We Have Moved

The Elder and Younger Professors W.O. Wiseguy are pleased to announce that they have moved the Professor Plum's Plums to new digs under a new name.

http://www.professorwiseguy.com/

Mental Detox

I was too busy watching TV to know about this, so I'm a day late reporting that Mental Detox Week is here and we're in the middle of it. So blow up your TV and detoxify your mind!

Technoslave

It's too late for me, but save yourselves! Throw your cellphone out a bus window! Smash your laptop! (Better yet, send it to me, especially if it's really new and really nice, and I'll smash it.) But do not become a Technoslave.

All-Boy and All-Girl Schools

I have a confession: I attended an all-male school from eighth grade through high school. (Explains a few things, eh?) In the centuries since I graduated, my alma mater has gone co-ed, merging with a nearby all-female school. A recent article suggests that perhaps this merger was misguided from an educational standpoint, as single-sex education shows its value in England.

Line up for the Library

I know that some of you aren't entirely sure where the library is on your campus. Apparently some British students have a similar problem, opting instead to visit one of the world's great non-university libraries, The British Library. As we read in this article, Frustration for authors as students hog British Library reading rooms. Wouldn't you just feel awful if you kept the next Karl Marx from working in relative comfort?

Vintage Wii

Turns out that the Wii isn't as new as it seems to be. I found this ad in an old magazine, proving that the "ultimate joy machine" has been on the scene for--well, for a long time.
This is just one of several vintage ads created by somebody with a great deal too much time on their hands.

Set Your Sights Low

Here's a news story that proves that having high expectations just isn't worth it. Apparently, selective schools rejected more students than ever before. What this should teach us is that having lowered expectations is a good thing. While all these suckers are getting the thin envelope from Harvard (93% rejected) and Princeton (91% rejected), you can be sitting back, comfortably assured of admission to Northwestern Oklahoma Wesleyan Polytechnic A&M from the moment you drop the application in the mail. Why deal with the serial rejection you're going to get from the Ivy League and their ilk? Set your sights low, and you won't be disappointed.

Threats to Education

A friend of mine has a painting in her office. Two of the corners of the painting are labeled "Rock" and "A Hard Place," while the other two, diagonally positioned across the canvas, read, "Devil" and "The Deep Blue Sea." In the middle of the painting is a big "X" labeled "You are here." To some degree that's how campus security types must be feeling these days. With horrific shootings in Virginia and Illinois over the past twelve months, they can't afford to take lightly any sort of threat. That's why semesters have been interrupted recently at two schools: "Threatening Graffiti Leads College to Cancel Classes."
What are you going to do, if you're the decision maker at a school where threatening messages show up above the urinals? Probably the writing is the ranting of somebody with a dreaded exam on the date in question, but you can't take that chance, can you? Time was when campus security only had to contend with rowdy partiers and sloppy drunks. Today they have to worry about gun-toting psychos and harmless but frightening cranks. I don't envy them their job.

No Dancing on my Donation!

Reading a recent article on gifts to colleges, "When Strings Are Attached, Quirky Gifts Can Limit Universities," I found myself taken back to the good old days at my alma mater, William Jewell College. A school with Baptist roots, Jewell, for decades, never had a dance on campus. (Baptists, you see, have traditionally disapproved of sex, believing that it may lead to dancing.) Instead of a Homecoming Dance, we had a Homecoming Concert. This was in the days before moshing, but I am fairly certain, despite never attending one of these events, that there were curmudgeonly overseers strolling the aisles to ensure that the movement did not wax rhythmic.
Was there a point to this post? Oh yeah! William Jewell used to play its indoor sports in the lovely and ancient Brown Gymnasium. After the construction of a fine new fieldhouse, which opened in time to mark my arrival on campus, the Brown Gym became a bit of a redundancy. The Browns, I am told, gave the money to build the gym with the stipulation that if a dance were ever held on campus, the gym would be burned down. Although I rather doubt such a restriction actually existed, it makes for a fun story. When the college raised buckets-full of dough to convert the gym into a performing arts center and classrooms, they apparently decided that whatever stipulation was in force had fallen away with the conversion of the building from gym to catch-all.
Sometimes, an alumnus' generosity winds up putting more burden on the school than their gift is actually worth. I'm contemplating some sort of poison-pill donation to one of my several former schools. Perhaps I could donate a new theater with the understanding that plays by Edward Albee must be performed in Norwegian at least once every leap year. That sounds like fun.

Find Books at Bookfinder

You probably won't be surprised that I, as an English professor, am a book junkie. More than likely I will buy more books this year than you'll buy in your entire college career. If not, then welcome to the wonderful world of book hoarding. Regardless, you probably don't want to spend more money on the books you buy--whether they be Harry Potter hardcovers or textbooks--than you have to. That's where a site like Bookfinder comes in handy. This resource searches a host of sites in search of the best buy, new or used, on a book you specify. It's similar to Best Book Buys, but Bookfinder has the advantage of searching new AND used offerings. On the other hand, Bookfinder does not organize by ISBN, so you might need to sift through a number of listings, all with slightly different titles, in order to find the bargain you're seeking.
And I still haven't found the site that will search both Amazon's used books and eBay in one move. That would be something worth creating for a programmer, although there's no money in sending people to eBay listings.

How Not to Make a Fortune in IT

It seems that the days of infinite competition for tech jobs perished with the dot-com bubble a decade ago, but computer-related jobs still promise good pay and solid security if you're halfway dependable. Take my nephew, who didn't go to college at all and now works for Google, attempting to take over the world. They keep moving him around the world. I fully expect him to live on the moon within five years.
If you're wondering what will not help you earn the big bucks in the computer field, you might find this lovely article from Infoworld interesting.

Professorial Plagiarism?

Here's a dirty little secret coming out into the light of day. Any sneaky thing that you've thought of as a student, professors thought of years ago, and we do it more smoothly than you do. Take the case of--how shall we describe it?--"creative acquisition of scholarly materials." With the publish-or-perish gun pointed at the career's heads, many professors have succumbed to the temptation of what would, in any other situation, be called plagiarism. (It's called plagiarism in this situation as well.) Now, it seems, in order to avoid embarrassment over such materials, journals are taking the battle to their writers. In "Journals May Soon Use Antiplagiarism Software on Their Authors" you can read about how the professorial version of Turnitin is being turned on the tenure-track types whose work might be suspect. Maybe I'll have to think twice about submitting that article to College English!

High-Fallutin Ivy Leaguers

Those hoity-toity Ivy Leaguers are at it again. Now it's the president of Harvard criticizing the game of football in this aptly named article: Harvard's President Denounces Football. That's as unAmerican as denouncing pizza or voting or enormous SUVs! You're not surprised at this denunciation, are you? Those smarty-pants East Coast types think they know everything. I wonder what Harvard's record was last year. Probably if they'd gone to a bowl game, the Prez would be whistling a different tune. But here's the rub. The Harvard President is Charles Norton Eliot, and he made his comments in 1908.

Fear of Facebook

How many Facebook friends do you have? In a current Time article,Suffering from Facebook fatigue?, you can read about the perils of Facebook overload. At the risk of sounding like a complete Old Fogey, I have to say that I don't get it. I don't get why people invite zillions of people--like me--to join some group like "Let's all fall down the stairs" or why I get vampire bites or why I get asked about my preferences in movies or whatever? The same students who complain about not having enough time apparently change their profile picture every thirty seconds and engage in twenty-eight Facebook applications. Might this be an experience that sucks up just a bit too much of our time?

