This funny link has been making the rounds on the Internet:
Cool Link
Just wanted to share.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Raising Enrollment Numbers
"And remember: the most important thing is numbers, numbers, numbers!" "Our central goal should be raising enrollment numbers." "You have to keep in mind that as an institution we are dedicated to raising our numbers." These are exhortations that college administrations across North America keep addressing to the teaching faculty. Numbers! To hell with quality, let's just concentrate on quantity.
Of course, high enrollment numbers mean more money in tuition fees. But at what cost? For me, this enrollment obsession means that I have to waste valuable class time explaining that there is no country called Ustingay. And that not only is Africa not a Latin American country, it is not a country at all. And that the Mexican Revolution did not happen in Spain. And that there was no country called the United States of America in the VIII century. And that Hitler was not a communist. For the majority of students, this means that while I'm explaining these very basic things to their extremely unprepared colleagues, they have to sit there bored out of their minds. And the money they paid for tuition goes to waste. For the unprepared minority, this means that they will probably have to drop out after their freshman year, having wasted a year of their lives and a big sum of money they paid to attend classes they are not prepared to attend.
In reality, when we allow students who are not even remotely ready for college to enroll, we are selling them our services under false pretenses. We promise them that we will somehow magically overcome the huge lacunae of knowledge and get them to a place where they can have a college degree.
We need to recognize honestly that for reason too well-known to be enumerated here, the secondary education system in the US is failing miserably. And we can't allow this problem to end up destroying the college education system as well.
One solution might be to offer a very basic college entrance exam. Since high school diplomas are inadequate in measuring who is ready for college, it rests with us to make sure we don't harm either the prospective students or the system of higher ed in general.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Of course, high enrollment numbers mean more money in tuition fees. But at what cost? For me, this enrollment obsession means that I have to waste valuable class time explaining that there is no country called Ustingay. And that not only is Africa not a Latin American country, it is not a country at all. And that the Mexican Revolution did not happen in Spain. And that there was no country called the United States of America in the VIII century. And that Hitler was not a communist. For the majority of students, this means that while I'm explaining these very basic things to their extremely unprepared colleagues, they have to sit there bored out of their minds. And the money they paid for tuition goes to waste. For the unprepared minority, this means that they will probably have to drop out after their freshman year, having wasted a year of their lives and a big sum of money they paid to attend classes they are not prepared to attend.
In reality, when we allow students who are not even remotely ready for college to enroll, we are selling them our services under false pretenses. We promise them that we will somehow magically overcome the huge lacunae of knowledge and get them to a place where they can have a college degree.
We need to recognize honestly that for reason too well-known to be enumerated here, the secondary education system in the US is failing miserably. And we can't allow this problem to end up destroying the college education system as well.
One solution might be to offer a very basic college entrance exam. Since high school diplomas are inadequate in measuring who is ready for college, it rests with us to make sure we don't harm either the prospective students or the system of higher ed in general.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Outsourcing Grading
Chronicle of Higher Ed published a really weird article discussing how it might be a good idea to outsource the grading of student essays.
All of this stupidity with on-line teaching, insanely huge classrooms, and now grade outsourcing is destroying our higher education system. This is wrong, people, and it needs to stop.
Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out—often awkwardly—nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.As we can see, this insane practice is justified by the claim that it's impossible for the professor to read and grade 500 papers each semester. In the discussion that follows, pros and cons of this kind of outsourcing are discussed at length. What is shocking, though, is that nobody stops to consider how it is even possible that such idiotic measures would be taken instead of simply opening more tenure-track positions. What our higher education needs is not people from other countries grading papers of students they have never met in the course they know nothing about. Rather, we need to stop cramming hundreds of students into the same classroom. We need to stop cutting down on tenure-track positions and stop saving money in these ridiculous ways.
Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn't deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. "Our graders were great," she says, "but they were not experts in providing feedback."
That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.
All of this stupidity with on-line teaching, insanely huge classrooms, and now grade outsourcing is destroying our higher education system. This is wrong, people, and it needs to stop.
Weight
Weight is usually an extremely touchy subject with people. It is considered more impolite to discuss weight than it is to discuss religion, politics, and issues with one's parents combined. To me, treating weight as such a sensitive issue has always seemed extremely strange. Besides, as a person with Asperger's I love raising issues that other people avoid. :-) So the time has come for me to blog about weight.
