How Being A Big Burly BRUTE Almost Landed Me In The Emergency Room

So there I was at the gym today, doing Mucho Macho Mojo. For the uninitiated, this is my workout routine in the summer --heavy lifting three days a week, lighter lifting two days a week, and 45 minutes minimum of moderate-to-strenous cardio on each of those days (plus bike rides at home when the weather permits). It has been doing a decent job of enhancing my health and making me just brutally Hulk-like, but it does have its hazards. Over-confidence is one of them.

I was doing chest and upper back today. My first routine involved a Hammer wide-grip bench press machine. I work out alone, so plate-based free-form machines like those made by Hammer are ideal. I loaded four 45lb plates on each side, and then a 25lb plate on each side, and did my first set of eight. Wow! I am strong!!! Let's go for the gusto! I replaced the 25lb plates with 45lb plates, for a total of five 45lb plates on each side. Total combined weight: 450 lbs. And I did a set of six. HE-MAN! HE-MAN! I got so excited that I took a picture of the rack to prove it to Mrs. Mojo (who is skeptical that I do all these Manly Feats).

And then I did a third set. I did with gusto! I did it with speed! I did it with an abandonment of common sense and let the machine bounce at the end of rep #2, whereupon the outermost plate on the left-hand side slid off the machine and bounced on the gym floor inches from my foot. A plate that size really ought to have crushed most of my metatarsals from that height, but I was lucky. Only then did I turn to the nearest gym attendant and asked, "Well, a day late and a dollar short, but do we have any pins for these machines?" He shook his head no.

I think I may have to find another movement...

Technorati Tags: humor, The world is full of morons

Why Do Students Regard Reading as Torture? - Neil Tokar - Mises Daily

Why Do Students Regard Reading as Torture? - Neil Tokar - Mises Daily: this is today's required reading, although most younger teachers would use "whole language" instead of "whole word." Pain is watching middle-school students reading aloud and completely screwing up words and never even realizing it.

This is pure money:

...[L]earning to read independently was supposed to be the first goal of primary education; hence, reading seemed to be the most natural place to start. When I was in grade one, I had a red phonics textbook and had lessons that taught sounds, for example, the "ch" sound accompanied by examples such as "child" or "church."

But the whole-word method taught students to guess at words, not to actually read them. This paralyzed the rest of their primary and secondary educations. Primary and secondary schools failed to build vocabulary and content-knowledge levels. Then, when high schools sent these graduates off to university, the recent graduates were unable to engage in critical thinking

Technorati Tags: education and pedagogy, The world is full of morons, unintended consequences

Famous Historian David McCullough Makes Me Feel Better About Myself As A Teacher

The Weekend Interview With David McCullough: Don't Know Much About History - WSJ.com: this is worth an entire read, but there are some parts that I need everyone to read, now.

One problem is personnel. "People who come out of college with a degree in education and not a degree in a subject are severely handicapped in their capacity to teach effectively," Mr. McCullough argues. "Because they're often assigned to teach subjects about which they know little or nothing." The great teachers love what they're teaching, he says, and "you can't love something you don't know anymore than you can love someone you don't know."

Another problem is method. "History is often taught in categories—women's history, African American history, environmental history—so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what."

What's more, many textbooks have become "so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back"—such as, say, Thomas Edison—"are given very little space or none at all."

Mr. McCullough's eyebrows leap at his final point: "And they're so badly written. They're boring! Historians are never required to write for people other than historians." Yet he also adds quickly, "Most of them are doing excellent work. I draw on their excellent work. I admire some of them more than anybody I know. But, by and large, they haven't learned to write very well.

Are you listening, Mr. Big-Shot Professor Who Wrote My Textbook That No Student Really Likes?

Are you listening, Snotty Colleagues of Mine Who Insist On Doing Things "The Right Way?"

Technorati Tags: academia, education and pedagogy, history, News I Can Use, The world is full of morons, unintended consequences

The Evils of AP

A lesson in Advanced mis-Placement - Boston.com: this is worth an entire read, but it's not new to me. I saw this over a decade ago where I used to work. We were told by admins (and it's always "told" and never actually put into writing --can't leave a nasty paper trail) to identify students for placement into AP classes. This was a terrible deal for me, because it meant that I lost my best and brightest students to a program that was generally taught by someone with less actual field knowledge than me. But worse than that, students didn't want to go to the AP class because --and here's the fun part --they knew that AP isn't always good prep for college! Yes, there are good AP instructors out there, but not nearly as many as AP instructors think. Some students deliberately avoided AP because it would ruin their GPAs. Even more twisted, the ones who were in the AP sections getting A's were scoring 2's and 3's on the actual AP when they bothered to take it --because their own AP instructors discouraged them from taking the exam on the grounds that "minorities never get a fair shake on the APs."

