Oh Brave New World! (or, Then And Now)

CARPE DIEM: Christmas Shopping for a TV: 1958 vs. 2009:

In 1958, American holiday shoppers paid $269.95 for Sears’ “best 24-inch console TV” (Update: black and white) in its Christmas catalog.... [I]t would have taken 136.34 hours of work at the average manufacturing hourly wage then of $1.98 to earn enough income (ignoring taxes) to purchase the TV.



Today you can purchase a Sansui 26-inch widescreen LCD high-definition TV on the Sears website for about $350 (or chose from the several hundred other TVs available), which would be a “time cost” today of only 19.03 hours of work at today's average hourly wage of $18.39, and this represents an 86 percent reduction in the cost compared to the 1958 TV. 

Lessons Learned

I have been winding down the semester, putting out fires of various kinds. This term has led me to re-evaluate some of my practices, and there will be some changes next time out.

For starters, I am going to be far less charitable in my attendance policy: hey, the college's handbook says X absences and you cannot pass the course. If that much else is going on, then you need to focus on that. Your grades will improve when you're not distracted, and we'll all be happier with that.

Next, I am revising my bonus policy for very good attendance. The current system can be streamlined very quickly into one-size-fits-all. I want my students to come to class, but I'm going to cut out the penalties for excessive absences below the college limit, relying instead on the system policy of "X misses and you're done."

Third, I am going to really take more advantage of the "hybrid" category and give more online work, especially for materials that I don't like to emphasize in lecture. The students are supposed to be picking up some of the slack, anyway.

I will not be taking a full break over Christmas. I will be teaching a mini-term --the money is good and it will get me out of the house and out from underneath the Mrs.'s feet.

Technorati Tags: academia

ATTACK OF THE CUTE!

Technorati Tags: News I Can Use

A Funny Thing Happened to Me Today...

I had a student tell me "I lost respect for you a long time ago." Thankfully this had nothing to do with my mastery of the material. It had everything to do with interpersonal issues. I will not violate FERPA here and now; suffice to say there was an issue and the student did not feel I was being "appropriate" in my response.

Still, the idea of a student losing respect for me... Should I care? In this one case, the answer is definitively "NO." But in general, I do want to be seen at the minimum as someone who is consistent. No one will accuse me of favoritism. In that, at least, my conscience is clear in the present circumstances.

Oh, and no good turn goes unpunished, I have learned.

[Post redacted from earlier version out of concern for FERPA. I never use names, ever; still, no sense being any more than appropriately vague on the specifics]

Technorati Tags: academia, education and pedagogy

Why Johnny Can't Add

Who Needs Mathematicians for Math, Anyway? by Sandra Stotsky, City Journal 13 November 2009: read all of it. When education professors tsk-tsk me for being so instructor-centered, I silently resist the urge to find a more appropriate use for the paper on which their diplomas are printed. Constructivist approaches have their uses, but they never should have been allowed to take center-stage. Long live Ausubel! (oh just go look it up already...)

Technorati Tags: academia, education and pedagogy, unintended consequences

'Equalizer' star Edward Woodward dies at 79

'Equalizer' star Edward Woodward dies at 79

"The minstrel boy to the war is gone,
In the ranks of death you'll find him;
His father's sword he hath girded on,
And his wild harp slung behind him;
"Land of Song!" cried the warrior bard,
"Tho' all the world betrays thee,
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise thee!"

Remembering Our Vets

Remembering Communism

Paul Hollander - Remembering communism - washingtonpost.com:

In the aftermath of the fall of Soviet communism, many Western intellectuals remain convinced that capitalism is the root of all evil. There has been a long tradition of such animosity among Western intellectuals who gave the benefit of doubt or outright sympathy to political systems that denounced the profit motive and proclaimed their commitment to create a more humane and egalitarian society, and unselfish human beings.

We could go all the way back to Lord Chesterfield, if we wished, to see the source of this emotion. I see many of my colleagues as his misbegotten intellectual children: railing not for progress but to a return to a sometimes-idealized-sometimes-actualized past where an oligarchic few exerted control over what they feared to be an over-energentic and far-too-clever-for-their-own-good movement of entrepreneurs and optimists --in other words, a form of aristocracy is what they wanted to perpetuate. Dress it up in whatever language you wish: communism, socialism, progressivism, they all inevitably have at the root a small group of people who really want to control a much larger group of people, weal or woe being beside the point.

I will not mourn the fall of the Soviet Union, and I hope to live long enough to see the history community join me whole-heartedly in that.

UPDATE:

Technorati Tags: academia, Cold War, revisionism, Soviet Union

Sweet Jeebers! Is This Person Secretly Enrolled In My Class?

Investors.com - The Ghosts Of '38: discussing the impact of the New Deal agenda on the actual Depression, the author makes three points:

1. Amity Schlaes in The Forgotten Man demonstrates FDR's own version of "trickle-down" economics centered on giving union workers higher wages to stimulate consumer spending, which did not work.


2. Recent scholarship, led by Cole and Ohanian strongly suggests the New Deal actually prolonged the Depression; and


3. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy argues that the Fed's actions made the Depression worse, not better, particularly in regard to the "depression-within-the-Depression" of 1937-38.

I discuss every single one of these points in my New Deal lectures. Man I'm good!!!

Technorati Tags: business, economy, News I Can Use, Great Depression, revisionism, unintended consequences

Views: Is Tenure Conservative? - Inside Higher Ed

Views: Is Tenure Conservative? - Inside Higher Ed: while nodding my head in agreement (even though I'm at an essentially non-tenure institution), I had to laugh out loud at this, because it's so true:

[M]ore slyly, what possible objection could there be to speaking frankly about topics in which most people have utterly no interest? Most academic work, especially in the humanities, is published for an audience smaller than a successful cocktail party..."

[Emphasis added, because it's so true...]