I haven't been skinny since the advent of puberty. I have also been blessed by high self-esteem and a great body image, so I never tortured myself with the desire to be size zero. Or even size eight. In the last year, I have gained some weight, which, from what I hear, is very normal when people start their first full-time job. It might later go away. Or it might not. Both possibilities are perfectly fine with me. What is funny, though, is how people react to my weight. For the most part, they studiously avoid noticing this simple reality to the degree when it becomes really funny to observe their heroic efforts not to mention it. It seems like for some reason people assume that I have to be heart-broken about it and any mention of this can send me over the edge. These same people have no difficulty mentioning any other change in my appearance, so the avoidance of the weight issue seems extremely strange. The idea that I might be perfectly fine with it - or even happy about it - never seems to cross anybody's mind.
When I refer to my own weight, people often feel so uncomfortable that they immediately try to silence me on this subject. I remember how I was once talking with a very nice and kind friend of mine and said something to the effect that I'm not skinny. "Oh, Clarissa, don't say that about yourself!" she replied all horrified. Apparently, being skinny is often considered as uniformly good and desirable, while not being skinny is perceived as undoubtedly horrible and painful.
For me, mentioning weight is not offensive. The avoidance of the subject, however, is because it betrays a person's belief that people who are not thin must necessarily hate their weight and be miserable about it.
I haven't been skinny since the advent of puberty. I have also been blessed by high self-esteem and a great body image, so I never tortured myself with the desire to be size zero. Or even size eight. In the last year, I have gained some weight, which, from what I hear, is very normal when people start their first full-time job. It might later go away. Or it might not. Both possibilities are perfectly fine with me. What is funny, though, is how people react to my weight. For the most part, they studiously avoid noticing this simple reality to the degree when it becomes really funny to observe their heroic efforts not to mention it. It seems like for some reason people assume that I have to be heart-broken about it and any mention of this can send me over the edge. These same people have no difficulty mentioning any other change in my appearance, so the avoidance of the weight issue seems extremely strange. The idea that I might be perfectly fine with it - or even happy about it - never seems to cross anybody's mind.
When I refer to my own weight, people often feel so uncomfortable that they immediately try to silence me on this subject. I remember how I was once talking with a very nice and kind friend of mine and said something to the effect that I'm not skinny. "Oh, Clarissa, don't say that about yourself!" she replied all horrified. Apparently, being skinny is often considered as uniformly good and desirable, while not being skinny is perceived as undoubtedly horrible and painful.
For me, mentioning weight is not offensive. The avoidance of the subject, however, is because it betrays a person's belief that people who are not thin must necessarily hate their weight and be miserable about it.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Knowledge of History
A great post from Tom Carter at Opinion Forum on the sad paucity of knowledge today's students have of the US history:
Students leaving high school and entering university score at around 50 percent on a test administered during the past five years by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Worse, they finish their university studies and, on average, score only 54 percent. Universities are obviously doing a poor job of training students in these essential subjects.Read more of the post here and take the test in question here. I got 81,81% on the test, which is a lot more than what an average "college educator" gets. I'm proud of myself but I kind of hoped I would get 100%. I don't teach US history but I'm fascinated by this subject.
Infantilizing Men, Cont'd
I have written before about the current trend in mass culture that legitimizes and celebrates male immaturity. Two recent commercials by At&T (I think) fall squarely within this trend and don't cease to amaze me by the incredible double standard they promote.
Commercial I: A man, a woman, and their toddler come to a restaurant. The woman gets up to go to the bathroom. The man looks terrified and bereft. Of course, the idea of being left alone with HIS own child for 5 minutes must be intolerable. The little boy starts whimpering, and the father feels completely lost. Then, he gets a brilliant idea. He whips out his phone, downloads a video and sticks it under the toddler's nose. The child immediately acquires a suitably zombified look and starts staring onto the screen. Problem solved! Can you imagine a commercial where a woman is similarly traumatized by the necessity to spend five minutes alone with her small child? Something tells me that this kind of commercial is not likely to appear any time soon.
Commercial II: A woman, a man and their two children come to an amusement park. The woman stops to check her phone. She needs it to work in case the kids disperse and she needs to find them. The kids are waiting patiently for their mother to figure things out with the phone. The middle-aged father, however, has disappeared. He has run off to take a ride on the merry-go-round, leaving his wife to deal with THEIR children alone. Once again, can you imagine a similar commercial where the gender roles are swapped?
Male immaturity and irresponsibility are often presented as cute and adorable. Remember this horrible Everybody Loves Raymond sitcom? For nine years we sat there enjoying a show about a middle-aged man being more immature than any teenager, who was babysat by his competent and domineering wife. Unsurprisingly, this couple's sex life was too pathetic even for American television.