So why even bother? First, it's a boondoggle for AP instructors, who get to have comparatively well-behaved students for most of their sections. They get a stipend for their trouble. And they can lord it over their colleagues that they get to teach AP. Second, it's a boondoggle for admins that get to pad their campus stats sheet (except for that pesky pass/fail number). And did I forget to mention that campuses get stipends based on AP enrollment? That's the part that's going on in the article. Admins get the credit for spiking AP enrollment and increasing campus funds (which are almost never spent on AP students, natch), while AP instructors get the heat for not doing a good job with students who have no business being there in the first place.

Full disclosure: I was, at one time, certified to teach AP U.S. History. I also work for a college system that heavily emphasizes and benefits from dual-credit classes which compete with AP courses for enrollment. But many of the same complaints apply there as well. Commonality: you tell the admins that their campuses will get money for doing a certain thing, and everything else goes out the door. I've seen it too many times.

Technorati Tags: education and pedagogy

IP Abolitionism; or, JSTOR Can Go Take A Flying Leap

The Four Historical Phases of IP Abolitionism: read all of it, but here's the gold:

"As Roderick Long notes in his 1995 article The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights (one of the first sallies of Phase 4), 'Though never justified, copyright laws have probably not done too much damage to society so far. But in the Computer Age, they are now becoming increasingly costly shackles on human progress.'

"The digital information/Internet age made the problem of IP more obvious and serious, which led to our current modern resurgence of libertarian IP abolitionism, a position which seems to have grown and become dominant in the last 10 years, as [is argued] in The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism.

"The case against IP is today especially clear to Austrian-, anarchist-, and left-libertarians, and has intensified and grown significantly in recent years, and shows no sign of abating. The libertarian IP proponents are on the ropes and dwindling in numbers, or so it seems to me."

I have a beef with the JSTOR database administrators. My institution is a dues-paying participating member. Our students' IT feeds pay for their access to the system. I may research and download articles, as may my students. But Heaven forbid that I actually make one step easier for my students to (within a password-secure environment) access materials to which they already have paid access. So no HTML-converted PDFs for my students; they have to go through the permalinks and re-enter their passwords (again and again), which is a royal pain to my distance-ed students.

Oh well. The Internet is Carl Becker's revenge. Peer-reviewed journals are in ICU already. JSTOR can go take a flying leap.

Technorati Tags: academia, education and pedagogy, The world is full of morons

Facing the Inevitable

The Internet has changed, and myself along with it.

This blog will remain active but most of my updates will be via my Twitter feed and/or my Facebook feed (NB Facebook account is by invite; sorry, current students may not access my Facebook feed).

Longer updates will, by necessity, be posted here.

Technorati Tags: News I Can Use

Grind Grind Grind

The post-Spring-Break grind is upon me. While it's not so onerous now that I've moved from a four-exam to a three-exam semester format, it's still a grind in the sense that a) yes, I still have exams and what-not to grade, and b) student begin to pester me for extra credit. Why couldn't you care enough about your grades from the get-go to render this a moot point? But students will be students, after all.

There also myriad committee meetings, professional development meetings, reports, more reports, the transition to a new Moodle-based LMS from the old Blackboard Vista one --and no, we didn't have the funds to commit to an automatic conversion program, so everything must be (re)built from scratch.

And I am on full-time Baby Watch in case Junior decides he wants to come out to play prematurely.

What was it that Lloyd Bridges used to say? "Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue..."

Technorati Tags: academia

What We Learned While Goin' Fishin' on Saturday

• If in doubt about the cranking battery, get it tested at the nearest parts store before heading out on the water.


• A change of dry clothes back at the truck (and a towel) is always a good idea (learned the hard way).


• Seaweed in abundance is the sworn enemy of any impeller-powered rig.


