Thursday, November 17, 2011

What Have Your Students Been Up To? (a Beaker Ben-inspired Thirsty)


In the spirit of getting back to bashing our students instead of each other (a suggestion in Gordo's last post, which seems to have disappeared),  and getting Beaker Ben some comments, and not thinking too much about the post just below, I want to resurrect one of  Beaker's wonderful  lists that was buried as a comment on the story about the teacher who didn’t teach

So, without further ado, here is Beaker Ben's breakdown of what his students have been up to this semester:

Now, let's be fair to the students. If they are anything like mine,

15% will be absent for months and may not realize that the class is not meeting

3% will attend a different class in the wrong building simply because they can't read their schedule

35% will feel they deserve the A because they did such a good job in high school

45% sit in class texting all the time and may not notice that nobody else is in the room, including the teacher

That leaves a few percent who actually want to learn. They are the ones who probably reported the teacher.

Or, if I'm feeling pessimistic, students ratted her out because she didn't respond to their emails requesting extra credit.

Q: How do your students compare? 

Please, Pass Your Eyes Over This Quickly. Don't Dwell On It. Don't Mention It. Don't Even THINK About Emailing Us About It. Let It In. Let It Go.

New mod. No name.




Two new programs are revolutionizing academic writing…

Wryte-Bot


Are you tired of writing correctly? Do you want your paper to read like an authentic college paper and not like it was written by somebody who actually finished high school? This handy freeware is compatible with all the most common word processing software. Download the program onto your computer. Then, when you’re done writing that essay or term paper, simply click on the desktop icon and the Wryte-Bot will

  • insert punctuation and capitalization at random throughout your text. The special apostrophe feature allows you to decide whether apostrophes will be used exclusively to indicate the plural or for randomly-selected possessives as well.
  • replace “than” with “then” and “you’re” with “your” and “throne” with “thrown” throughout
  • switch the tense of random sentences from past to present or present to past
  • switch random sentences to passive voice. This features includes the timeless double-whammy passive offensive: “Hitler decided to invade France” becomes “The decision was made by Hitler that France be invaded.”
  • change the margins, line-spacing, font styles and font sizes of random paragraphs

Revision that used to take you hours now handled automatically! The licensed version, which costs only $10 and a verified registration, will also make up a random citation system and use it for most of your paper’s citations. The rest of the citations will be automatically deleted. Time you used to spend turning your coherent, well-composed, properly-documented term paper into a complete mess can now be spent doing what you really want to do be doing – sitting in the library studying for the final exam.

The Wryte-Bot Deluxe ($30) does even more. It will take your original work and post it online at dozens of webpages under randomly-generated pseudonyms and submit your essay to several of the most popular essay-trading sites, almost guaranteeing that you will be busted big time for a slam-dunk case of plagiarism when you submit your essay under your real name in class.

Why do all the work yourself when Wryte-Bot can do it for you?


KlugScheisser

Originally created in Germany after decades of live trials, KlugScheisser software is now finally available for English publishing. It automatically converts any word you enter into a longer, more abstract word or even a new phrase which either sounds somewhat like the original word or shares some aspect of meaning with the original word. Students can use this program to lengthen their submissions up to the required minimum.

But this isn’t just about length! Enter in a sentence, and KlugScheisser will add words and phrases or change the voice in such a way as to make the sentence longer and harder to comprehend, but without necessarily adding meaning. In fact, it will usually erode the meaning of the sentence making it harder for the reader to spot any logical or factual error you may have made. Try this while writing your papers and you will come across as a real intellectual. Now, instead of, “The industrial revolution started in Britain the late 18th century,” a truly banal piece of information, the professor will now read real scholarship: “The beginnings of what is known as the industrial revolution are considered by some scholars to have had their origins in the King’s England late in the Age of the Enlightenment.” If the bastard doesn’t give an A for that, take it to the administration!

Professional academics can upgrade to KlugScheisser-Pro and use it to hide nonsense by numbing their readers and listeners with intellectual-sounding jargon. Mark your text and then select any of the 15 jargon categories from the drop-down menu. Choices include traditional categories such as “post-modernism” and “Marxism” as well as seven different “turns” such as “linguistic”, “spatial” and “visual.” New “turns” are available as free downloads each week as they come into fashion. Fun categories such as “add Foucault,” “conjure feminist Afro-centrism” or “Gender this, bitch!” will work wonders on otherwise straightforward but uninteresting humanities writing. Transform that trivial archive report, the re-visitation of the same old worn-out second century documents, or the Cliff-notes-level analysis of some vampire novel into a real journal article! Watch as KlugScheisser-Pro takes book reviews which simply summarize the content and churns them into verbal oatmeal disguised as cutting-edge analysis. You can even revive some of your publications from the 1970s and “turn” them according to the fashions of 2010 without doing any revision work youself except the addition of a few recent citations. Nobody will notice that you have nothing new to say.

Gone are the days of embarrassing clarity. Hide your banality with obscurantist drivel.

SPECIAL: For a limited time only, KlugScheisser-Pro will be sold with the Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies Utility Pack (a $20 value) at no extra charge!

Natural scientists will have to be patient. The expected publication in 2012 of the Jan Hendrik Random Data Generator for the creation of snazzy-looking data sets will be followed in 2013 by the Poly-Publicize Significator to help you and your team transform real but irrelevant data into yet another four-page paper with five scatter-diagrams and 17 authors.