As I stated in my first post on this subject, creating this image of men as inherently inept in the realm of interpersonal communications, romantic relationships, and child-rearing is a way for society to compensate women for infantilizing them in everything that pertains to the public sphere. Women are not supposed to be competent and powerful at work, in politics, or anywhere in the public sphere. Men, in turn, are not expected to be mature, competent, and responsible in the private sphere.
What we get as a result is the perennial division of the public and the private along gender lines.
Commercial I: A man, a woman, and their toddler come to a restaurant. The woman gets up to go to the bathroom. The man looks terrified and bereft. Of course, the idea of being left alone with HIS own child for 5 minutes must be intolerable. The little boy starts whimpering, and the father feels completely lost. Then, he gets a brilliant idea. He whips out his phone, downloads a video and sticks it under the toddler's nose. The child immediately acquires a suitably zombified look and starts staring onto the screen. Problem solved! Can you imagine a commercial where a woman is similarly traumatized by the necessity to spend five minutes alone with her small child? Something tells me that this kind of commercial is not likely to appear any time soon.
Commercial II: A woman, a man and their two children come to an amusement park. The woman stops to check her phone. She needs it to work in case the kids disperse and she needs to find them. The kids are waiting patiently for their mother to figure things out with the phone. The middle-aged father, however, has disappeared. He has run off to take a ride on the merry-go-round, leaving his wife to deal with THEIR children alone. Once again, can you imagine a similar commercial where the gender roles are swapped?
As I stated in my first post on this subject, creating this image of men as inherently inept in the realm of interpersonal communications, romantic relationships, and child-rearing is a way for society to compensate women for infantilizing them in everything that pertains to the public sphere. Women are not supposed to be competent and powerful at work, in politics, or anywhere in the public sphere. Men, in turn, are not expected to be mature, competent, and responsible in the private sphere.
What we get as a result is the perennial division of the public and the private along gender lines.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
"Vesti La Giubba" by Pavarotti
This is my most favorite aria ever from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. I have listened to it hundreds of times but it still always makes me cry.
Asperger's on TV
Even the kindest portrayal of people with Asperger's is concentrated on presenting us as some kind of eccentric geniuses who are smart but completely inept socially and as a result make everybody around them feel extremely uncomfortable.
On the one hand, ridiculizing autistics attracts viewers. Many people need the kind of entertainment that gets more and more extreme with every new episode, show, movie, etc. These people feel so benumbed by their sad daily existences that they need entertainment to tickle them into consciousness, albeit momentarily.
Because of shows like these, it is often useless to try telling people that you have autism. "No, of course you don't!" they say in indignation. You are nothing like people with Asperger's that they show on television!" Well, my friends, do you know what the difference is between me and these characters? I'm real and they are not. They are fictional characters created for a specific purpose. Such shows might entertain you but they will never teach you anything useful or truthful about autism.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Eerily Familiar
I'm preparing my class on the Cuban Revolution for tomorrow, and the following passage from Fidel Castro's 1953 trial speech "History Will Absolve Me" sounded sadly familiar:
We're talking about the six hundred thousand people without work, who want to earn their daily bread honestly without having to emigrate from their homeland in search of a livelihood; the five hundred thousand farm laborers who live in miserable shacks, who work four months of the year and starve the rest, sharing their misery with their children, who don't have an inch of land to till and whose existence would move any heart not made of stone; the four hundred thousand industrial workers and laborers whose retirement funds have been embezzled, whose benefits are being taken away, whose homes are wretched quarters, whose salaries pass from the hands of the boss to those of the moneylender; the one hundred thousand small farmers who live and die working land that is not theirs; the thirty thousand teachers and professors who are so devoted, dedicated and so necessary to the better destiny of future generations and who are so badly treated and paid; the twenty thousand small business men weighed down by debts, ruined by the crisis and harangued by a plague of grafting and venal officials; the ten thousand young professional people: doctors, engineers, lawyers, veterinarians, school teachers, dentists, pharmacists, newspapermen, painters, sculptors, etc., who finish school with their degrees anxious to work and full of hope, only to find themselves at a dead end, all doors closed to them.
Musings on Immaturity
Reading Edmund Andrews's Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown
(see my review of it here), made me think about how our entire society is held hostage by the mind-numbing immaturity of a large group of people. Even if it weren't for the housing bubble and the market collapse, I am convinced that we would have experienced some sort of a profound systemic crisis anyways. If the economic collapse hadn't happened, it would have been something else. The time has come for us to bear the fruits of a profound infantilization that plagues our society.
