With the aid of turnitin.com, I caught a number of students in my large class who plagiarized an ungraded book comment assignment. They were given a zero on the assignment and a formal letter of discipline describing specifically what they did and were and told that a copy of the discipline letter would be forwarded [...]
I’d appreciate your dropping comments if you have thoughts, suggestions or links relevant to good strategies for taking and organizing your “literature” notes. I’m working with my advisees on this, and I have to say that my own procedures have been ad hoc and often unsatisfactory. I have the index card files from my notes [...]
It’s odd. When I chose it, I thought of the “olderwoman” moniker as a little edgy, sort of the wise and proud Crone of mid-1990s feminism blended with Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. A lot of my friends had croning parties* in the 1990s, before I was old enough to qualify. So I’m always a [...]
Like Jeremy and some other of the scatterbrains, I grew up with a very deep and specific sense of place, although a very different place from his rural Iowa. My mother still lives in the north Torrance house I grew up in, and I’ve been out here visiting. It has been 41 [...]
The AirTran transaction would have been bad under the best of circumstances, as it was a complicated mess. It was all made worse by AirTran’s unreliable phone system, which tended to generate random hang ups after long holds, so that it took 6-10 trials of listening to long instruction messages and waiting on hold for [...]
I’m in LA with my mother while my sister is on vacation and floods ravage the Midwest. Twice a week, Mom goes to a pulmonary rehabilitation class. Everybody else in the class appears substantially younger than she and was a heavy smoker. Several have had multiple hospitalizations after which they returned to [...]
I’m in California helping my mother, who is much better than she was in March, but still mostly housebound, on oxygen, and weak. She’s easily frustrated and demanding, which is both understandable and tiring. One upshot is that I’ve been blog commenting all day. I do get periods of free time, but [...]
I’m putting this out as a separate question to avoid hijacking the ask a scatterbrain thread about cvs. I advise students to try to tailor their cover letter and cv to any job they really want, to make it sound like they know something about that specific department, especially if that job is at a [...]
I’m not sure but I think a man died within six feet of me yesterday. This was on a jet that was just about ready to close its doors for departure in O’Hare. They had not given up on him when they carried him out, but everyone involved was treating it as fatal. I noticed [...]
There have been several posts lately about public sociology and the tenure process, including newsocprof and thepublicandtheprivate and, most recently RadioFreeNewport. All are written by young scholars. The general tone of these remarks is either to worry about the impact of public sociology on getting tenure, or to decry older sociologists who tell younger [...]
There was a lot more interest than I would have expected in my brief mention of my problem figuring out what to do with five bags of garlic mustard. The update is that I put off dealing with the problem while I finished grading, and then the bags started to leak. Most of [...]
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Tagged 1491, black locust, buckthorn, Charles C. Mann, dame's rocket, dandelions, garlic mustard, invasive plants, invasive species, native plants, non-native plants, RoundUp, violets, weeding
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By request, if not popular request. This post is about an amusing experience in teaching Sunday School from inside a liberal Christian point of view. If you don’t share that point of view you may find it upsetting or just weird.
First, a little context. I agreed to help teach a Bible curriculum [...]
I spent the weekend at my son’s college graduation. My last child is now more or less launched. The graduation ceremony was very well done. The best part: The graduates processed across the campus to the arena in their regalia led by a bagpipe ensemble (about 20 pipers). The bagpipes were way cool. The faculty [...]
Things I’ve been doing that did not seem bloggable:
1. Writing official letters of discipline for plagiarism cases. I could write a blog about this, but we all know about the problem and it just depresses us.
2. Reading graduate papers. Work, not unpleasant, not bloggable as not anonymous. Could be combined [...]
I still intend to write a post with my thoughts on newsocprof’s discussion of public sociology and the tenure process, which jt also addressed in a response post in The Public and the Private. That will come later, after the flurry of end-of-term grad advising and family business (including my son’s college graduation and attendant [...]
Is there a way I can see something different on my laptop screen than what is projected onto the lecture screen? I use “bad” PowerPoint slides with too many words because I don’t have the personal organizational capacity to keep track of lecture notes separately from slides, so my slides double as my notes. If [...]
How do you ask questions that guide a student discussion? I realize I’m a little old to be asking this question, but I’ve realized this is a teaching skill I don’t have. I know how to lecture and tell students what I want them to know. I know how to respond to [...]
H/T to WOC PhD: http://profbw.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/racism-is-like-contaminated-soil/
I’ve used Eyes on the Prize in teaching for years, it is a great resource. But this new video, Dare Not Walk Alone, looks like it could be an excellent update. In addition to historical footage about the St. Augustine protests, it includes footage and interviews of current [...]
There are some issues to consider about naming yourself in print, and a lot of these are not obvious at first. I’ve been talking with some of my students about this, because several are thinking about changing their names for a variety of reasons, including marriage and language.
If you are thinking about changing your [...]
Many of you have probably gotten this word from other networks, but in case you have not, Chuck Tilly passed away this morning. He was a great scholar and a fine human being and will be greatly missed.
blog commenting, blinding articles
I’m in California helping my mother, who is much better than she was in March, but still mostly housebound, on oxygen, and weak. She’s easily frustrated and demanding, which is both understandable and tiring. One upshot is that I’ve been blog commenting all day. I do get periods of free time, but [...]