Money = Happiness?

All my life I've been taught that money can't make you happy. On the other hand, I've come to the conclusion that the absence of money can certainly lead to unhappiness. All that being said, someone far more methodical and thorough than I did an intriguing study of the correlation between money and happiness, published in the New York Times.

M.H. Abrams and Academic Majors

What's your major? If you haven't decided, or even if you have, you could do worse than to listen to the thoughts of the great literary critic M.H. Abrams from an article by Jeffrey Williams. He went into English because, he says, "there weren't jobs in any other profession, so I thought I might as well enjoy starving, instead of starving while doing something I didn't enjoy."There's a lot to be said for going into what you enjoy.

Voodoo Baseball

I awoke this morning to a radio report of the story of the Boston Red Sox jersey buried in the construction of the new Yankee Stadium. It seems that Gino Castignoli, a New York-dwelling, Red Sox-cheering construction worker, placed a David Ortiz jersey beneath five feet of concrete in the new stadium several months ago. After bragging about it to friends, he allowed the story to get out. The Yankees then, figuring out where Castignoli might have had access, took a jack hammer to the suspect floor and found the shirt last week.
So who is dumber? Is it Castignoli who spent good money on the Ortiz jersey and buried it, only to face possible legal action for his troubles? Or is it the Yankees who took this nonsense seriously and spent time, money, and mess jack-hammering their new ballpark searching for a jersey that might never have existed?
Does somebody in the Yankee organization really believe that a buried piece of cloth will somehow put a hex on the Bronx Bombers? If that's so, perhaps they ought to sift through the rubble of the House that Ruth Built when they demolish it next year looking for an explanation of the jillion-dollar team's woes in recent years.

Read Novels for Success!

The lovely world of Lifehack brings us a great notion: Reading novels (books in general) fuels your idea machine. I'm not sure that's the best reason why physicists and accountants and nurses and IT types ought to read non-job-related stuff, but it's a good reason. So head on down to Borders and start reading!

Citation Site

I guess it took Kiwis to get it done, but somebody at the University of Auckland has created a very nicely presented guide to documentation in the various styles, including MLA and APA. Now you'll have no excuse for not knowing how to site a book by three authors published under a full moon and sold on street corners.

The Unavailable Mr. Hughes

Some ten years ago, I sat in a teachers' workshop and shared my memories of Hill Hughes, a high school English teacher, and why he meant so much to me. I can well imagine Mr. Hughes wiping his brow when I walked out of his classroom for the last time. Surely, I had not proven his most promising or successful student. Wise enough to recognize ability, he probably knew that I profoundly underachieved in his class, but I'm fairly certain he didn't foresee me teaching English as a profession, earning a doctorate, and publishing on some of the very literary works that I so studiously avoided studying seriously when they appeared on his syllabus.
After I told of this man, I remember Helen Burnstad, our staff development director at the time, asking, "Have you told him how much he meant to you?" Obviously, I had to write this man a letter. I called the school the next day to retrieve his address, but I never got that letter written.
Today, for some odd reason, I thought of that undone task. Again I contacted the school, but this time I received word that Hill Hughes passed away in October 2004.
I'm not self-absorbed enough to believe that I somehow ruined the last six years of Mr. Hughes' life by not telling him about how life turned out for me. He did not, I'm certain, die wondering "What about Browning?" with his last breath. Still, I might have added a sliver to his day had I taken the time to write that letter and get it in the mail. And today, the opportunity is gone.
This is not some thinly veiled attempt to be praised for my teaching. Instead, it's a bit of a carpe diem plea. When we get opportunities, we simply have to act upon them. Far too many of those chances go away, never to return.

Magic Pen Game

Would you like something free and just as capable of sucking your soul out of you through addictive game play as Desktop Tower Defense? Try Magic Pen. In this game--did I mention it was free--you draw geometric shapes in order to push a little red ball through a course. Sound goofy? Yes, but it's . . . well, did I mention it's addictive?

The Prophets of Sports Illustrated

With my beloved Kansas Jayhawks in the Final Four for the first time since 2003, I'm paying a bit more attention to sports news over the past couple of weeks. On Friday, I found the Sports Illustrated college basketball experts' predictions for the weekend's three games. SI has five such experts, each of whom picked his winner for the Kansas-North Carolina and the UCLA-Memphis semifinals followed by their expert opinion on the winner of Monday's championship.
These geniuses, people who get paid good money for their college basketball acumen, made the following guesses. Four out of five of them picked North Carolina over Kansas. A different four out of the five picked UCLA over Memphis. All the picks for the final champion went to either UCLA or North Carolina. How rich.
On Saturday evening, Memphis thumped UCLA and Kansas spanked the Tarheels. Neither game was within single digits. Therefore, out of the possible ten right answers the SI experts posited, they got exactly two correct. To add to the beauty of this, they have no chance of adding right answers in the finals, since they all picked teams who have already lost! Thus, out of fifteen chances, they have gotten two right, considerably worse than coin toss guesses would have likely produced.
These sports-page prophets are just the latest and most trivial of the various prognosticators who you'll find showing up in magazines and other media. Do you remember the people who predicted with apparent certainty that the Bush administration would be reinstituting the draft or invading Iran over the last couple of years. You probably don't recall Richard Clarke's breathless 2005 article in which he predicted a nation wracked by continued terrorist attacks over the coming years. So far, Clarke's bleak vision appears quite fanciful. The same magazine featured a 1999 cover predicting "Dow 36,000." That came shortly before the dot-com bubble popped.
Of course all those brilliant financial minds at Bear Stearns and other lenders, who have gotten us into the whole subprime mortgage greed fest, were predicting the future as well. "It'll be okay," they assumed, glancing at their Harvard MBAs for reassurance.
What all of these stories should tell us is that hubris is alive and well in America. The best predictions today, as always, appear after the fact.
Without Harvard MBA's, government jobs, or SI press credentials, we're best off speaking of what is known and leaving the hard work of prophecy to the stronger minds.

In Memoriam: Semicolons

I used to share a communal office two mornings each week with a guy who had spent several years as a journalist. "I resigned," this former reporter explained, "because they wouldn't let me use a semicolon in a story. In all the stories I ever turned in, some copy editor always took out the semicolons. Eventually, I started to try to sneak one in, but it never worked. No semicolons would appear, so I quit!"
Why do I mention this? It seems that the apparently endangered future of the semicolon is quite the cause celebre in France, as this story from The Guardian explains.

Intentional Misrenunciation

In the category of "Things that may only interest me" is "Saying it Wrong on Purpose," an article from The Lexicographer's Rules, dealing with people's intentional mispronunciations of words. Personally, I've been known to pronounce the "w" in sword, but most of my on-purpose mispronunciations derive from things my kids say or have said. In time, I think, we develop an entire, warped vocabulary if we talk sufficiently with our offspring.
Therefore, if you want to sound like an educated person, avoid procreation!

Texting Ourselves Silly

According to this article from The Times of London, constant texting and emailing makes us lose as much as 10 IQ points temporarily. To my mind, this is yet another of the recent evidences that multitasking really isn't working out so well for us. How effectively, then, do you think you do at studying, writing, and so forth if you're responding to constant texts, calls, and messages?