We are all complicit in this. We look at a president who can't read and then go and elect him for a second term. We seriously consider as a vice-presidential candidate a person who is dumb as a door-nail. We keep trying to dumb down our college-level courses. Instead of asking students to read, think, analyze, and write, we make them look up information on the Internet and then regurgitate it. We accept it as normal when people proudly tell us that they never read anything or follow the news. We read articles in the leading newspapers written by people who cannot compose a sentence without making three mistakes. We watch TV shows where stupidity is celebrated and education is ridiculed.
Andrews's book is so scary because if a supposedly educated person whose job is to analyze events and report the fruits of his analysis (which is meant to be an intellectual endeavor) turns out to be as immature, irresponsible, and stupid as a 12-year-old, what can we expect from people who have not been as blessed by education and very well-paying white-collar jobs?
When an entire society turns away from intelligence and embraces a cult of stupidity, chances are there will be a systemic crisis of major proportions. This time, these immature, unintelligent, whiny jerks have led us into an economic collapse. Tomorrow, it will be something else. Unless we, as a society, embrace the idea that being stupid, irresponsible, and immature is unacceptable, we will keep being shaken by these crises on a regular basis.
(see my review of it here), made me think about how our entire society is held hostage by the mind-numbing immaturity of a large group of people. Even if it weren't for the housing bubble and the market collapse, I am convinced that we would have experienced some sort of a profound systemic crisis anyways. If the economic collapse hadn't happened, it would have been something else. The time has come for us to bear the fruits of a profound infantilization that plagues our society.We are all complicit in this. We look at a president who can't read and then go and elect him for a second term. We seriously consider as a vice-presidential candidate a person who is dumb as a door-nail. We keep trying to dumb down our college-level courses. Instead of asking students to read, think, analyze, and write, we make them look up information on the Internet and then regurgitate it. We accept it as normal when people proudly tell us that they never read anything or follow the news. We read articles in the leading newspapers written by people who cannot compose a sentence without making three mistakes. We watch TV shows where stupidity is celebrated and education is ridiculed.
Andrews's book is so scary because if a supposedly educated person whose job is to analyze events and report the fruits of his analysis (which is meant to be an intellectual endeavor) turns out to be as immature, irresponsible, and stupid as a 12-year-old, what can we expect from people who have not been as blessed by education and very well-paying white-collar jobs?
When an entire society turns away from intelligence and embraces a cult of stupidity, chances are there will be a systemic crisis of major proportions. This time, these immature, unintelligent, whiny jerks have led us into an economic collapse. Tomorrow, it will be something else. Unless we, as a society, embrace the idea that being stupid, irresponsible, and immature is unacceptable, we will keep being shaken by these crises on a regular basis.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Evolutionary Psychology Bingo
Sunday, April 4, 2010
White Russians
We went to an Easter dinner at the house of the Chair of my department. There was a lady there who used to work for our department teaching Russian and French but she is now retired.
It turned out that this woman is the daughter of a White Army officer and a White Army doctor. Her parents were on the side of the people who lost the Civil War in the twenties and had to escape from Russia. They eneded up in Morocco, which is where she was born.
And we both ended up in Southern Illinois, teaching at the same university.
History works in the weirdest ways.
Immaturity and the Housing Bubble: Review of Edmund Andrews's "Busted"
Andrews is a long-standing reporter for the economics section of the New York Times. This is what makes the story he tells in Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown so scary. Andrews's book presents two closely connected stories: the history of the creation of the US housing bubble that started the current economic crisis and his personal story of getting into an incredible amount of debt in the years that led to the collapse of the housing market.
This is a book that needs to be read, even though it will make you lose your faith in humanity for a long time to come. Andrews analyzes in great detail how the lending institutions gradually became more and more driven by the desire for instant profit without stopping to think for a second what will happen long term. The author also brings to light the incredible, mind-boggling stupidity of Greenspan, Bernanke, and Co. He demonstrates how corrupt and dishonest the Bush Jr. administration was.
None of this, however, is very new. At least not to me. From the moment I moved from Quebec to the US, it became obvious to me that the housing prices in this country were ridiculously over-inflated. I saw my friends and colleagues pay really insane, seven-figure prices for poky little apartments in Manhattan or run-down bungalows in Connecticut and immediately realized that this was the game I would never agree to pay. Mortgaging away your life for the next 30 years in hopes that the bubble will get even bigger and the price of your house would magically grow seemed like a genuinely stupid proposition even for someone like me, who at 27 was woefully ignorant about economy. Today, when I understand the workings of this country's economy and politics a lot better, I am even more reluctant to participate in this insanity.
