is currently debating.
Personally, I HATE virtual labs and would resist doing them if I were a student. And as a faculty member, I have had a few students come through my classes who did virtual labs for their lower levels, and they are the ones I have to go through the whole litany of glassware with ("This is a beaker. It is for holding liquids. It is not accurate for measuring liquids; for that, you want a graduated cylinder, which is this...")
But I can totally see those who are into the idea of "the most at the cheapest" figuring whatever is lost in virtual labs isn't worth keeping.
I have 12 years before I can make full retirement and every day that passes I wonder if my job is going to last for that long. And that's sad, because I really love teaching (when it goes well). And labs *are* the most fun part of teaching.
But the whole "but online education" thing has been going on for years; we are regularly subjected to lectures, I am not sure why, as to how MOOCs or online classes are the wave of the future, and there will be something like ten "superstar" professors in the whole nation, and the rest of us will work as minimum-wage graders, at least until a good grading algorithm is developed. As I said, I'm not sure why we get that anti-pep-talk at the start of every fall semester but we do. (Perhaps to make us grateful for the jobs we currently have? Even with no pay raises for 10 years and additional duties we're told to take on? idk.)
I worry about this at my parents who are retired professors and they laugh off my concerns, but they're not out in the workforce and I don't think they fully see how AI is going to change every aspect of employment....
On “Objects Have Free Will; People Don’t”
I once opined we like superhero movies for similar reasons: we all hold the fantasy of doing something Big and something Good when most of us are stuck on a treadmill of work that is marginally meaningful at best.
Or Harry Potter, for that matter: the fantasy of being something special.
And yeah, I know in another thread I talked about rejecting the Chosen One narrative, but really, deep down, I would kind of like to be that one who had the power to make things a lot better. And not just the platitudinous "but you're helping shape the next generation of doctors" crap better.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.