• 65 degree water is still too cold for comfortable swimming, let along going under the boat to clear a clogged intake.


• The third time the boat refuses to start in a reasonable time, when it does get started it is time to head for the ramp.


• Any day you catch fish and get back to the ramp under your own power is A Good Day, no matter what else happens.

I Think Of My Old Journalism Profs And Pause...

For first time, you online news consumers outnumber those newspaper readers: we all knew this day would come. Trees everywhere, rejoice!

Technorati Tags: history, media

Redux: How, Once Again, I Was Ahead Of The Curve And Am The Greatest!

UPDATE: I wrote this back in May 2008, and it bears revisiting now.

RealClearPolitics - Articles - A Step Back From Enviro Lunacy: "$3 a gallon gas didn't change anybody's mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. " That was today.

Now, compare this with comments I myself made elsewhere over two months ago: "We are still in the relatively inelastic range of the demand curve. You get gasoline up to $4.25/gallon in Houston, or $5/gallon in Los Angeles, and I’ll posit that you’ll see the beginnings of serious declines in consumption." I was off by about 25¢, but I still claim it as me own.

Technorati Tags: economy, oil

Concealed Carry on my campus?

My state legislature is currently debating allowing concealed-carry permit holders to carry firearms on campus. Naturally the natives are now Restless. "And can you do SOMEthing about our legislature forcing this down our throats?" sniffed one solon at the last Faculty Senate meeting to the incoming board chairman. Every other conversation in the office inevitably brings the issue up. I suspect a coordinated effort on the part of some SuperSekrit Wacko Faculty-List: Journolist for the community college set.

My colleagues seem to believe that the second this happens, students are going to start bringing Glocks and Colts to class with them and twirling them like six-shooters. I'm trying to figure out if their fear is motivated out of an instinctual (viz., left-wing) fear of guns as a symbol of Authority; or a reflexive spasm against anything coming out of our Republican legislature.

Puh-lease. If you're worried about a student shooting you, CCL holders are probably at the bottom of your list of potential suspects. Most students cannot afford the training. And the ones who are angry enough to actually gun you down, probably aren't going to worry about if they're going to be ticketed for lacking a permit. They'll either ignore the law (funny how gun laws seldom actually stop crimes...) or wait for you to be off-campus. Virginia Tech: that poor crazy so-and-so didn't care about a permit. Professor Crazy What's-her-face at Alabama-Huntsville: didn't have a permit, still came to the department meeting with heat.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but we have guns on campus already, the students are just being very cool and even (!) responsible about them. They're not the ones I worry about. The day some hothead gets angry enough to shoot up a campus near me, I hope someone is capable of stopping him quickly and forcefully, and more often than not such stoppage is going to involve superior firepower. This is reality, however distasteful and ugly it may be.

(Note: I would not oppose requiring those CCL holders who actively carry to register with campus security, should they chose to actively carry while on-campus.)

Technorati Tags: academia, News I Can Use, guns, The world is full of morons, unintended consequences

What If the Biggest Solar Storm on Record Happened Today? --Nat'l Geographic

What If the Biggest Solar Storm on Record Happened Today?: this kind of thing I have noted before (as have others) and occasionally this keeps me up at night. My mania for gardening isn't just about playing with power tools....

Technorati Tags: News I Can Use, end of the world

A Disturbing --If Funny-- Conversation I Had With A Bold Student (Not One Of Mine)

...so here I am in my so-called "office": a designated table out in the lobby of the satellite campus where I hold my Thursday classes. (Hey, I like it here, I can greet students by name as they come in, and it's something of a local tradition.) And I'm going about my business when I hear Bold Student (BS) talking to an associate thusly: "Man, that exam I just took was so hard, I had to get my mom to help me take iit." And I had to just stop and call BS out.

"Hey, are you serious?! You had to get your mom to help you take an exam?"[NB presumably a take-home]."

"Yeah, she's a[n expert in the subject area.]" [Job title withheld to preserve privacy.]

"Okay, fair enough, but she wasn't in class with you, she might not be familiar with the subject area."

"But she's an expert!"

"Even so, what're you gonna do if you fail the exam anyway? Yell at your mom???"

"Uhhh..."

"And for the love of Pete, why are you talking about this out loud in the lobby of the college where at least one professor is hanging out and can overhear your entire conversation!?"

BS had no response for that one.