What really bothered me in Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown was not the story of the housing bubble. It was the story of a nearly fantastic immaturity. Immaturity on both sides, the lenders' and the borrowers'. Those who handed out completely unsecured loans to people incapable of ever paying them off and those who accepted loans they could never even imagine paying off. Andrews was one of those who accepted. And accepted. And accepted some more.
The immaturity and total intellectual impotence of this man - who, once again, writes for the economics section of The New York Times - is mind-boggling. He decides to take out a loan to buy a half-million dollar house. As a result, he knows that his entire paycheck will go towards his alimony payments and the mortgage with not a dime left over for the bills. Of course, he hopes that his new wife will make enough money to cover all of their living expenses. Nothing would be all that wrong about this picture, if it weren't for one tiny detail. His new wife has been a house-wife who hasn't worked a day in the past 20 years. Besides, she is accustomed by her former husband to living the life of luxury. She didn't even do any work around the house because her first husband paid for a housekeeper. On top of that, Andrews gets this woman to move to a completely different part of the country. Then, he expects her to find a well-paying job - with no skills, no connections, no experience of being an employee - and start paying all the bills: "We had both assumed she could earn enough for us to get by. We didn't have any idea how she would do it; we were both simply sure that she could do it." It is incredible to encounter such profound intellectual impotence from any one over the age of 12.
This is not the weirdest thing about Andrews's relationship with Patty, the woman who eventually became his second wife. He left his first wife and proposed to Patty before Patty and he had ANY kind of a relationship. They hadn't even as much as kissed, let alone had sex or lived together. And these are not some horny teenagers. These are people who are almost 50 at the time. During marriage counselling, Andrews and Patty discover that they do not see eye to eye on 90% of issues discussed. This, however, does not suggest to them that it might make sense to postpone the wedding until they actually get to know something about each other.
Andrews's path to penury begins when he takes out a sub-prime mortgage on his new house. Over the next few years he gets so far into debt that you couldn't dig him out of it with an excavator, just to keep the stupid super expensive house. And you know why? In his own words, "Even though it was all about buying a house in the suburbs, it felt vaguely exciting, edgy, and a little gangsta." When a balding, paunchy, white gentleman in his late forties is motivated to take out an impossible loan because he wants to feel "gangsta", of all the stupid things, you know that something is seriously wrong here. And this is supposed to be a well-educated upper-middle-class individual, who works as a journalist, for Pete's sake!
In order to climb out of the financial hole he has dug for himself, Andrews tries every crazy borrowing practice out there. He runs up a staggering credit card debt, empties his pension account, and even hits up for money his elderly mother. There is just one thing he doesn't do: try to cut down the costs. Andrews goes through his wedding to his second wife in throes of a panic attack over mounting bills and huge debt. After that, he proceeds to pay the caterers that were hired for the wedding. Of course, the idea that people who can't pay the electricity bill might be able to do without a catered wedding never crosses his mind.
For a while, Andrews's family income rises to $200,000 per year. I don't know about you, people, but for me this is a staggering amount of money. One could live like a king on half that amount. Still, Andrews cannot make ends meet. Even though the debt is growing and his interest rates become sky-high, he keeps spending on things that cannot possily be considered necessary expenses: cable telivision, HBO, beach house, Ipods, expensive clothes, the list is endless.
Andrews criticizes the irresponsible lenders virulently. He never stops to think, though, that those who criminally handed out unsecured loans were motivated by the same basic immaturity that got him into so much trouble: have fun now and assume that things will somehow work out in the end. These people, who are so immature that it makes my hair stand on end in horror, are the ones that got us into this mess. They mortgaged away our future, and their children's and grand-children's future because they wanted that Ipod, that house, that vacation right now and didn't want to pay for them. Now, we will all have to pay for their lack of responsibility and their inhuman immaturity for decades to come.
[To be continued...]
so scary. Andrews's book presents two closely connected stories: the history of the creation of the US housing bubble that started the current economic crisis and his personal story of getting into an incredible amount of debt in the years that led to the collapse of the housing market.This is a book that needs to be read, even though it will make you lose your faith in humanity for a long time to come. Andrews analyzes in great detail how the lending institutions gradually became more and more driven by the desire for instant profit without stopping to think for a second what will happen long term. The author also brings to light the incredible, mind-boggling stupidity of Greenspan, Bernanke, and Co. He demonstrates how corrupt and dishonest the Bush Jr. administration was.
