If It's Tuesday I Must Be Pissed Off At Our Textbook Committee.

Jesus Lord in a Mustang, the nutcases who were too slow-witted to avoid getting roped into the textbook committee have finally finished their recommendations for our multi-section freshman sequence of classes.

They've replaced a 2011 edition of one book with a 2010 edition of a different book. It means we have to supplement this book with a 2013 edition of another book to make up for outdated material in this "new" book. Twice the number of books. Almost twice the price. Why?

Because there are TWO essays in the 2010 edition that two committee members can not live without. I found out what they were and found them both free online. It took me, gulp, 15 seconds to copy and paste them both into an email and send it to the committee.

Oh Dear, It's an Early AND Undergrad Thirsty. I've Bent the Rules of Thirstydom so Much This Past Year That If It Weren't Already Bulging With Enemies and Former Colleagues, I, Too, Would Be on Cal's Shit List. Anyway, Here's Atrus.

I'm Atrus, an undergrad at a New England SLAC (double-majoring in Hamster Lit and Frog Lit/Language), as well as a regular reader of College Misery. I'm planning to get my MLS and become a librarian after graduating, so I've been doing everything I can to work towards that dream (taking whatever relevant courses I can, volunteering/interning at libraries, going to library conferences, befriending librarians, everything short of taking up residence in the SLAC's stacks). I provide occasional research guidance to classmates who request it. And yes, I point them towards both printed and online resources.

And yet I worry. The library job/internship market is a jungle right now - I've only recently found a paying summer job in a library. Some people that I've talked to have scoffed and said that libraries are becoming obsolete. A poster here once said that "If [a student] starts talking about going for a Master of Library Science degree, discourage her!".

I can deal with the increasing emphasis on technology (I'm a geek, I can adapt to changing technology); the salary much lower than what businesses are promising to my science-majoring classmates; even the near-certainty of having to take whatever I can get with regards to positions.

Do I have a chance in hell, or should I just change intended career paths now while I'm still young, relatively sane, and debt-free?

Grade Grubbers Galore

I teach Intro to Hamsterology to one large section of 400+ students. Thus crowd control is crucial, particularly with respect to grade grubbing.

After mid-semester tests which are graded by my PhD student assistants under my close supervision, I give students the opportunity to request a "review of their mark" (by me, personally) within a specified time period via an elaborate written procedure. I allow no personal discussion before, during or after this process. The time period starts a week after the test is returned (to give them time to cool off) and ends a week later (to avoid the end of semester grade grubbing frenzy). Anyone wanting to meet with me to get "more advice and not to ask for more marks" (yeah right, they're just lazy and trying to circumvent the procedure) can do so, but only the day AFTER the specified grade review request period ends. End of semester grade grubbers (and the Deans they complain to) are told "but you had the opportunity to get your grade reviewed by me and you didn't take it."

Normally only a handful bother to follow the process, but this semester, I had 2 dozen requests, and their reasons for requesting a grade review reached new depths of grubbiness. Here's a sample:

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Dreamer Delia: My dream was to get 25/25 in the multiple choice section and I only got this one question wrong so I think you should give me the mark so I can achieve my dream.

Dream-Killer (rolling on the floor laughing): Just call me Dream-Killer!

On drama queens (and kings)

Years ago (what am I saying? Decades ago) when I was in college, one of my classmates became the center of a whirlwind of media attention after a mysterious stranger entered her house and raped her. She basked in the drama for more than a year, seeking to become a sort of media spokesperson for victims of sexual violence, until her story was exposed as a lie. She had invented the mysterious stranger and the rape as a ploy to seek attention, and the details of the supposed rape were borrowed from the plot of a popular soap opera at the time. A sad and tawdry incident. She finished her degree eventually, but she had a hard time holding her head up on campus after her fiction was exposed.

We've all had drama queens in class, students who create elaborate scenarios either to seek sympathy or to avoid work, but few of them go quite this far. Here's another from today's news:

Johns Creek man charged with faking his kidnapping

A Georgia Gwinnett College student couldn’t bear to tell his parents he was flunking English class — for the second time — so he faked his own kidnapping, according to Johns Creek police.

Now Aftab Aslam, 19, has more to worry about than an ‘F’ in English class.

On Thursday, Aslam turned himself in to police who charged him with a misdemeanor count of false report of a crime, three felony counts of false statements, three felony counts of tampering with evidence and three felony counts of terroristic threats.

(Click here to read the rest.)

Is there a male form for "Drama Queen" and if so, what is it?

 

First Monday after spring semester ends Thirsty! (Hint: The answer is "no")

Dr. Jekyll:  Is there any day so wonderful as the first Monday after spring semester has finished?