DiMaggio, Hitting Streaks, and "At This Rate"

A recent op-ed contributor to the New York Times uses computer modeling to demonstrate that a hitting streak like the fifty-six-game job Joe DiMaggio put together is really not that extraordinary. Indeed, the computers suggest, we shouldn't be surprised at Joltin' Joe's performance at all.
With all due respect to this writer, I have to observe that computers do not play baseball. I did a similar study, albeit without aid of complicated computer modeling. What I discovered was that perfect games, that rarest of pitching accomplishments, should actually happen more often than they do. If the odds of getting a single hitter out are about 3/4 for a good pitcher, then the odds of getting 27 hitters out in a row are 3/4 to the 27th. That comes out to a .000432 chance of a perfect game. That's 4 in 10,000. Given that there are 2,592 games per year with two sides pitching or 5,184 possibilities, there ought to be something like two perfect games each year. Even crummy pitchers, the sort that allow runners to reach base 30% of the time, ought to get a perfect game every six years or so.
This goes along with my irritation at comments like "at this rate" when it comes to sports or anything else. For example, at the rate they are hitting home runs this year (after one game) the Kansas City Royals will hit 162 homers this year. I'd be fairly certain that the Royals will not hit 162 home runs this year. At the rate they're winning games, the Royals will go 162-0. "At this rate" is an absolutely meaningless comment, since rates rarely stay the same.
If housing values continue to decline at the present rate for the next ten years, houses will be worth nothing. I'm pretty sure that isn't going to happen. At the rate my son is playing Wii, he'll have put 5,000 hours on the machine by the end of the month. That isn't going to happen either.
Let's just be clear. Computers don't play baseball and the future cannot be boiled down to a mathematical formula. To write and think intelligently about such things, we have to go beyond such functions.

A Great Example of Irony

This is just too rich. When the University of Texas at San Antonio drafted their new honor code/anti-plagiarism policy, they . . . you guessed it . . . copied. It seems that their policy came from Clemson by way of Brigham Young University, all with nary a peep in the credit department. They'll be a while living this one down.

Foot Shooters Unite!

If you really want to effect change in the world, sign a petition! Sign a petition to stop the war in Iraq, fight global warming, end genocide, and make the tax code fair. Change is as simple as that! Do I really believe that? Not for a second.
At JCCC, several interior design students have started a petition complaining about their primary professor. You have to think that'll make classes awkward for the complaining people. (I tried to find the article online, but it's nowhere to be found.)
Let's realize that professors have a dozen ways to screw up a students life if they choose to do so. Any professor who wants to drop a student a letter grade can find a reason to do so. And what can the student do? Not very much. Appeals are rarely successful. Mostly you can simply grit your teeth and suffer.
Knowing the professor in question, professionalism will permit her to work with these students and avoid reprisals, but somebody needs to share a basic life lesson with these petitioners. If you're going to stick your neck out, you'd better be sure about what you're doing. What seems like a great idea on Friday afternoon can leave an unrepairable mess come Monday.

Did He Think This Through?

I want you to think when you write. Is that really too much to ask? I just read an article on CNN's website explaining the pains that people in Camden, Alabama are feeling over gas prices. These people, shelling out some 13% of their paychecks for gas, are really feeling it. To this I have to say, "Well duh!" They paid this journalist, Steve Hargreaves, to tell us that fuel prices are high and that they hurt poor people who drive a lot more than others!
Take this example from the story's lead: "Corey Carter spends a quarter of his paycheck on gas." I feel for this guy, but I don't have any sympathy for Hargreaves, who doesn't give me sufficient information to know what to make of this story. How far does Carter drive to work? Why doesn't he carpool? What does he drive? If he's driving some 1978 Lincoln or other gas chugger, then might he not consider trying to downsize? It's possible that Carter drives a highly tuned hybrid from his mountain-top retreat where he cares for his mother who can't be moved and works a shift that nobody else who lives on his side of the plant works. Maybe, but with this fine writer--who apparently did most of his legwork for this article at a filling station--we'll never know.
Similarly, when he says, "For local businesses, an extra dollar spent in the tank means one not spent at the restaurant or hardware store," you wonder if you really needed to be told this bit of wisdom. An extra dollar spent on the cellphone bill or on the cable bill or on the lights or the water or taxes or anything else is also a dollar out of the local economy. How about a dollar spent on lottery tickets, Steve?
Just because Mr. Hargreaves gets paid for his writing does not make it good. I urge you to think harder than this guy thought before you sit down to pen your next grade-gathering effort.

Mind Mapping

While we're worrying ourselves about the mind, I'd like to say a word about mind-mapping. Actually, I'd like to say several words.
Word #1: Just what is mind-mapping? For all you visual thinkers, it's a powerful technique for taking notes and organizing thoughts. I saw a demonstration of it in a class once and was so impressed that I've shamelessly plagiarized that demo in my own classes. You might want to check out Tony Buzan's book on the topic.
Word #2: Isn't there free web-based software for just about everything? Well of course. You can scoot over to Mindomo to see how easily (and cheaply) you can make one of these little delights. Granted, it's not as fun as having a whole box full of colored pens, but you can't have everything--at least not in PHP.

How to Think

Is that a practical title, or what? This little bit of wisdom is written by somebody a lot more science-oriented than I am, but his ten methods for thinking will translate nicely to just about any discipline.

Why Should We Study?

In "A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law" (1765), John Adams admonishes his readers not to presume that the spirit that led to the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had died out entirely in less than a century. He instead assured his readers that such a spirit still existed, not only in England but in America as well. However, Adams added a warning to his assurance of the spirit's continued life:

This spirit, however, without knowledge, would be little better than a brutal rage. Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.

You can find the last sentence of this quotation now at the top of a large placard advertising the new HBO miniseries about Adams. I saw it today in the post office. Given the general cluelessness of many high school graduates today, I have to wonder how seriously our society takes this admonition. Adams does not simply suggest that we "dare to read, think, speak, and write." He suggests it for a very specific reason, so that we do not descend into brutishness, so that we can be worthy of the political and social liberty that our heritage has bequeathed to us.
As a home-schooling parent and a teacher, I would urge those who read Adams' words to look beyond that one-sentence quotation and read this Founding Father's words in their original context. Should we fail to dare for the reason that Adams proposes and simply dare to descend into self-absorption and trash, we'll find the cause of liberty to be a lost one.

Get a Dictionary!

It isn't available online yet, but the last page in the April Atlantic has a marvelous response to two letter writers asking for definitions on two different words. The Word Court writer points out that while dictionaries cannot be expected to define every possible word that you might want it to define, good dictionaries cover an amazing amount of turf. He specifically suggests two dictionaries that I would also recommend:

• The American Heritage Dictionary
• The New Oxford American Dictionary

Yes, they cost a bit of dough, but if you're serious about using words--and any person with an eye on success in our world should be--then think of these as more of an investment than as an expense.

Are You Smart or Stoopid?

If you'd like to test your relative excellence in matters cerebral, check out this little test. Feel free to share your results for all to ridicule.

The Famous Final Line

Maybe you've been waiting to finish that great American novel with a truly inspired final line. Some people think that the opening line is the most important thing, but, let's face it, the final line is the lasting impression that people get. At least those people who manage to finish the book. You'll find a list of the 100 best concluding sentences in novels here.

You Write Like a Girl

Okay, we're probably all old enough that the old playground insult, "You throw like a girl," isn't that big of a deal. I know it doesn't bother me . . . much . . . anymore. You've probably never cared much if someone said you WROTE like a girl (especially if you are one). Regardless, I've just discovered the amazing Gender Guesser. Paste in a sample of your writing and it will attempt to determine whether you are male or female.
Should it concern me that I usually come out as a "Weak Male"? It really doesn't bother me. Really.

