School is Back . . .

. . . and boy is it crowded. My university has a record number of students this semester and they were all on the road today. I took a road near the school for an errand. That was a mistake! I'm no longer taking classes, so I had forgotten that class had just ended, and people were leaving. Way too many people on the road!

Have you noticed how hard it is to park near universities too? And if you do park, it's not cheap. I think the basic student cost at my school is $75. That entitles you to the privilege of finding a non-existent parking spot in a lot half a mile from campus. If you want to park in one of the parking garages on campus, that's $250 for the Fall semester. The school has a new health plan, so my health insurance for Fall was about $280. Hmmm. There's something wrong with that picture.

Edumacation, Shmedumacation

First, kudos to Obama for realizing that our university system needs help. But it's not just our universities. See my previous post about the sorry state of affairs in my own classroom. The real problem is our high schools. It's ridiculous that so many college freshmen need so many remedial classes each year. If you cannot pass certain basic high school classes, then you do not need to go to college. It's that simple. And, not everyone needs to go to college.

Now, before I get spammed by people calling me elitist, let me explain. There are people out there who do not like school and don't want to go to college. There are people who are perfectly capable of getting a great job in a trade, and don't need college. My cousin is 17 and is dropping out of high school to get his GED and start a welding program. Several of his friends dropped out after 9th grade and became diesel mechanics. You can make a very good living as a diesel mechanic or a welder, especially in the South. None of them wanted to go to college, and they also did not want to become farmers. So they made the best decision for them. They did not try to go to college for no reason, except that society expected it of them.

Somehow, our culture has come up with this idea that everyone must go to college. So people who shouldn't, end up going there. And many who may want to go end up dropping out. And way too many of us end up owing massive student loans to pay for our experience. We will always have a need in our society for welders, plumbers, brick layers, carpenters, electricians, construction workers, road workers, etc. And if they don't need a college education, why should they have to get one? The years we spend in college, they spend as apprentices, learning their trade. What's wrong with that?

Freedom, anybody?

WTF is going on! Several blogging and messaging sites have been forced to close, by the US government. One of them had 70,000 users, who no longer have access to their blogs and never will. The blogsite is permanently closed. The webhost (who hosts the blogging site) says they had to close it because the blogsite violated the terms of service. CNET says that it was because al-Qaida materials were found on the blogsite's servers. And the CTO for the webhoster is saying the government didn't make them shut down the blogsite, it was the webhost's own decision. Which still makes me say "What the Fuck!

I understand shutting down terrorist information. No matter how much I believe in freedom, I don't believe in letting al-Qaida recruit people and build bombs. But shutting down the entire site! That's ridiculous! I'm fairly certain the blogsite wasn't intentionally hosting al-Qaida material. Hell, for all we know there are al-Qaida blogs on Blogger. I'm pretty sure that Google wouldn't shut down their entire blog service because of it. They'd just destroy the individual blogs.

I really feel badly for the bloggers who used that blogsite. They may have lost years of material and now have no recourse for getting it back. And this becomes yet another instance of a small company (the blogsite) being destroyed, whereas a larger company (Blogger) wouldn't be. So there goes your freedom of choice getting smaller. Just give in and choose the global corporation, forget the mom & pop shops! Screw them, they should have sold out when they had the chance.

Woohoo - Chupacabras!

I just love all the Chupacabra sightings. They have been doing DNA testing and so far they've turned out to be hairless/mangy coyotes. That seems likely. My first thought, after seeing photos, was that it was a coyote-dog mix of some kind. There are a few hairless dogs that look pretty weird (Chinese Crested, Xoloitzcuintli) and have that odd grey skin color too. Don't forget, most of the World's Ugliest Dog Contest winners have been part Chinese Crested. I actually thought that would be pretty neat, if some pet had gotten lost and bred with a coyote and had enough puppies to form a little band of goat-suckers down in Texas.

Googling

There's an interesting article about Google and their book project at Yahoo. Personally, I don't Google things, I Yahoo! them. Most search engines nowadays have a lack of privacy, but Google seems to want to database every single thing that you do, so I stay away from it. Supposedly, you can even search and find e-mails that people have written with their Google accounts.

