This morning I went to campus early and by myself, working in the building where I would teach a few hours later.  It was so nice to have a quiet, lovely environment in which to work.  As you might guess, I’m gearing up for 8 weeks without Sydney next semester; I have to start compiling my coping strategies early.  I already have a cat, and now I’m working on finding warm, appealing study spaces on campus.

On my way back, however, I noticed a major change in the leaves.  Our house is near the top of a hill, which then meanders slowly downward to Cornell, which is itself perched on a hill, “high above Cayuga’s waters,” as they say.  Driving from campus to home, I saw a shift from green mixed with orange and yellow to a profusion of yellow and orange and red as I got higher and higher, where the fall foliage has turned more quickly.  Bathed in a light rain that tempered the sunlight and brought out the colors in the trees, I was reminded of yet another reason why I love living where we do.

Erin

1)  I don’t think most students understand how difficult it is to give bad grades.  With good papers you get the joy of offering simple encouragement and ideas for taking the work further.  Who doesn’t like grading good papers?  But with bad papers you spend forever trying to articulate not only what went wrong but how one might rearrange things to climb out of the morass that you’re confronting; it’s not easy to disentangle a train wreck, much less in terms that the student will understand.  It takes a long time to grade bad papers and a lot of mental energy.

This is all compounded by the tacit understanding that students who get good grades won’t question them; it’s the students who get bad grades who will look for a way out, will try to blame it on you (as in the case of my student this fall, who followed a comment about the bad grade on her paper with a question about my teaching qualifications), or will, in even the best circumstances, rely on you to show them the long road to improvement.

I worry when a professor has a reputation for easy grading, because all too often it means that he is overworked or tired of his job.  I don’t think he is doing his students any favors by giving them good grades, although I can easily understand that professors eventually get tired of the struggle over grades (which are not the focus of one’s teaching anyway!); he may give up the grade struggle, hand out acceptable grades, and then try to motivate students to improve through extensive comments on their work.  But that does make it a lot more difficult for those professors who are still trying to work within the traditional understanding of grading, who then appear to be “mean” graders.

2 ) My students are used to getting bad grades.  They come in with stories about the chemistry exam in which half of the class got a C.  But if I handed out C’s to half the students in my class, I can guarantee that I’d have a faculty advisor chatting with me within a week’s time.  “Bad” grades are acceptable in the sciences, but not in the humanities.  You can guess how I feel about that.

Erin

A recent New York Times article:

Birth Control Allowed at Maine Middle School

PORTLAND, Me., Oct. 17 — The Portland school board on Wednesday approved a measure allowing middle-school students to gain access to prescription birth control medications without notifying parents.

The proposal, from the Portland Division of Public Health, calls for the independently operated health care center at King Middle School to provide a variety of services to students, including immunizations and physical checkups in addition to birth-control medications and counseling for sexually transmitted diseases, said Lisa Belanger, an administrator for Portland’s student health centers.

All but two members of the 12-person committee voted to approve the plan.

The school principal, Mike McCarthy, said about 5 of the school’s 500 students had identified themselves as being sexually active.

Health care professionals at the clinic advised the committee that the proposal was necessary in order for the clinic to serve students who were engaging in risky behavior.

The conference room at the Wednesday night meeting was packed with parents, students and television cameras as school board committee members discussed the issue and heard testimony from experts and residents.

“It has been shown, over and over again, that this does not increase sexual activity,” said Pat Patterson, the medical director of School-Based Health Centers.

Reaction was mixed.

“This is really a violation of parents’ rights,” Peter Doyle, a Portland resident, told the committee. “If there were a constitutional challenge, you guys would be at risk of a lawsuit.”

Others argued for approval.

“Not every child is getting the guidance needed to keep them safe,” said Richard Veilleux, who said his child attends King Middle School. “This is about giving kids who are sexually active the tools that they need.”

According to the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care, about 30 percent of the 1,700 school-based health centers in the United States provide birth control to students, Dr. Patterson said.

* * * * *

What do you think?  Ordinary rules about institutional power get a bit tricky when they’re applied to schools.  I was not aware that there were clinics attached to schools at all (having fond memories of my very nice school nurse, who handled K-12), but having them raises a few more questions about what role schools are to play.