George Fredrickson--Writer and Change Agent

You've probably never heard of George Fredrickson, the 73-year-old historian who died last week. That's understandable. He never made quite the headlines of such truly important figures as Paris Hilton or Kanye West. Still, Fredrickson managed a few useful things in his life, notably writing six books. But more important than a handful of books was the impact those books had. George Fredrickson, over a long and productive career, made a difference for the better on racial understanding in the United States. No, he didn't win a Grammy and few people asked for his autograph, but this man took pen in hand and helped people to understand one of the most intractable issues of our lifetimes. That's a life well spent in my book. You can read a remembrance of the man in the New York Times.

Post Hoc Ergo Coffee Hoc

One of my favorite logical fallacies is the one called "post hoc ergo prompter hoc." Translated from the Latin, it means, "after this therefore because of this." The fallacy involves assuming that because something happens after another thing it was caused by it. For a ridiculous example, I might note that the phone rang just now, immediately after I launched FreeCell on my computer. Did FreeCell make my phone ring? If I'm committing that fallacy, then yes it did.
But let's be a bit more reasonable. Today in Kansas City, it's snowing. If my daughter calls me to say she's had a car wreck, I'll probably assume that the weather contributed to the wreck. In reality, though, just because she had the wreck after the snow started doesn't mean that the snow caused the wreck. She might have been hit by someone who ran a stoplight.
So along comes this brilliant person who seems to suggest that the philosophical upheaval we call the Enlightenment came about because of coffee. You introduce coffee into European society in the 17th century. The Enlightenment kicks in during the late 17th and 18th centuries. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the connection.
But what this theorist neglected to see was the great potato connection. Potatoes--which come originally from South America and not from either Idaho or Ireland--arrived in Europe around the same time as coffee, around 1700. And many historians and philosophers date the beginning of the Enlightenment to the same time. Coincidence? I think not!
Perhaps what both coffee- and potato-Enlightenment theorists neglect is the much larger current that these two agricultural products were a part of. When the New World opened up to Europe, an incredible amount of wealth began flowing from the Americas to the Old World. That wealth provided for education, leisure time, and a period of great philosophizing.
Nah, it must have been the coffee.

Valley Girl or Gangsta Girl?

Apparently, the new chic thing is fake memoirs. With megabucks available from publishers, why should anybody allow something as simple as truth get in the way of a contract. According to various sources, including this New York Times article, Margaret B. Jones, a supposed drug-running, half-white/half-Native American girl from South Central LA, the author of a critically acclaimed memoir, Love and Consequences, is in reality Margaret Selzer, an all-white, affluent child of the San Fernando Valley.
This has me wondering who these critics are, loving a book that hasn't a shred of truth to it. You have to wonder about a publisher who could be taken in by such a pack of lies.
What does this teach us as students? I guess there are a couple of lessons to learn. First, if you're going to fake your way to fame and fortune, make sure that you can cover your tracks. Second, when you're considering a source, look long and hard at it. Apparently neither the critics nor the publishers will do the job for you.

The Importance of Style

If you saw The Incredibles, then you might remember the title sequence, an homage to the great graphic designer, Saul Bass. Some enterprising person with a Youtube account decided to speculate on this question: What would the credits sequence for Star Wars have looked like had Saul Bass done the job?
Watch this and then tell me that style doesn't matter.

Built Green? No, Black

The top news on CNN's website at present--at least for the next five minutes until Hilary Clinton jaywalks or Britanny Spears leaves her kids at Saks--is an account of five $2 million-dollar homes burning in Seattle, apparently an act of eco-arson.
The ELF or Earth Liberation Front, it seems, decided that the most environmentally sensible way to deal with the insane land use represented by these houses was to burn them down. I'm curious how much carbon dioxide these fires released into the atmosphere.
I mention this event because I carry a certain amount of sympathy for these whack-jobs who torched these monuments to conspicuous consumption. Nobody on earth needs a $2 million house, just as nobody needs a Hummer. Food from South America isn't really cheaper than food from close by when we factor in all the costs of production and the effect that these foods have on our health. We live in a world with an unsustainable, indefensible way of doing a great many things. However, the way to change the world does not begin with burning down houses.
Of course, the ELF hasn't really thought things through from the outset, have they? What are they liberating earth from? Humans? Isn't there something paradoxical about human action serving to liberate the earth from human domination. Just yesterday, I thought I heard a tree in my yard say, "Gee, I wish some enlightened human would burn down the homes of some of the benighted types who are doing bad stuff to the earth."
Like so many people in our society, this brand of activist has opted for a lazy (and criminal) approach to effecting change. Rather than doing the difficult work of engaging people's minds and risking some questioning of their beliefs, these people just start burning. They're right up there with those who blew up government installations during the '60s or murdered abortion doctors in the '80s.
Such action is no more the mark of educated people than is living in ostentation and excess along Seattle's "Street of Dreams."

[Citation Needed]

This is a two-fer. Not only do you get to read an amusing tale of people going around graphically calling for sources on unfounded claims, but you get to read a reasonable defense of Wikipedia. Who could want more than this article offers?

The Door Game

This is kind of interesting. This game involves choosing from three doors. Unlike the Simpsons, there's not a hungry animal behind any of the doors. I'll let the host site explain the rules of the game. Make sure you stick around for the evaluation at the end.

Movies from Novels

You can make film from fiction? That's a crazy idea, but it might just be crazy enough to work! Here's an article about recent films and their adherence to their novelistic origins. Who'd have known that all of these movies were first novels? But what about Transformers?

Rejection

In the unlikely event that you receive a grade that you'd rather not see, the sort of grade that ought to be reserved for the truly mediocre and inept people who populate this world, you might find a bit of solace in this little video. Or maybe not.

Weirdest Book Titles of '07

I couldn't improve on this, so here's an entire brief article from the NY Times.

The polls are open in the annual balloting for the Diagram Prize, honoring the world’s oddest book title, Agence France-Presse reported. Conducted by The Bookseller, a British trade magazine, the vote at www.thebookseller.com asks participants to choose from six mostly nonfiction titles on the shortlist, culled from titles submitted by publishers, bookstore workers and librarians around the world. The nominees are “I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen” by Jasper McCutcheon; “How to Write a How to Write Book” by Brian Paddock; “Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues” by Catharine A. MacKinnon; “Cheese Problems Solved” edited by P. L. H. McSweeney; “If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs” by Big Boom; and “People Who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Doctor Feelgood” by Dee Gordon. The winner is to be announced on March 28. The prize has been offered since 1978, when the winner was “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/books/25arts-BOOKTITLESEA_BRF.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

Literature vs. literature -- John Grisham

If you've taken a literature class from me, then you know that one of the big questions I like to continue to dangle in front of the eyes of my students is the difference between capital-L Literature and small-l literature. In other words, what makes something worthy of being treated with respect, printed in literature anthologies, and so forth. John Grisham, it seems, doesn't place himself in the upper-case category.

“I’m not sure where that line goes between literature and popular fiction,”
the mega-selling author says. “I can assure you I don’t take myself serious
enough to think I’m writing literary fiction and stuff that’s going to be
remembered in 50 years. I’m not going to be here in 50 years; I don’t care
if I’m remembered or not. It’s pure entertainment.”

