Future of College

Going to school online is going to be the colprate for the exstiction of physical colleges... The majority percentile usage of online courses reside among adults.

The English faculty is fighting its way through student essays. Our clientele typically never were required to read or write when they were growing up: it's disheartening if you let yourself imagine the writers and their hopes for their future.

This writer is, I believe, taking Freshman Comp for the third time.

Student Writing and The Woman President: The Near Election of heaily client

Read this post to be purged of pity and terror. Excerpt:

Well… give the student credit for trying to be specific. He does not merely generalize about the fact that we see “a female woman run for president” or “woman owner there own business.” He names names: heaily client.

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Cognitive Dissonance

Me: Adam, what place do you hope to write about for your profile essay?

Student: Jefferson Parish Lockup.  That place is nasty, cold, all hard concrete… there’s no place to pee but this big iron terlet right in front o’ ever-body.  Ain’t no place to lie down.

Me: Great topic. What’s your Plan B?  What other place could you write about?

Student: The French Riviera.

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In other news, this from a student paper:

I stayed behind to keep watch in our getaway car, a 1999 Toyota Avalon which we had stolen from the same dealer.  It took [my accomplices] about 3 minutes to drive out with the red Mustang.  When I saw them pull out the lot I felt a sudden intense rush.  It felt better than sex.  Our plan was to drive it to the Mexican border and have it stripped and sell the parts for quick drug cash.

I’m so freaking sheltered…. 

A Student Considers Science and Faith

He wanted to write his research paper on science and Christianity.  Against my better judgment, I let him do it: he wasn’t terribly clear what he wanted to say about it, but he seemed to have a belief that science “comes after” Christianity… 

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Student Studnet

Sample from Student’s Paper:

As a studnet, it’s hard.  I aim at the mark, but sometimes I miss it.  For example; I asked out a fantastic female from class for the club, and she said she would think about it.  That was 2 years ago n she never called me back.

My comment in the margin: 

Give it up, man.  She’s so not n 2 u.

Student Culture

From the Mailbag:

Based on your experience, what would you say are the cultural prospects of the modern urban community college undergraduate, in terms of culture and bettering humankind?

FREE: College Education

I want to borrow a bar for an hour a day, three times a week.  Class to run from eleven until the bar opens.

“Free college course with a real Ph.D. instructor.  No credit, no fees.  Buy your book and show up.  I’m just tired of teaching people who are taking my courses for credit and not to really learn something.  You’ll learn the same things they do.  Papers are optional.  No grades.  No pressure.  Just a conversation about books.”

You think anybody would show?  

How To Totally Freak Out Your College Class

You cannot handle morally what you do not understand.  So in class, we attempt to understand.

They do not like it when people over forty discuss the rhetoric of ads like this…. I think after class they all ran out to go home and bleach their brains.  

I think too that they’re so savvy in some ways, and they dislike being made to feel that a hip awareness of coercive relationships isn’t their sole property.

But that’s good: the first step in a good education is probably the recognition that none of your ideas are all that original yet.

Paper Chase: Cheating In College

My students must submit their papers to a little jewel called “SafeAssignment.”  It’s a nifty program that scans the web, including paper-mills, and detects plagiarism.

Plagiarism is rarely a problem in my classes, since I typically have students bring their research and then I oversee them hammering it into quotations, paraphrases, and summaries.  But now and then a student whose relatives will be dying all semester misses those classes and has a crack at beating the system.

I just bagged a plagiarist, who will receive a zero without the chance to re-write the paper.  Nice try, honey: next time just do the work.

This forum at the Chronicle is worth reading for the humor alone, especially when somebody asks for information about cheating at four in the morning: “im very urgent to know.”   I’m not sure he ever did realize he was asking a lot of professors for help beating Turnitin… The responses are hilarious.

Tulane Girls After A Mardi Gras Parade

Reactions to an absolutely astonishing conversation by Tulane sorority girls after a Mardi Gras parade:

Hey, Tulane girls. Marry somebody smart and bright. You’re too stupid to be allowed to survive on your own.

You betray quite clearly that if you ever read a serious book it slid right by you.

You make quite clear that if you have any ideas in your head besides sex and pleasure and drugs and alcohol, it makes no mark on your soul.

You’re a disgrace to the idea of “women’s education,” and a betrayal of your gender, and the only thing you have going for you at present is the idea that your cunts* have some currency.  Congratulations: you’ve squandered the faith that your foremothers placed in you.

With luck, that faith isn’t misplaced elsewhere.

*This distasteful word was brought up by the girls themselves, who used this term of other people not once, but several times.

Update on Monday, February 20, 2012 at 9:35PM by Otter

From a RipChurch regular reader:

I see this more as a self esteem issue.

I agree.  Among other things.

Let them get out of the way and work out their self-esteem issues in some nursery and let somebody who cares about learning get on with the work of higher education. 

What a waste of university-space, and parents’ tuition dollars.  Tulane University seems, judging by its students’ public behavior, to be summer camp for adolescents, not a place of learning.