None of this, however, is very new. At least not to me. From the moment I moved from Quebec to the US, it became obvious to me that the housing prices in this country were ridiculously over-inflated. I saw my friends and colleagues pay really insane, seven-figure prices for poky little apartments in Manhattan or run-down bungalows in Connecticut and immediately realized that this was the game I would never agree to pay. Mortgaging away your life for the next 30 years in hopes that the bubble will get even bigger and the price of your house would magically grow seemed like a genuinely stupid proposition even for someone like me, who at 27 was woefully ignorant about economy. Today, when I understand the workings of this country's economy and politics a lot better, I am even more reluctant to participate in this insanity.
What really bothered me in Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown
was not the story of the housing bubble. It was the story of a nearly fantastic immaturity. Immaturity on both sides, the lenders' and the borrowers'. Those who handed out completely unsecured loans to people incapable of ever paying them off and those who accepted loans they could never even imagine paying off. Andrews was one of those who accepted. And accepted. And accepted some more.The immaturity and total intellectual impotence of this man - who, once again, writes for the economics section of The New York Times - is mind-boggling. He decides to take out a loan to buy a half-million dollar house. As a result, he knows that his entire paycheck will go towards his alimony payments and the mortgage with not a dime left over for the bills. Of course, he hopes that his new wife will make enough money to cover all of their living expenses. Nothing would be all that wrong about this picture, if it weren't for one tiny detail. His new wife has been a house-wife who hasn't worked a day in the past 20 years. Besides, she is accustomed by her former husband to living the life of luxury. She didn't even do any work around the house because her first husband paid for a housekeeper. On top of that, Andrews gets this woman to move to a completely different part of the country. Then, he expects her to find a well-paying job - with no skills, no connections, no experience of being an employee - and start paying all the bills: "We had both assumed she could earn enough for us to get by. We didn't have any idea how she would do it; we were both simply sure that she could do it." It is incredible to encounter such profound intellectual impotence from any one over the age of 12.
This is not the weirdest thing about Andrews's relationship with Patty, the woman who eventually became his second wife. He left his first wife and proposed to Patty before Patty and he had ANY kind of a relationship. They hadn't even as much as kissed, let alone had sex or lived together. And these are not some horny teenagers. These are people who are almost 50 at the time. During marriage counselling, Andrews and Patty discover that they do not see eye to eye on 90% of issues discussed. This, however, does not suggest to them that it might make sense to postpone the wedding until they actually get to know something about each other.
Andrews's path to penury begins when he takes out a sub-prime mortgage on his new house. Over the next few years he gets so far into debt that you couldn't dig him out of it with an excavator, just to keep the stupid super expensive house. And you know why? In his own words, "Even though it was all about buying a house in the suburbs, it felt vaguely exciting, edgy, and a little gangsta." When a balding, paunchy, white gentleman in his late forties is motivated to take out an impossible loan because he wants to feel "gangsta", of all the stupid things, you know that something is seriously wrong here. And this is supposed to be a well-educated upper-middle-class individual, who works as a journalist, for Pete's sake!
In order to climb out of the financial hole he has dug for himself, Andrews tries every crazy borrowing practice out there. He runs up a staggering credit card debt, empties his pension account, and even hits up for money his elderly mother. There is just one thing he doesn't do: try to cut down the costs. Andrews goes through his wedding to his second wife in throes of a panic attack over mounting bills and huge debt. After that, he proceeds to pay the caterers that were hired for the wedding. Of course, the idea that people who can't pay the electricity bill might be able to do without a catered wedding never crosses his mind.
For a while, Andrews's family income rises to $200,000 per year. I don't know about you, people, but for me this is a staggering amount of money. One could live like a king on half that amount. Still, Andrews cannot make ends meet. Even though the debt is growing and his interest rates become sky-high, he keeps spending on things that cannot possily be considered necessary expenses: cable telivision, HBO, beach house, Ipods, expensive clothes, the list is endless.
Andrews criticizes the irresponsible lenders virulently. He never stops to think, though, that those who criminally handed out unsecured loans were motivated by the same basic immaturity that got him into so much trouble: have fun now and assume that things will somehow work out in the end. These people, who are so immature that it makes my hair stand on end in horror, are the ones that got us into this mess. They mortgaged away our future, and their children's and grand-children's future because they wanted that Ipod, that house, that vacation right now and didn't want to pay for them. Now, we will all have to pay for their lack of responsibility and their inhuman immaturity for decades to come.
[To be continued...]
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Scholarship
Scholarly inspiration is a strange thing, indeed. You never know what will bring it out.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
Friday, April 2, 2010
Interview with a Student
A student came to interview me yesterday for a project which required students to interview a professor they find interesting about teaching and learning. I will reproduce the interview here because it was lots of fun to answer the questions.
