Commenter Archive

Then I, too, am old.

Well, I kind of am already, but yeah, just hate the slang usage of "woke" and also the way there's developed a micturational combat over who is more woke than whom.

Link #2: Maybe Santa causes global warming? He finally automated that toy factory because he was told to stop using elf sweatshop labor?

And sometimes not-so-little-ones on the Squishables - I have a giant Squishable narwhal a friend sent me for my birthday several years ago. It is just the right size to prop my shoulders against while reading, and, I confess, sometimes it's nice to have something fuzzy to hug when life makes you sad. (My allergies and my crazy schedule preclude me having actual living furry pets)

Agreed.

Though I admit there's a certain schadenfreude in thinking of the First Lady having to wear a dress from JC Penney's or something. (Wasn't it Mrs. Ford who had the "good cloth coat"?)

We have leeway; my policy is to give a 0 for the first offense and any additional offenses after the person has been warned will go to Academic Dishonesty Council. I have never had to do that.

I give a very long time (more than a month for a 3-5 page review paper) for people to complete assignments, and I offer advice, and I even, in some cases, offer to look at drafts and comment on them.

Plagiarism is kind of a big deal if it happens "in the working world" in biology (though fabricating data is an even bigger bad deal) so I want to teach people how to do things the right way from the get-go.

The problem is, in high school, some students have been so miserably taught - either never had to write, or were told, "The only way you are not plagiarizing is to directly quote and then attribute" which, I'm sorry for the language, makes for piss-poor papers.

We're SUPPOSED to report it to an online repository now but I don't because that does feel needlessly harsh. A 0 on a paper in my class won't net the student a failing grade but it will lower their final grade.

Yeah, I kind of object to the ads (though in every election year, they feel more welcome, after the campaign ads) and the blaring of commercialized carols and the pressure to buy.

I mean, don't get me wrong: I love giving and getting presents but that's not really what Christmas is all about.

And if I don't hear "All I want for Christmas is You" this season, I could be happy.

When I was a kid we didn't decorate until like December 20 (but then again, we had a live tree). It seemed like FOREVER between decorating-time and Christmas.

Now that I'm an adult, I feel like if I don't put stuff up early, I won't have enough time to enjoy it and it won't be worth doing. Also, I'm way busier and at home less than when I was a kid.

(And I live alone, so no one can gripe at me over it.)

My standard response to people getting upset over things like that, and things like the very cup DESIGN is:

If your life is that free of troubles and woes that you must go out looking for them, get down on your knees and thank whatever Deity you believe in (or the Universe, or whatever, if you don't) for such a trouble-free life. Gah.

Even though most people would argue it's "still too early," I'm going to put up my little (fake) tree and the rest of the Christmas decorations. I usually do this about this time anyway (am traveling over Thanksgiving, and then that first week of December is crazy because it's the last week before final exams) but especially this year, I need things that are simple and pretty and shiny and bright and reminders of the happier parts of my childhood just to break me out of the 2016 funk.

I plan to do that probably this evening; I cleaned up the house last night in preparation.

Tomorrow, I don't know. I might just go out and go shopping and buy silly things for stocking-stuffers for family or little gifts to mail to faraway friends. This has been a brutal fall in a brutal year and I desperately need to try to cheer myself up.

I've decided I'm going to listen but not engage.

And offer to do a lot of kitchen labor and walk the dog to get myself out of the fray.

Avoidant behaviors, I has them.

We don't have a subscription to Turnitin, but supposedly there is something called "SafeAssign" in BlackBoard for people who, unlike me, aren't Luddites and want to do all their grading online.

I still demand printed copies of papers, that I can write on and file if necessary. I check plagiarism by doing a Google search on one or two random sentences in the paper (using quotation marks to see if I hit anything that's an exact lifting). If I find something, I read the site, if it matches the paper, I print out the website, make a copy of it and the paper for my files (just in case) and staple the webpage to the student's paper, and on the grade sheet have written "0. See me to discuss this."