Consider the Source?

What a strange morning. I awoke this wintery morning and, before getting completely dressed, performed the sensible task of looking to see if JCCC had cancelled due to the weather. According to KC's channel 5, we were open.
After spending a half hour in my office and speaking to several colleagues, I received a peculiar phone call from Penny, my wife.
"Are you at school?" she asked.
"Yeah, why?"
"You're closed," she continued.
"No we're not."
"Channel 9 says you're closed."
If Channel 9 says we're closed, then I guess we must be closed. After all, they're on TV and we're not. Never mind that classes are in session, the parking lot is filling up, and the Writing Center is buzzing. Channel 9 says we're closed.
When I notified our public information czar about this tidbit, expressing my outrage at her for withholding this information from us, she registered surprise. "I knew that KFKF said we were closed, but this is news to me."
News. Yeah, that's what Channel 9 is all about. They're so late-breaking in their news coverage that they announce us as closed before we close. I'm impressed.
The czar explained that the last time she had called a TV station directly to register a closing, they had simply accepted the news without asking who she was or whether she had the authority to make such a pronouncement. Interesting.
There's a point to this little rant. My point is that you should always check all available sources for school closings so that you get out as often as possible! Also, it is important to be skeptical of sources. Channel 9 either wasn't skeptical about whoever called in with the news on JCCC's closing or they simply made a mistake, perhaps confusing Johnson County Country Club for Johnson County Community College. Either way, a smart student will recognize that these things happen.
Had a person gone directly to the JCCC website, they'd have seen--straight from the horse's mouth--that the school is open.
Taking this idea a bit further, maybe I should be more skeptical. I didn't see Channel 9's error myself. It's not on their web listing now (although it might have been removed in the last few minutes), so maybe Penny made a mistake and I shouldn't trust her. I'm so confused!

Ninja Advice on Research Papers

It’s that time in the semester when you start wondering about term papers. Who better to help you out on that topic than me? I’ll tell you who’s better: Ask-A-Ninja! He’s got some wonderful insight on the matter.

If He Can Do It . . .

I ran across an intriguing story today, the "by the bootstraps" project of Adam Shepard. Starting with $25 and a change of clothes, Shepard set out to use the system to get on his feet. He lived in a shelter, received foodstamps, and did a lot of grunt labor, but he managed to . . . well, you can read what he did in a year's time.
Anybody can think through various reasons why Shepard had advantages in his effort, but the basic point that I take from his story is simple: If life deals you a bad hand, you have to make good plays in order to get out of the hole. Self pity and self indulgence don't help, in school, at work, or in life. End of sermon.

From Thought to Essay

For those of you dealing with my "Who Am I?" assignment, this essay may be particularly useful.

What's going through the mind of the reporter who writes the article about what goes through the mind of the police officer who pulls over a motorist? Are you still with me? Kevin Ransom wrote an article regarding the mindset of cops performing traffic stops for AOL Auto. While Ransom's work is interesting in helping us to understand the mindset of the officer, I thought it might be interesting to consider how that article popped into Ransom's head.
Did he wake up one morning and think, "Hey, I'd better write an article or they won't pay me this week?" That may have happened. After all, Samuel Johnson tells us that "no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." But, having decided that he would write an article, how did Ransom come to this topic?
Unfortunately, I can't find an email link for Mr. Ransom, so we'll have to attempt to infer his motives from what he wrote. I'd like to suggest a couple of routes he might have taken in order to reach this article.
First, and most obvious, Ransom might be the recent recipient of that most unwelcome of slips of paper: the traffic ticket. While sitting in his car as the officer ran his plates, our intrepid reporter may have considered how he might make these particular lemons into lemonade. "I wonder what's going through that guy's head right now?" he may have asked himself. And then he knew how to proceed.
Or, perhaps Ransom found himself in a social setting with a police officer. "You know what I've always wanted to know?" he may have begun before drawing out of the cop a long explanation of the psychology of traffic stops.
Maybe, if we'd manage to talk with this reporter, we'd find that his mind took an entirely different route to this article. It really doesn't matter. My point here is simply that you, as a student writer, can use the events, oddities, and exceptions of your day as the jumping off point for interesting papers. Rather than knocking out the same old tired topics in the same old tired way, pay attention to your life, the news, and the vicissitudes of existence for the seeds of a good essay. In a subject-matter course, say history or psychology, look for places where the news and the course reading overlap. Look for places where your curiosity is piqued or you're irritated. Those are the departure points for meaningful writings. If you'll do this for a while, you'll soon find that you have far more good ideas than you could ever effectively develop.

Publish or Perish

An article in the New York Times recently explored some aspects of the academic publishing system that you ought to be aware of as a student. At most research universities--either the big state schools or prestigious private ones--a junior faculty member has to come in and perform. You might have thought that performance would be measured in how well the professor taught, but that's not the case at all. Instead, new professors are largely evaluated on their publications. How many books and journal articles do they guide into print? How many papers do they read at prestigious scholarly conferences? Sure, if the professor goes in and drools all over the place in class, that doesn't bode well for their gaining tenure, but if the drooler manages to publish enough, then that might work out.
This article describes how Harvard is tinkering with some of the economic aspects of the current system. Notice that they're not trying to dismantle or even seriously reform the whole publish-or-perish mindset, but at least they're admitting that there are problems.
You can't change the mindset at your school. If you're at a community college or a so-called teaching college, then you should have professors for whom teaching is the main thing. Otherwise, you'll find that research leads the parade and teaching, while it might be good, follows behind the band. You can't change that, but you should know about it. Know what motivates your professor. You could try to change them, but more importantly you should endeavor to understand them.

What's so great about $22.54?

Visit my friends at Forensic Genealogy--dumb name, but an intriguing site--and take their quiz. This week's quiz challenges you to figure out the claim to fame of a lady holding a check beside her mailbox.Weird eh? Try it out. You stand to win . . . I'm not sure you stand to win anything, but it's kind of fun to participate.

Union University

It’s tough for me to watch the news this week as I see the results of the nasty weather from Tuesday night. While Kansas City was experiencing virtually nothing to complain about, a row of tornados sliced across several states. People in Arkansas rode out these snow twisters in bathtubs, but my mind is drawn to Union University, a Baptist school in Jackson, Tennessee, where a couple of dorms were pretty well obliterated during the night. My former college roommate used to be a librarian there, while a current writing teammate, Joanna, retired from the university and still lives in Jackson. Several editors and other writers I’ve worked with have kids and other family members in school at Union. Miraculously, no students at Union were killed. I guess there’s some sort of message here, but I don’t know what it is.

Mind Control and Education

Your Jedi mind tricks won't work on me!
Sure, students sometimes think they can work amazing mind control feats on professors, but it rarely works out very well. Here's a great example that happened to be caught on tape.

World Wide Words

Where does the term "The Elephant in the room" come from? I ask this because I just asked it myself earlier. I heard students in my fiction class suggest that Hemingway's story "Hills Like White Elephants" evoked that saying. That's a great theory, but, according to World Wide Words, a language web site, it can't be true. By their research, we learn that the phrase goes back not into the 1920s when Hemingway was writing this story, but only into the 1970s. Check out World Wide Words if you're into language oddities and word/phrase origins.