Anyway, the article is interesting because it talks about how people look something up, but never go farther than usually the 1st page of the search results. That people are letting Google think for them, instead of thinking for themselves. I've seen things like this in my classroom too. The students don't want to do anything that takes effort. I know that sounds like all students throughout history, but it's worse now. If it takes a lot of effort, many of them don't seem to know how to do it.

They also can't follow simple instructions. I had my students write short little essays at one point (they read an article in a book, then answered the questions that followed it). I gave them a specific list of how I wanted the essay - 12 pt Times Roman font, double spaced, 1.25" margin, and it must be long enough that it runs onto a 2nd page; it couldn't be just one page of type. I put the instructions up on my website, and went over them all in class. Most of my students could not follow those instructions, or just chose to ignore them, thinking that it didn't matter and I would take their essay anyway (I took them, I just gave them a bad grade).

After the first essay, I discovered that I also had to post instructions on writing an essay in general - that you should have an introduction, your main points, and then a conclusion - because most of the students didn't seem to know how to do that. In fact, there were only a handful of students that I would deem ready for college after reading their essays. I was teaching a freshmen course, but that was still a shock to me, that so many people today simply cannot write at all. And some of them were upset about writing an essay because this was not for an English class! (Hell, I once had to write an essay on a math exam!)

I hate to harp back to the "good old days," but I'd swear that when I first started college, if you didn't learn the subject material, you would flunk the course. And if you cheated, you would flunk the course. And when you got to your upper-level classes, you had to study. I studied my ass off for my bachelor's degree, but now it seems like most colleges are turning into diploma mills. And at some colleges it's almost impossible to flunk someone for cheating (I won't name the college, but one professor I know was put through the wringer for trying to flunk a student who had outrageously plagiarized her final paper - it was so bad that he said he'd never do it again, he'd just give the student another chance). Since when did cheating become something that's allowable? Why have standards dropped so low? The same college where the cheating incident took place now offers 8-10 remedial math sections each semester. If you can't pass basic math, how did you get into college!!! Forget that, how did you graduate high school!!!

What Team Are You On?

Alright, I admit it, I'm female. And yes, I read the Twilight books, and I've seen the first movie (I know people who are fans). So what team am I on? I'm on Team I Don't Give A Fuck. And I'm a little disturbed by these Twilight Moms. In some ways it reminds of the Olsen Countdown, to when the Olsen twins would become legal age to lust after.

Rush Limbaugh needs to die!

Alright, I just can't take this bullshit anymore. It was bad enough when Rush would rant about those evil junkies, while he was doctor-shopping for oxycontin, but now he's taking on children! Here's a quote, about where the kids should look for food:

And, of course, the first will be: "Try your house." It's a thing called the refrigerator. You probably already know about it. Try looking there. There are also things in what's called the kitchen of your house called cupboards. And in those cupboards, most likely you're going to find Ding-Dongs, Twinkies, Lays ridgy potato chips, all kinds of dips and maybe a can of corn that you don't want, but it will be there. If that doesn't work, try a Happy Meal at McDonald's....

There's another place if none of these options work to find food; there's always the neighborhood dumpster. Now, you might find competition with homeless people there, but there are videos that have been produced to show you how to healthfully dine and how to dumpster dive and survive until school kicks back up in August.

There's a reason we have school lunch programs for the poor - because for some kids, that IS the only meal they get every day. They don't have cupboards full of crappy desserts and they sure as hell can't afford McDonalds (unless that's where they're dumpster diving). Hell, they don't even have computers so they can look up how to properly dumpster-dive so that they're getting a healthy dinner.

I had a paper route when I was in college, and I had to stop and collect the money for the paper delivery. One lady I collected from was a senior citizen, on Social Security, so I tried to make sure I was never late collecting from her, because she couldn't afford to pay for two months at once. This same lady was the only thing keeping the children behind her alive. This was an older neighborhood, and there was a house behind her house, and the driveways were right next to each other. The woman in the house behind had 3 children, and was hooked on heroine. Every month, she would use her food stamps to buy heroine. The senior lady had called Social Services on her several times, and even bought the kids food. She said she had to, because one day she went back there and knocked on the door. The kids were all at home, but the mother was out. She looked through the kitchen, and the only food item in the entire kitchen was a bottle of ketchup. So tell Rush Limbaugh to shove his condescending, hypocritical, blinded point of view up his prodigious ass!