About 80% of the time when I catch a plagiarist, he or she responds with "oh, man, I didn't think you'd check. I just ran out of time." They accept the 0 and admit what they did, and I admit it bothers me that they're simply chagrined they got caught.....and also that my reputation as someone who really truly does check hasn't spread.

I once had someone protest what they did WASN'T plagiarism; I directed them to the defining statement of it in my syllabus and offered a meeting with the two of us and the department chair to iron things out, but then the student decided maybe they would just accept the 0.

A few people claim "But I didn't know" but considering most every faculty member I know who requires written papers goes over just what is and is not plagiarism early in the semester, that one doesn't wash either.

That said: I would NEVER confront someone in front of a class about it, and I would never base my claim on the usage of a single word. I think the professor in the instance described was in the wrong.

E1: Don't get me started on my tirade about the academic-publishing "game." It's rigged in a lot of ways, but it's a game most profs are expected to play if they want to get or keep tenure. (And I definitely want the protection of tenure, based on what happened during the last bad budget cycle to a couple of our non-tenured people who were highly regarded as teachers - they were gone, somewhat suddenly, because there was No Money)

I remember when I was working one summer on the campus where my dad worked, he invited me to come out to lunch with several other profs in his department.

I wound up being the designated money-collector to take the cash up to the check-out to pay the bill. When I got up there, I found out someone had shorted me $5 - which, out of embarrassment, I paid out of my own pocket. (Had this happened now, I would have gone back to the table and said, "Very funny, who stiffed the college intern by $5?").

Later, I told my dad, thinking he'd make it good. Nope. He just looked at me and said, "You learned something today."

Since then, I have never collected the money for ANY split check on anything. (And I also learned that geologists are cheapskates)

I may have a more restrictive definition of "friendship." I tend to follow Ben Franklin: “Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.”

There are lots of people I'm civil to that I doubt I would want to eat dinner with on a regular basis, or share a hotel room with.

"Nerd Culture" - I don't quite know what to make of this article: this article . I WANT to say "that's total BS" but I don't know.

I always felt growing up that the nerdy kids had my back, because I was similarly excluded, and a couple of friends of mine were stereotypical nerds. So this guy is saying they were actually closet Brownshirts?

Again: humans are tribal critters, to Hell with 'em, why not let God or evolution start over again with sentient platypodes or fence lizards and see if it can keep from going wrong THIS time. (Though I'm wondering if it's "sentience" and not "human" that's the root of the problem here)

I'm thinking now about childhood, and making friends, and how easy it was:

"Oh! You have a Hello Kitty t-shirt! I LOVE Hello Kitty! Do you want to play together at recess?"

It's kind of sad the adulthood equivalent (being a Star Trek fan, or liking a particular team, or whatever) seems to have been made into a problem, because I find it terribly hard as an adult to make new friends as it is.

I wish someone had pushed me more to specialize in something like Pomology. I'm just kind of the Utility Infielder of botanists....(most of my research has been on either remnant prairie or restoring prairie. Though I have done some entomological stuff of late, and if I were going to do it all over again, I think I would go the Entomology route - more possibilities for alt-ac careers if the teaching thing palls.)

My lab is decorated with free posters from various ag departments - "Common lawn weeds" and the like, and "The Dirty Dozen" (invasive species).

I have a poster of a Carl Larsson painting up in my office and a couple of My Little Pony tiny toys hidden away on my desk where only I see them.

I have biostats comic strips (there are more than you'd think) up on my office door but even that's a bit sketchy, I know in some departments faculty were asked to denude their doors because of the rather pointed political things on them and fear it might offend potential donors.

So far, no one has complained about my xkcd "correlation vs. causation" strip.