The Freshman Phenomenon

In the wake of that last, rather depressing, entry, I add this. If you've ever thought that college wasn't haven't the eye-opening effect on your life that you'd hope it would--as if anybody really wants their eyes opened--rest assured that you're not alone.
This article suggests that most students don't undergo much awakening in their first year of college. It also indicates that at least one professor has pretty much given up on trying to make that awakening take place. That's the spirit, Prof!

You're an Imposter!

Do you ever walk into a classroom and feel like a fraud? As if everyone else is immensely smarter and more capable than you? As if at any moment some member of the academic truth squad will walk in the door and quietly escort you away?
When I started teaching, I used to joke, as I left the classroom, "That's another day without being found out!" Now, some twenty years later, I realize that they're not going to catch on to me, so please keep my secret safe!
Apparently these feelings are nothing new or rare. The simple fact is that you probably are competent enough and that everyone has these sorts of self doubts. Some people, however, do a better job of hiding them. Here's an article that explores this phenomenon. Maybe it'll make you feel better . . . or worse.

A Different Point of View on Politics

Sometimes you have to see things from a different perspective to fully understand them. That's why I'm grateful to this journalist from Minsk, Belarus, for an outsider's take on the American presidential race:

From Belaruskija Naviny (translated by
the Belarus Information Agency):
Minsk (BIA) 1 February, 2008-- In America,
there are not strong leaders like Aleksandr Grigorevich Lukashenko, who come
into power, and stay in the power. The only president in American history
to have held on his power more than two terms was Franklin Roosevelt. And
he was cripple! He stayed long because of war-time situation, not
strength.
But every four years, the parties make their best effort.
This year, because of failed war in Iraq and weak leadership of George W. Bush,
the American people are going in for politics like never before in their
history. Participation in the political life of the country is up 32% from
its historic low in 2004. This upswing is most notable among the young-people of
America, many of whom have at long last removed their walkman headphones to
"tune in" to their nation's future.
What choices are the Republican
and Democratic parties offering them?At this present, the Republican ("Grand
Old") Party has three candidates in competition: the Christian retail-store
magnate and "healthy life-style" advocate Mike Huckabee, whose business
practices were subjected to critique already in American independent cinema
production "I Heart Huckabee" (2005); Mitt Romney, governor of State Utah and
elder of Mormon church, which until Lukashenko's bold measure against foreign
missionary-activity was responsible for the common sight on the streets of
Grodno and Brest and Vitebsk of clean and polite young Americans, speaking
Belarusian like mother tongue, and promoting their heretical sect to our
villagers like we were pagan Indians; and finally, John McCain, senator of City
Phoenix and number-one opponent of current president George W. Bush within
Republican party.
The Democrats have now only two candidates who stand to
chance against this powerful phalanx: Barack Obama, senator of City Chicago and
nephew of Saddam Hussein; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, organizer of popular
solidarity-building women's breakfasts for discussion of hair-hygiene and of
place of woman in American politics, and only official wife of number-one enemy
of Serbs and all Slavic peoples, Bill Clinton.

Fiction Detectives--Groundhog Day

I ran across this bit of wisdom on the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. It reminded me of the bits of detective work that I often encourage my fiction students to pursue. Sometimes this sort of deduction is a pointless way to spend your mental energy--like my colleague Bob who railed about Sam and Frodo walking the wrong direction at the end of one of the Lord of the Rings movies--but sometimes such an exercise can reveal significant information about the story--or the film--that you would not have uncovered in any other way.
The significance of Bill Murray's movie? I'm not sure there is any, but you never know.

The Case Against Anger

If you're reading this, then you must be a networked-type person, an interconnected, blogosphere-dwelling, online-flourishing sort of a human. If not, then what on earth are you doing here?
As a person in the bridge generation between those who struggle famously to integrate computers and the web into their lives (like my mother) and those for whom Web 2.0 is their blood type (like my daughter), I have a love-hate relationship with all of the forces of connection and social networking. Similarly, I am both drawn to and repelled by the hasty rhetoric, political, artistic, religious, etc. that swirls around so many websites.
Cultural critic Lee Siegel has written a book, Against the Machine, in which the negatives of the Internet society are explored. What I find just as interesting as Siegel's anti-net argument, however, are the words of John Lanchester, who reviewed the book in the New York Times. Lanchester points out the frequent anger that lies beneath a great deal of Internet discussion as well as in the pages of Siegel's book.
Anger, I would suggest, rarely does the work that we hope it will do, either in public life, private life, or, for the purposes of this post, in the education world. Anger can be a great motivator, but it must be carefully controlled if its motivation is going to lead to genuine accomplishment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/books/review/Lanchester-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

Pictures Don't Lie . . . Or Do They

Some forty years ago during the notorious Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War, photographer Eddie Adams took a horrific shot that became an emblem of all that was wrong with the war. In the photo, a South Vietnamese general is shooting a captured Viet Cong prisoner in the head. That photo, while "true," doesn't tell the whole story. It doesn't tell about the American soldiers that this prisoner had just killed. More significantly, it doesn't tell about the carnage, chaos, and confusion swirling throughout South Vietnam in those days. It doesn't tell about the many, many executions being performed by invading North Vietnamese troops during those same days. Forty years later, even the photographer has issues with his work, for which he won a Pulitzer.

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera.
Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe
them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only
half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were
the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called
bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?"

I mention this not to suggest that we all play revisionist historians. That war was a long time ago, probably long before you were born, unless you're one of the oldest of my students. Instead I share this in hopes that all of us will take pains to realize that evidence does not always speak as authoritatively as we think it does. Because photos and other sources can lie--or at least tell a partial and misleading truth--we must be constantly vigilant.

One Sheet Wonders

In looking for a permanent site to link for the Hirshorn Modern Art Gallery contest in which artists could use only one piece of paper, I found this trio of intriguing artistic projects. Still, the one-sheet wonders top the bill in my book.

The Lazy Route to Success

I just encountered this interesting approach to organization. The basic idea is to achieve more by achieving less. Each day, you identify three and only three things that you'll accomplish the next day. You focus on only those three things, and you get more done than the people who try to do ten things. It sounds crazy, but it might just be crazy enough to work!

Multi-taskers Beware!

I read this article in The Atlantic recently. A comment from a student who is trying to make her way through my online Comp I course for a second time brought it back to my mind. When you're young and energetic, you think you can cram everything possible into the 24 hours a day you've been allotted. You think you can take 20 credit hours, work 30 hours a week, play 4 hours a day of Guitar Hero, and throw in a few other things as well. You think you can text people, eat burritos, and drive your car simultaneously, all the while listening to Dave Matthews and talking to the three other people in the car. I'm sorry to tell you, but you can't. You're not wired to multi-task.
The only way that you can do two things at one time is if you can put one of those things on autopilot. Yeah, you can breathe and play nose-flute at the same time. (Good thing, that!) But you really can't do two things that require your attention. When you attempt to do that, as this article makes clear, you'll either task-switch between the two or do a lousy job of both.
I can play the guitar pretty well. I can sing pretty well. I can't play the guitar and sing at the same time all that well. When I try to do that, one or both of those performances suffers.
So the moral of the story here is simple. As much as you might want to do so, try not to multitask. Focus on the important things of your life. Don't try to write your biology paper while driving to work. Don't try to read your history textbook while texting your Valentine. Otherwise, you'll end up referring to him/her as Teddy Roosevelt. And that won't turn out well.