Prof. Hyde:  Given the usual difficultly of your rhetorical questions, the answer is clearly "no".

Dr. Jekyll:  What a joy it is to walk past fraternity row.  The only sound is that of the cleaning vans running the steam machines.

Prof. Hyde:  I'll miss the frats' debauchery and sense of entitlement.

Dr. Jekyll:  The road construction crews started early this morning, but most in our town celebrate their appearance as it coincides with the disappearance from front lawns of beer bottles and public urination.

Prof. Hyde:  Hey, when a man has to go, he has to go.

Dr. Jekyll:  The smell of the cleaning chemicals the maintenance staff uses to give our building its annual sprucing make me light-headed at the thought of no more students for three months.

Prof. Hyde:  I find the chemicals useful in other ways.

Dr. Jekyll:  And my office!  Oh, my office!  It is so quiet in my building I can hear deanlets thinking three floors away!

Prof. Hyde:  You wouldn't be as happy if you knew what they were thinking about.

Dr. Jekyll:  It's the most wonderful time of the year!!  Happy Summer everyone!!

Iskander Cannot Launch. A Weekend Thirsty.

To keep things reasonably vague and anonymous, I am an advanced graduate student at a decent-but-not-great Rodentology program. However, I cannot seem to escape. My dissertation advisor and committee appear to operate with a not-so-benign form of neglect, and as a result the completion of my degree has been delayed for at least a year, to provide a conservative estimate.

No level of cajoling or begging seems adequate to get feedback or progress towards the end of this hellish process, despite assurances that my research is fine and poses no problem to a successful defense. It has definitely had an economic effect on myself and my family, and probably contributed to a less-than-satisfactory result from my first year on the job market. It has also increased the appeal of bourbon (though what doesn't, these days?)

I should note that I am not a troubled student barely scraping through nor a needy student desiring to be led by hand through graduate school. I am not the brightest star in the academic firmament, but I am fairly competent at both teaching and getting research done.

The question I have for the CM community is this:

Q: Am I well and truly screwed? Am I completely dependent on my committee eventually getting around to doing their thing? Or are there other options that I may not have explored or thought of?

In which You Can Be Anything

 Sunday comic!

"... as far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down--and I will be satisfied, too.... The law of work does seem utterly unfair--but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also."
Mark Twain,  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court 

What would you not do for any amount of money?

This goes beyond helicopter parenting...

So I grew up with family friends who were kind of like cousins.  We are now sort of distant.  Well, not in any way estranged....just not in touch.  It's been 20 years since our families have had those barbecues.

Recently, one of them sent a video of her young lotus blossom, who is apparently quite a burgeoning genius, to 1,000 or so of her closest friends.

It is a three minute short of her young daughter straining over her little potty. 

THREE MINUTES of a small child straining.....and then finally getting that poop out.  Entitled "Patty's First Poop in the Potty," it ends with a close up of the poop, with the sounds of her parents cheering in the background.

Heaven help us all. 

NYU Professor Busted for Allegedly Spying on Undressing Women.

College faculties are made up of all kinds of people, of course. Just another subculture in our big, messy world. I don't know why it always seems worse to me when a proffie gets caught doing something gross like this dude. Does it reflect on me? On us?

My best friend / neighbor is a roofer. When a roofer in another city gets picked up for molesting goats or alpaci, I don't think any less of my neighbor.

Should I? No, that's stupid. But, correct me if I'm wrong, this is context for the below linked article, right? I mean, I won't lose that good parking space here on the Weber State campus, will I? I'll still get to share a cubby with Leslie K? I did it right, didn't I?

[+]

Wouldn't YOU
be sweating?

An accomplished NYU art-history professor — who has lectured at the Met and Sotheby’s — is a Peeping Tom who uses his iPhone to spy on young women in West Village boutique changing rooms, cops said.

Ross Finocchio, 34, video-recorded women trying on vintage clothes at Beacon’s Closet by entering a changing area, setting up his phone in a shoe, and sliding it under the partition into the next room, cops said.

The medieval-art expert pulled the move on two women — ages 26 and 28 — in two incidents, cops said.

The 26-year-old saw the shoe slide into her room as she was getting undressed at 4:30 pm.

“I told the store manager that I saw him put something under the door but I didn’t see what it was,” the alleged victim told The Post.

She and the manager then watched Finocchio pull the same stunt on a 28-year old, cops said.

“I knocked on [his dressing-room door] and said, ‘You have to come out right now,’” said manager Stephanie Williams.

She said when he finally came out, “he was sweating profusely.”


FULL ARTICLE.