Of course this conversation was troubling on several levels. But arguably the most disturbing part was the mother's willingness to help her daughter cheat.; What does that say about the woman's professional ethics? (Hint: her field would, in fact, be distressed to know of such a thing.)

Technorati Tags: academia, cheating, ethics, humor, The world is full of morons

REPOST: "Ahh, I see Professor Mojo has given his first exam of the term..."

[SPRING 2011 UPDATE: Scores in the "Since 1877" class have been good so far. The change in format has only managed to shrink the standard deviation by a modest amount, and has probably benefitted some low-end students a bit in the process. Even so; I will be dealing with the inevitable students who are in Deep Trouble Over Things Which Have Incurred The Wrath Of Professor Mojo. As istradition, here is this post marking the occasion:]

"Ahh, I see Professor Mojo has given his first exam of the term: hisstudents look like they've been gut-shot."

I try to keep class upbeat, lively, and not boring--oxymoronic aims for a history lecture, one might say (and yes, there are days when even I get bored by the things I have to cover). But I never intentionally mislead my students. From Day One, I warn them that if they don't study for the exams --and especially if they blow off the essay questions -- they will fail. But there are a significant number who simply do not listen. And so every term, I get Exam One grades (out of 100) like 55. 38. 18.

Welcome to the world of Community College Education.

For what it's worth, I also tell the students that this happens to everyone, and that I will take significant improvement into account when final grades are calculated. My mission is to improve

these students, I don't get paid extra for failing them --that's how I justify it. Even so, I also know from past experience that only half of those students who bomb Exam One (bomb: = = anything less than a D/60) will even bother to finish the course, they'll head for the door at break and keep on going to the registrar to withdraw. It makes me sad.

But I can only do so much. I'm not legally allowed to use a war elephant (with howdah) to chase down those counselors who push students into classes for which they are absolutely unprepared; nor can I use Invoked Devastation on the schools which produce these students. I can only encourage and work with those who stick it out, and at least get them on the Path of Right Learning ("Read! Think!" "Write!").

The really sad part is that many of them will "shop around" for an "easier" prof next semester, and then end up failing again when they don't bother to study. This is college: I'm not doing any favors by reinforcing the bad habits they picked up in high school. And yes, I can throw stones at high schools, I used to teach high school, and I do know what it's like.

Technorati Tags: academia, education and pedagogy, News I Can Use

Wherein We Review The Concept of "Dawdlework"

Moons and moons ago I believe I coined the term "dawdlework" to describe doing things that, while necessary, are insufficiently high on a current priorities list to justify the level of energy expenditure devoted to them. This is generally more constructive than mere procrastination, and allows for a positive defense when accused by family and loved ones of "not getting anything done."

I am confronted every spring with this, and this one is no exception. In preparation for the coming of Sturdy Baby, the Mrs. and I have been doing various projects around the house. We still have too much junk. But my priority revolves around thinning the amount of Stuff that we have, and putting away the Stuff that we do have in some semblance of order and aesthetic appeal. But Mrs. is focusing on the nursery. At this point our opinions diverge. I feel (quite strongly) that we need to focus on other areas first, since we have already done so much in the nursery already. Mrs., firmly in Nesting Mode, disagrees. She offers as a positive defense, "But we need to have the nursery ready well before the baby gets here!" And while she has a point, I can't help feeling that this may be a bit of a dodge to avoid doing things like sorting boxes for storage, thinning for another garage sale, and such.

Mind you, I have utterly no hope of winning this argument, logically or otherwise. I've been married long enough to appreciate this.

However, my crafty ("male!") mind has taken a different tack lately. The weather is growing warmer. There are many projects that need doing outside, especially in the vegetable beds. I can reasonably claim that if work is not done now, we will be in March and March is going to be busy, plus March is into growing season and many things need to be done prior to this time. Thus, I go skipping merrily outside to do Manly Things.

This, friends, is dawdlework.

One of the key secrets to a happy marriage is agreeing to only tackle one project at a time, and to have a defined time-limit to said project (four hours on Saturday morning seems to work well for everyone here). Another is agreeing beforehand to reward cooperation with incentives like footrubs. But it also doesn't hurt to make sure that "dawdlework" also includes something that will pleasantly surprise the other party. I'm working on that one...

Technorati Tags: humor, relationships