Benjamin Franklin: Student

In the current issue of The New Yorker, Jill Lepore writes copiously about Benjamin Franklin, mostly focusing on the contradictions in the great man's life. It seems that nineteenth-century Americans took Franklin and tried to make a sort of Solomon out of him, holding up the proverbs and maxims that he placed into the mouth of his fictitious Poor Richard Saunders as an absolute guide for life. "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise"--that's one of the Poor Richard proverbs that Franklin dropped on us. And who among us, when wanting to sleep just a little bit longer, hasn't hated Franklin for those words.
While I commend the entire article to you, I'd like to make two quite separate points from these words.
First, Lepore points out the general complexity of the life of the mind. Whenever you think you have things all figured out--as apparently those nineteenth-century moralists thought they had Franklin all figured out--you're almost certainly oversimplifying. Life is complex. Any discipline worth studying is complex. When you can discourse on a significant topic, beginning with a phrase like, "It's really quite simple," then I'd suggest that you go back for another look. Life, like Benjamin Franklin's legacy, is rarely quite simple.
Second, and contrary to the thrust of Lepore's article, things don't have to be quite simple to be essentially true. Sure, Benjamin Franklin might have failed to live up to many of his own proverbs, but that does not put the lie to the proverbs or even to Franklin's belief in them. As I write these words, I should be going over to the gym to run a couple of miles. I should do it, but I'm not going to do it. Does that mean that I'm really a hypocrite and a liar when I speak of the importance of physical fitness? Not hardly. It means that I'm a human, frail and imperfect. I'll run on Wednesday.
Do these two points contradict each other? They do and they don't. (How's that for a contradiction about contradiction?) They only contradict each other as much as life always contradicts itself. A successful student will learn that life is not only not as simple as they'd like it to be but that life is not as complex as it might seem to be. The tendency to oversimplification makes us dull and pointless. The tendency to overcomplication leads us to surrender and despair. If you're to accomplish anything academically, you'll need to navigate a course between these two shoals. Easier said than done, but it can be both said and done.

Enhancing Your Performance

I stumbled onto this and couldn't resist sharing it with you. Hey, if this stuff is good enough for Congress, then why not for you?

You can see other cartoons by Bob Gorrell here.

Roe IQ

It's possible that some of you might have wanted to write a paper on abortion at some point in your academic career. I can confess that, as a college freshman, many, many years ago--like almost 30--I wrote a paper on that topic.
Despite trying to discourage people from writing on that topic, I get those papers pretty much every semester, and they're almost always dreadful. Now it's certainly possible to write a good paper either for or against abortion, but people almost always bungle the task. Why? They typically don't have a clue what they're talking about, simply parroting the propaganda that they've gotten from either the American Life League or Planned Parenthood or somesuch organization. Get these writers a little bit off script and their ignorance is exposed. In other words, these writers aren't sharing their own ideas. They're sharing somebody else's ideas through their words. Boring!
Today I stumbled onto this little tool for exposing ignorance on the topic of abortion. It's the Roe IQ Test. The average score is pretty dreadful. Mine was even more dreadful. I'm glad I wasn't taking that test for a grade!

Death Data

How many people died in automotive accidents in Kansas in 2004? 500.
How many of them were female? 180.
How many of those were Black women? 8.
Why should you care? I guess unless you knew some of those people, you probably don't care, but I use these numbers to illustrate a website that you might find valuable while writing about a host of different topics. It's called WISQARS Injury Mortality Reports, 1999 - 2004, a product of the Centers for Disease Control. I'm not sure if they keep the data updating as the years go by, but you can certainly find some recent material that will be useful. Want to know how many male dog bite victims were hospitalized in 2006? (1,642) You can find that in the non-fatal side of the site. In both databases, plug in the type of injury, the state (or whole nation), ages, gender, or any of several other parameters, and you'll get a set of results that can take a so-so paper and make it look like you have access to all sorts of great information. Why? Because you do have access to all sorts of great information. So use it!
Check out WISQARS.

First Day of School

I've been doing the same old boring thing on the first day of class for years. This time, in my Comp I class, I "improved" it a little bit. I used to play the theme song to the old TV show Get Smart as I passed out the syllabus. This time around, I showed a YouTube video of the show's opening. I fully expect my students to point to this as a significant improvement in their educational experience. In the end, though, I wonder if my schtick is not getting schtale. Perhaps I need a new approach.
The following ideas, not original to me I must confess, might give you an idea for some interesting classroom hijinks.

50 Fun Things to Do on the First Day of Class
Smoke a pipe and respond to each point the professor makes by waving it and saying, "Quite right, old bean!"
Wear X-Ray Specs. Every few minutes, ask the professor to focus the overhead projector.
Sit in the front row and spend the lecture filing your teeth into sharp points.
Sit in the front and color in your textbook.
When the professor calls your name in roll, respond "that's my name, don't wear it out!"
Introduce yourself to the class as the "master of the pan flute".
Give the professor a copy of The Watchtower. Ask him where his soul would go if he died tomorrow.
Wear earmuffs. Every few minutes, ask the professor to speak louder.
Leave permanent markers by the dry-erase board.
Squint thoughtfully while giving the professor strange looks. In the middle of lecture, tell him he looks familiar and ask whether he was ever in an episode of Starsky and Hutch.
Ask whether the first chapter will be on the test. If the professor says no, rip the pages out of your textbook.
Become entranced with your first physics lecture, and declare your intention to pursue a career in measurements and units.
Sing your questions.
Speak only in rhymes and hum the Underdog theme.
When the professor calls roll, after each name scream "THAT'S MEEEEE! Oh, no, sorry."
Insist in a Southern drawl that your name really is Wuchen Li. If you actually are Chinese, insist that your name is Vladimir Fernandez O'Reilly.
Page through the textbook scratching each picture and sniffing it.
Wear your pajamas. Pretend not to notice that you've done so.
Hold up a piece of paper that says in large letters "CHECK YOUR FLY".
Inform the class that you are Belgian royalty, and have a friend bang cymbals together whenever your name is spoken.
Stare continually at the professor's crotch. Occasionally lick your lips.
Address the professor as "your excellency".
Sit in the front, sniff suspiciously, and ask the professor if he's been drinking.
Shout "WOW!" after every sentence of the lecture.
Bring a mirror and spend the lecture writing Bible verses on your face.
Ask whether you have to come to class.
Present the professor with a large fruit basket.
Bring a "seeing eye rooster" to class.
Feign an unintelligible accent and repeatedly ask, "Vet ozzle haffen dee henvay?" Become agitated when the professor can't understand you.
Relive your Junior High days by leaving chalk stuffed in the chalkboard erasers.
Watch the professor through binoculars.
Start a "wave" in a large lecture hall.
Ask to introduce your "invisible friend" in the empty seat beside you, and ask for one extra copy of each handout.
When the professor turns on his laser pointer, scream "AAAGH! MY EYES!"
Correct the professor at least ten times on the pronunciation of your name, even it's Smith. Claim that the i is silent.
Sit in the front row reading the professor's graduate thesis and snickering.
As soon as the first bell rings, volunteer to put a problem on the board. Ignore the professor's reply and proceed to do so anyway.
Claim that you wrote the class text book.
Claim to be the teaching assistant. If the real one objects, jump up and scream "IMPOSTOR!"
Spend the lecture blowing kisses to other students.
Every few minutes, take a sheet of notebook paper, write "Signup Sheet #5" at the top, and start passing it around the room.
Stand to ask questions. Bow deeply before taking your seat after the professor answers.
Wear a cape with a big S on it. Inform classmates that the S stands for "stud".
Interrupt every few minutes to ask the professor, "Can you spell that?"
Disassemble your pen. "Accidentally" propel pieces across the room while playing with the spring. Go on furtive expeditions to retrieve the pieces. Repeat.
Wink at the professor every few minutes.
In the middle of lecture, ask your professor whether he believes in ghosts.
Laugh heartily at everything the professor says. Snort when you laugh.
Wear a black hooded cloak to class and ring a bell.
Ask your math professor to pull the roll chart above the blackboard of ancient Greek trade routes down farther because you can't see Macedonia.