Q.: How long have you been teaching?
A.: This year, I will celebrate the 20th anniversary of my teaching career. I'm not ancient, I just started very early. [The last statement was in response to the interviewer's incredulous look.]
Q.: What makes a bad student?
A.: In my teaching philosophy, there are no bad students. There are only students who did not receive enough attention, encouragement, and support from the teacher.
Q.: How do you find a balance between work and personal life?
A.: In our profession, it is very easy to do so. We only have to be at work 2 or 3 days a week, seven months in a year.
Q.: Then why do so many professors complain that they are overworked and never have time for anything?
A.: I guess they are a lot more responsible than I am.
Q.: How do you preserve your enthusiasm for teaching? I often see professors who look like they don't even care. How do you avoid that?
A.: I'm sure they care a lot. Everybody's teaching style is different, so some people are not as demonstrative as others.
Q.: What advice would you give to freshmen?
A.: Dedicate your first year of college to learning how to learn.
Q.: How long have you been teaching?
A.: This year, I will celebrate the 20th anniversary of my teaching career. I'm not ancient, I just started very early. [The last statement was in response to the interviewer's incredulous look.]
Q.: What makes a bad student?
A.: In my teaching philosophy, there are no bad students. There are only students who did not receive enough attention, encouragement, and support from the teacher.
Q.: How do you find a balance between work and personal life?
A.: In our profession, it is very easy to do so. We only have to be at work 2 or 3 days a week, seven months in a year.
Q.: Then why do so many professors complain that they are overworked and never have time for anything?
A.: I guess they are a lot more responsible than I am.
Q.: How do you preserve your enthusiasm for teaching? I often see professors who look like they don't even care. How do you avoid that?
A.: I'm sure they care a lot. Everybody's teaching style is different, so some people are not as demonstrative as others.
Q.: What advice would you give to freshmen?
A.: Dedicate your first year of college to learning how to learn.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Answers to Readers' Questions, Cont'd
In a comment to my first post ever, Khephra asked: So since this post have your motivations undergone any redirections? For example, this post focused on you (e.g., opinions, frustration, orientation), but has blogging become more community-focused or???
Answer: I really liked this question because it made me think a lot. As an autistic, I'm not very big on communities. It is next to impossible for me to feel as part of any community. I have met some really cool people in the blogosphere. I even met one of my colleagues who works in my department first as a blogger and then as a "real" person. I have discovered - to my great surprise - that there are a lot of people who think like I do about many important issues. At times, I have felt nothing short of shocked by how much support I got.
Community-wise, blogging led me to become very disappointed with the feminist community and very inspired by the Asperger's community. So the results are mixed. I'll keep thinking, though!
Question: How come you only linked to blogs writen by MEN? and what does this say about you as a feminist?
Answer: This one also made me think a lot and analyze my motives. I have no idea why at this point in time I like the blogs I listed the most and not some other blogs. I don't think that gender has anything to do with it. If I could find some female blogs that are both progressive and don't mention the word "privilege" every 15 seconds, I would be happy to read them. I welcome suggestions and self-promotion!
Question: If an Asperger boyfriend dumps you, will he at least miss you?
Answer: A fellow Aspie blogger Izgad said yes. My answer would be no. But then again, my Asperger's is way stronger than his. :-) As for me, I have a tendency to develop intense enthusiasms and intense dislikes for people and things. When I like somebody, it means I REALLY REALLY like them. But if they disappoint me, I tend to forget that they ever existed, to the degree of not recognizing them in the street.
Question: So how is the troll doing? :-) :-) :-)
Answer: You won't believe it but the troll keeps coming here religiously. I'm flattered to have such a faithful fan. I'm hoping my intelligent texts will somewhat civilize the troll in the long run.
Answer: I really liked this question because it made me think a lot. As an autistic, I'm not very big on communities. It is next to impossible for me to feel as part of any community. I have met some really cool people in the blogosphere. I even met one of my colleagues who works in my department first as a blogger and then as a "real" person. I have discovered - to my great surprise - that there are a lot of people who think like I do about many important issues. At times, I have felt nothing short of shocked by how much support I got.
Community-wise, blogging led me to become very disappointed with the feminist community and very inspired by the Asperger's community. So the results are mixed. I'll keep thinking, though!
Question: How come you only linked to blogs writen by MEN? and what does this say about you as a feminist?