I wonder where t-shirts fit in with this? Certainly seeing someone in a t-shirt is a shared-space thing. (And I might note how glad I am for the death of the "Big Johnson" themed t-shirts fad. I don't squick out easily but those kinda squicked me out. Not that I ever said anything)

Except I doubt most people could go "literally anywhere" and be accepted there. As I said: humans are tribal critters (and some days I would add: and to Hell with 'em)

I mean, I'm a cis-het-white-nativeborn-"abled"-Christian woman. I am like the MAJORITY majority here, and there are still plenty places I feel unwelcome. I tend to avoid those places.

not that funny a joke, either, IMHO.

And generally, I bristle at any suggestions that people homogenize themselves for the "comfort" or "ease" or whatever you might say of others. I mean, yes, there are some things that need to be agreed upon as "this is not a good idea" (the example of pin-up calendars, though I admit I'd be less put off by those than some might).

But an example: I knit, and I tend to bring knitting with me when I invigilate exams. It keeps me from being bored and fidgety and feeling resentful towards that one student who wants to use every single second of the allotted exam time. But I also sometimes worry, when I have a class full of somewhat-rowdy guys (we have students who take my class as a cognate, who are majors in another department that leans very male, and very good-ol'-boy male) that it's just going to lead to me being taken less seriously.

So I always ask myself: do I leave it at home and feel somewhat resentful that I've had to do that, or do I take it and just deal with the fact that some of these guys seem not to want to show a little respect for whatever reason? I usually come down on the side of bringing it, because why should I have to edit who I am because of some trolls? And yes, I'm willing to deal with whatever fallout but if they're already borderline rude to me, I'm not going to edit who I am - I'm even less likely to.

And I will say: I was excluded throughout much of my schooling-years (though for other reasons than being a hardcore geek) and I admit one of the things that baffles me a little in gamer and other bad-behavior: these folks KNOW what it's like to be excluded, yet they are doing it to other people (the "fake geek girl" taunts and the like). Humans are tribal beasts and while that probably has adaptive value for the species as a whole, I admit I don't like it.

(Also: girl bullying, at least until recently, relied very heavily upon shunning and exclusion of the non-conformers. And sometimes that includes girls interested in STEM. So it's not just "geeks" that can make it hard)

I dunno. I'm a woman and I guess I could say my career is STEM-adjacent (professor of biology at a teaching-heavy university) and also some people would say I'm "STEM-lite" because I'm a botanist, but - Star Trek fandom and Dungeons and Dragons were not the things I found challenging about being a woman in science. And they aren't now, even though I doubt any of my colleagues play D&D. (One might be a Trek fan, not sure).

I've made Star Wars jokes in class (I prefer the "classic" Star Wars movies to Trek). Had no idea I might be specifically "alienating" women. Oh well. I suppose the thing is to never make jokes, and to never let anyone know you have a side to you outside of your narrow field, then. THAT'S appealing to students. (not)

There are other things that make a career in the sciences unappealing. I really really loved my subject but some of the politics and crap surrounding the whole research arena is what drove me into a more teaching-oriented career. Also, I didn't want a job where my continued employment was dependent upon how many federal grants I could get, because even back in the Clinton administration I suspected that "gravy train" was slowing down fast.

Also, at least when I was in grad school, the fact that I preferred not to drink alcohol (so, didn't generally go to the bar with the rest of the folks after weekly seminar) was probably more "distancing" for me than the fact that many of my colleagues were guys, some of whom, yes, liked Star Trek or played Dungeons and Dragons.

Oh boy that's going to make my upcoming travel on Amtrak fun, in the "community seating" diner, if anyone has a fit over "Is Pepsi okay?" (For reasons other than the "Ick! PEPSI!?!" that are usually given).

I dunno. I tend to roll my eyes over any attempt on that scale to make the personal political. (I dislike most sodas and so am a conscientious objector in the Cola Wars.)

And especially if the guy was a manager there, and he pulled that tactic, they get whatever is coming to them. That was a seriously idiot move.

I figured that out this year but now it's too late to dial back and slack a little, and slacking is against my nature.

I am bad at playing games like this because I am far too literal-minded for my own good.