When you've tried them all, perhaps it's time to graduate.

The One-Ton Rodent

There's an old cliche about people ignoring the "elephant in the room." Today, I find my mind thinking about people ignoring the one-ton rodent in the room. It seems that paleontologists have discovered the remains of such a one-ton beast in Ecuador. I'm sure that the two Uruguayan scientists who uncovered this critter, to which they gave the easily memorable Latin name Josephoartigasia monesi, are quite excited about their find, but I'm left wondering about a professional career that peaks with the discovery of a 2,000 pound gerbil. Is this, perhaps, taking specialization a bit far? Would you want to be introduced at parties as the person who discovered the world's biggest rodent?
But then I'm not a scientist. I spend hours of my time studying the intricacies of poets long dead and mostly forgotten, writers about whom most people don't care a bit.
Education, you see, tends to make specialists out of us. The literature types can't talk very effectively with the chemists who can't deal well with the psychologists who don't fathom the economists at all.
I'd like to suggest that undergraduates resist this inexorable tug of specialization. It will happen eventually. Eventually, you'll be forced to declare a major and start to think and talk in the specialized jargon of that discipline. Before long, you'll sound like Dilbert's boss or some other ridiculous creature. It'll happen, but you don't have to like it. I'd suggest that you fight the specialization impulse as long and as hard as you can. Enjoy a broad swath of what the world offers, from Byzantine art through atonal music to 2,000-pound rodents. It's a wonderful world; why shouldn't we enjoy as much of it as possible?

An Eye on Completion

I've been haunted by that Einstein ring image from my last posting. It's scary to me--like a giant eye somewhere out in the cosmos, watching me as I go through my day. Frankly, it makes the CBS eye look like small potatoes.
Right now, with classes starting at various schools around the country, and at JCCC this Wednesday, the eye could well be peering at you. If it helps, imagine that it's the eye of Chuck Norris. As I recall, the theme song from Walker, Texas Ranger includes the words, "the eyes of the ranger are upon you."
So what is Chuck looking for? It's not whether you'll be voting for Mike Huckabee. That's your business altogether. No, what Chuck's watching is how you fare in this new semester. Every new semester brings with it a bundle of potential and possibility. Hope rises again, like dandelions in my front yard. Everybody intends to earn a 4.0 when the new semester begins. It's only as the semester burns in that those hopes wither away, like the bluegrass in my front yard.
You might ask why those hopes fade for many students. Go ahead, ask.
Various studies, like this one, demonstrate that in recent years, students have been taking longer to complete college degrees and the number who are taking forever--that is, not finishing at all--is rising. We're not talking horrific, scary increases, but it is true that over half of the people who start college, aiming to get a four-year degree, don't have that degree in hand after six years.
Why? That's a question for a different posting, but I'd like to think about you and your success this semester. Over the years, I have noticed several factors that get in the way of student success. Allow me to share my list with you. I'll probably go into more depth on them at a later time.
Students who perform poorly tend to:
Miss a lot of class. This is kind of a no-brainer, but it's true. If you're a sporadic attendee, even if you get all the assignments done, you'll probably lose a letter grade just because you don't pick up important stuff along the way.
Ignore the directions. Good teachers--this one included--take care to give clear directions. Failing to pay attention to those directions won't win you any popularity points.
Rush their assignments. Is it the same thing to spend 6 hours on a paper the night before it's due or to spend 1 hour on each of 6 days? No! Students who cram, do worse than those who spread their work out.
Don't get to know the professor. It's much easier for me to fail a student who is just a name on the grade list. I agonize over the students I know. Get to know the teacher!
Don't get to know other students. It's amazing to me how often students don't know anybody else in their class. You don't have to know everybody. I've seen some of those people in your class, and I wouldn't get to know them if they weren't paying me. But get to know at least a few people. Study with them; talk with them. It'll pay off.
Perhaps these hints will translate into a bit more success this year. By the way, when Chuck Norris took my fiction class, he never missed a point on any of the quizzes. Any time he didn't know the answer, he made the story change to fit his answer.

Ringer!

I played horseshoes a few months back, the first time I've tossed hunks of metal that will never see the bottom of a horse's hoof in many, many years. In the span of a long game--neither of us were very good--I had a grand total of one ringer, and I think that was a matter of dumb luck. I'm reminded of that as I read about the discovery by the Hubble Telescope of a "double Einstein ring." I must admit that I didn't know what an Einstein ring, single or double, was until I read this posting on the topic. In short, it involves two (or three) galaxies being perfectly aligned to our eyes so that the gravitation within the nearer one(s) bend the light of the farther one(s). The result is something like we see in this photo.

What are the odds of something like this being out there? I don't know, but they're probably about as long as me being able to successfully run both ends of a basketball alley oop. One of the report's readers notes the improbability of it all:

"The light left the first galaxy, 11 billion years ago, 5 billions years later it went past the next galaxy, 3 billion years later it swung past the next one (by that point the first two probably had moved and were not aligned with the third), and then 3 billion years later, this twice bent light hits the Hubble, by which point no three (much less all four counting us) of the galaxies are actually in the same line. "

Now what does all of this have to do with your success as a student? Let me be completely clear that you should never take physics instruction from this old English professor. I took physics (for the first and only time) as a senior in high school and wasn't certain that I had passed until I received my diploma at graduation.

What I can tell you, however, is that good academic results do not happen by random chance. I got a lousy grade in physics after I left that class largely to chance, hoping that the galaxies would align and all would be well. That didn't work out very well. It probably won't work out well either.

Good results, rather like an Einstein ring, can come about by accident, but you don't want to bank your future on it.

The Fonts of Fame and Fortune

Gotta get off this alliteration kick.
Do you think that fonts don't matter? I'm here to tell you that they do matter very much. A couple of years back, I sat on a committee looking to hire a new faculty member. One candidate looked quite competent and attractive--academically speaking, of course--but there was this one little problem. An essay in her application was printed in some weird, scripty font. Several of us had significant problems with that. That choice suggested somebody who just didn't make the best choices.
I mention this because I ran onto this study on fonts on student papers. Read it and you'll know what to do in some detail, but the basic idea is that using traditional fonts is a good idea. I don't know that it's fair that Times Roman gets a better grade than Bauhaus Light, but that really doesn't matter, does it? You could, I suppose, become the champion of font fairness. You could expose all of the typeface bigotry and san serif prejudice in this world. You could, but why? Is this really a fight worth fighting, a hill worth dying on? If you decide that it is, then by all means, man the barricades. For most of us, however, the right choice is to simply laugh at the silliness of it all and use the fonts that get the result we want.

Professor Plug-In

Do you know how many p-words I went through in order to come up with a title for this crazy blog? But then what's in a title? (Not much, apparently.)
My goal in this space is to post ideas of use to students, helping them to plug in to their education and their lives more effectively. There, that actually made some sense. It's a good thing I didn't settle on Professor Porridge, isn't it?