Answer: This one also made me think a lot and analyze my motives. I have no idea why at this point in time I like the blogs I listed the most and not some other blogs. I don't think that gender has anything to do with it. If I could find some female blogs that are both progressive and don't mention the word "privilege" every 15 seconds, I would be happy to read them. I welcome suggestions and self-promotion!
Question: If an Asperger boyfriend dumps you, will he at least miss you?
Answer: A fellow Aspie blogger Izgad said yes. My answer would be no. But then again, my Asperger's is way stronger than his. :-) As for me, I have a tendency to develop intense enthusiasms and intense dislikes for people and things. When I like somebody, it means I REALLY REALLY like them. But if they disappoint me, I tend to forget that they ever existed, to the degree of not recognizing them in the street.
Question: So how is the troll doing? :-) :-) :-)
Answer: You won't believe it but the troll keeps coming here religiously. I'm flattered to have such a faithful fan. I'm hoping my intelligent texts will somewhat civilize the troll in the long run.
A Search for a Professor with a Degree in Stupidity
Isn't this just a precious piece of news:
The University of Washington billed it as a debate among distinguished law faculty over whether the new federal health-care law is constitutional. But while the four panelists at a packed event Tuesday may have differed on some of the finer points, they all agreed on the big question: They said the new law passes constitutional muster and that various lawsuits arguing the opposite — including the one joined last week by state Attorney General Rob McKenna — have little merit or chance of success. Even John McKay, the former Republican U.S. attorney for Western Washington (who was forced out in 2006 under contentious circumstances) said that while he sympathized with some of the political issues in play, he thought the lawsuits lacked merit. In fact, he questioned the timing and thrust of the cases: “One way to say it is, that this has to be seen as a political exercise,” he said. Moderator Hugh Spitzer noted the lack of a vigorous dissenting voice. “I will say that we tried very hard to get a professor who could come and who thinks this is flat-out unconstitutional,” he said. “But there are relatively few of them, and they are in great demand.”Trying to find academics who support the anti-intellectual and grievously ignorant Republican worldview is a tough undertaking, indeed. There are no doctoral degrees in stupidity, you see. At least, not yet.
Dentists, Cont'd
As terrified as I was of going to the dentist yesterday, it turned out that I was in for a very nice surprise. My new dentist is a young woman (a couple of years older than me) who has her own clinic. It's always so great to see a woman who has her own thriving business that even if the procedure had been painful, I would have been anaesthesized from pain by my feminist joy for this woman's success.
One of the reasons why I liked this dentist so much is that - unlike many other doctors - she did not treat me as a vegetable that has no thoughts or feelings. Often doctors perceive you as an object in need of repair. As soon as they see you, they proceed to do things to you without attempting to explain the procedures they are performing or find out whether you want those procedures performed in the first place. I don't like going to see doctors because whenevr I go, I feel my identity slipping away from me. Outside of the doctor's office, I see myself as a respectable, intellectual, independent, and higly-opinionated human being. Inside, however, I turn into this powerless thing that is incapable of being an active agent of her own life. And I really don't dig that feeling.
When I shared these feelings with my sister, she said, "If you want to feel really powerless and objectified, try getting pregnant and giving birth." She is right, of course, as sad as that is.
My new dentist, however, was very different in this respect. She actually took the time to explain to me what she was doing every step of the way and asked me what I wanted to be done. I wish more doctors were that way.
One of the reasons why I liked this dentist so much is that - unlike many other doctors - she did not treat me as a vegetable that has no thoughts or feelings. Often doctors perceive you as an object in need of repair. As soon as they see you, they proceed to do things to you without attempting to explain the procedures they are performing or find out whether you want those procedures performed in the first place. I don't like going to see doctors because whenevr I go, I feel my identity slipping away from me. Outside of the doctor's office, I see myself as a respectable, intellectual, independent, and higly-opinionated human being. Inside, however, I turn into this powerless thing that is incapable of being an active agent of her own life. And I really don't dig that feeling.
When I shared these feelings with my sister, she said, "If you want to feel really powerless and objectified, try getting pregnant and giving birth." She is right, of course, as sad as that is.
My new dentist, however, was very different in this respect. She actually took the time to explain to me what she was doing every step of the way and asked me what I wanted to be done. I wish more doctors were that way.
A Year of Blogging
Today I'm celebrating my one-year anniversary of blogging.
This has been a great experience so far. I am deeply grateful to everybody who has been visiting the blog, reading, sharing my posts, leaving comments, and arguing with me.
For those of you who weren't around when I started to blog, here is my first ever post explaining the reasons why I decided to do it:
Why I decided to blog
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