Racquel

She is majoring in computer repair.  I wish I could find somebody who would just teach her to do this, apprentice her to somebody with very thin screwdrivers and no interest in making her do research papers. She flits through tabs and tabs of sources for her research paper, long technical explanations of Asperger's Syndrome, which is her topic. But she needs the short articles, tiny paragraphs of barely-adequate answers by unknown people on the web, that army of misinformation and distortion that is her only hope for finding answers to questions she doesn't really have.

Click to read more ...

Werken Wel And Hastily: Plagiarizing and Research

Updated on Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 6:22PM by Otter

The research paper was a form developed when research was a real labor, a way of acquiring knowledge.  Because the tools and mechanics were slow, sluggish, and difficult, we were essentially tracing the growth of our own minds on a topic.

Now the tools are slick, rapid, and almost independent of the human researcher.  Now, the research paper is merely compiling.  No real learning has to take place: indeed, it's perfectly possible to write a research paper of which the student-writer has only read a few lines.

Click to read more ...

Upping Hell: More Students Add Their Little All To the Comedy of Errors

Bienville, who with his brother Iberville came to New Orleans in 1718 seeking a drama-free weekend. It is not known if he himself upped hell, but New Orleans has certainly attempted to do so since then.

Today, I would very much like to read a little bit on the economics of modern warfare.  Or perhaps a Wodehouse novel.

Alas.  There's work to be done.  I've decided I don't need to get past more than two paragraphs of things like this before slapping an "F" on the perpetrators.  If they don't care, why should I?

When tourists come to New Orleans, they come to party, tour the city, and have fun.  Tourists really know about what New Orleans are famous for and that's Mardi Gras, French Quarters, and food.  They don't really know about all the crime that goes on in New Orleans.  The crime is getting worst as the years go on.  When they had the French Quarter first they had people from all over the United States visiting.  They were looking forward to having fun and a drama free weekend, but they had a shooting that lead up to seven people shot, and wounded.  After that why should tourist comeback to New Orleans if its not a safe place to visit.  New Orleans has a reputation to up hell.

 French Quarters?

Play The Game & Wear The Suit: Reflections on The Humanities and Academia

Sustainable teaching jobs in the humanities elude anybody who does not "create knowledge," but often the kinds of things that find their way into peer-reviewed publications simply don't need to exist in the human community.  They are part of a conversation, of course, but there are conversations that exist for no other reason than that people wish to hear themselves talk.

Teaching the humanities is a vocation.  I'm tempted to call it a ministry.

Click to read more ...

The Ballad of Election Fraud: Thoughts on A Student Essay

Student essay introduction:

Even though cheating is prohibited anywhere you go, people spend their hole lives doing it anyway.  For example the election, who are we to say if those ballads or accurate.  We don't know if someone voted twice or if they have  missed counted their oppenents votes honestly.   There are different way to cheat in life, so a student caught cheating should not be dismissed from college.

I think, if a person is caught cheating by any means necessary excuse that person from the class, but let them know that they were cheating and this is not the way of life.  You can learn just as much as the next person by studing the same materials as the next person.  Some people don't have time study because of other reasons like work, may be caught up in their kids activities, their just don't want to or they just don't have time to.  Sometimes I don't like to study but I have to do whatever it takes for my kids and I.

A few reflections on this:

(1) There is such a thing as intellectual child abuse, and it might be harder to recover from than any other sort of abuse;

(2) Many of my students, especially the remedial ones, are not students that I can help in a class of 25.  They need aggressive one on one therapy to get to the point where words actually mean something;

(3) They have to go back and begin life again, without the easy feeling that it's just as meaningful to hang out with their friends, texting inane drivel, as it is to read a book once in awhile.

Certified, Part 2: More Adventures in Grading

The Festival of Hell that is grading 102 papers goes on.  I wish to emphasize that this is 102: that implies that some genial idiot has passed these people through 101.   What follows is from the final drafts.  I am renaming "Rough Drafts" for these sections "Fucking Trainwreck Drafts" and penalizing them for turning in Trainwrecks by making them rewrite every sentence.

Click to read more ...

Certified: Every One Of These Is From A Paper I Have Graded Tonight

Grading papers. Just thought I'd share...

Click to read more ...

Love In the Ruins: Teaching Writing In America in 2011

There's a kind of breathtaking insouciance in the student's work.  If you're going to rip off somebody's words, it should be a sentence like, "A charge of plagiarism can have severe consequences, including expulsion from a university or loss of a job, not to mention a writer's loss of credibility and professional standing."  And it should be from a site dedicated to helping you avoid plagiarism.

Click to read more ...

Grading Essays: A Guide To Detachment

I stare at this page as though it were some strange scripture, as though this moment mattered more than all the others I'll see today.

And I'd like to say that I wrote the right thing at the end, some jewel of insight or some aphoristic healing thing that would transcend the inevitable grade of "D" that the paper was going to earn.  But really, it just came to this...

Click to read more ...

Update: Cancer, Freshman Composition, and Other Evidences That There Is Not A Good God in Control of This Place or Rather That "Goodness" Cannot Be Defined In Terms of My Personal Well-Being

I swear I think her North Georgia accent gets stronger the weaker she gets.

Yesterday was a good day.  Mom was alert.  They took out the gastric tube that was causing her immense discomfort, and she was in good spirits.  They put her on antibiotics and blood-thinners.Don't Even Get Me Started

Just got a text from my über-kuhl wife, who spent the night with her at the hospital.  Mom's got a fever today.

My feelings are a seismograph.  You can plot my bipolar swings next to mom's vital signs.

Today is a peculiar exercise in horror: they lock a group of us in a room with eighteen sections' worth of Freshman Composition portfolios.  We evaluate them.  Painstakingly.  Painfully.  Horribly.

I have it in mind to win the lottery and build a ziggurat in the quad, and to dress myself in academic robes and, with elaborate ceremonies, to perform human sacrifices once a term as a warning to Freshman Comp students that the gods must not be bored.

At the best of times (that is, when one's mother isn't freshly diagnosed with terminal cancer) this is an ordeal.  

Today...?

I'm just really looking forward to that.  Really.  No.  Seriously.