Having known many, many friends who were strongly affected by birth control, be it in shifts eating habits, gastrointestinal pains, or even, for some, a long, quiet depression, I am worried about giving students medication without the support of a family to keep an eye on them and take note of inappropriate side-effects, among other things.

For another thing, I am saddened when attempts to help students (presumably the goal of both parents and the school) becomes the reason for attempting to undercut each other.  Keeping parents in the dark in order to help students is a sad state of affairs, in my opinion.

Erin

Earlier this year a Cornell student was arrested for savagely beating and pouring a bleach mixture on a dog that he was ostensibly taking care of for his friend. He was just sentenced to six-months for felony animal abuse. The story got a lot of press and discussion around here. We are in Ithaca, after all: home of the country’s only No Kill, Open Admission animal shelter (‘no kill’, I learned recently, is compatible with euthanizing animals — the subtleties of the English language escape me) and home of the vegetarian icon, Moosewood Restaurant. Anyway, it was kind of interesting following the story and seeing what sort of ridiculous things might be said, both by those apparently attribute more rights to animals than to humans and those who apparently would think nothing wrong with idly torturing animals.

But another interesting thing showed up in the story today about the sentencing. Apparently the prosecuting attorney thinks that the guy deserves a stiff sentence because there is ‘a statistical correlation between people who are violent toward animals and people who are violent toward humans’.

Umm, okay, I don’t dispute the correlation, but how is that relevant? There is also a statistical correlation between being poor and committing crimes. Does that mean that poor people should get harsher sentences? There is also a statistical correlation between committing one crime and committing more crimes. Does that mean that we should sentence first-time offenders not only for the crime they’ve actually committed but also for the correlation?

I thought it was a basic principle in Western judicial traditions that you can only punish people for crimes that they have in fact already committed and not for ones that they may or are likely to commit (i.e., regardless how many statistical indicators suggest that you are likely to become a criminal, you can’t be punished until you actually commit a crime). So a question for those of you who know something about law: Am I missing something here?

Sydney

Cornell has made it a practice of posting the median grades for each class online.  Not surprisingly, recent studies have shown that students are drawn to classes with higher median grades, thus encouraging grade inflation.  This is no small difference: the studies found “a 50 percent increase in the enrollment of courses with a median grade of an A from 1998 to 2004.”  What’s worse, up until this point the median grades have been available on the registrar’s website, thus making the information available to students, but not on transcripts, where it might prove revealing for potential employers.  At least in upcoming years they’re planning to have the median grade report next to the student’s grade on transcripts, so the students aren’t the only ones “benefiting” from the system.

The idea behind making median grade reports available is that it provides greater “transparency.”  I’m not, for once, in favor of transparency.  Students are already basing their class choices on whether or not it’s a convenient time slot; do we really need them choosing classes based on whether or not they can skim right through it without doing any work?  There’s clear evidence linking the reports to class choices: during enrollment week, the hits on the median grade report webpage go up significantly.  So if I have the misfortune of taking over a class that was taught by a lenient grader in the previous year, I may well find my entire classroom filled with mediocre writers expecting A’s.

Students, not surprisingly, are protesting the inclusion of median grade reports on their transcripts.  One argument runs like this: “it isn’t fair to upperclassmen to have median grade reports on their transcript for courses they took as freshmen and sophomores when at the time, they were not aware median grades would ever be included.”  Something tells me students aren’t protesting having the median course grades available for themselves . . .   Are you pitying them yet?  How about this: “Median grades are calculated for a course on the whole, not taking into account the teacher of the course. While it is possible to have an inadequate teacher, causing grades to be lower in a certain section, those students will still be held against the median grade for the course on their transcript.”  Yeah, I’m sure that’s the major explanation (it’s the only one given) for low grades.

And while there was talk of restricting the number of high grades given out, the response from the administration is as follows: “I don’t think anybody at Cornell is going to tell faculty how to grade any time soon.”  No, not explicitly, but those faculty who can draw more students (whether through lenient grading or through good teaching) will be in a much better position than those faculty who can’t.

Erin-filled-with-disgust

A few months ago we got a letter in the mail from an IRS informing us that we were being audited for 2005.  As in, the year we married, moved states, had more than four jobs between us, and changed dependent status.  We weren’t surprised to hear that something might have slipped through the cracks, but we were hoping H&R Block would cover us, since they were responsible for our taxes that year.

Turns out, however, the IRS just wanted to repay us for the extra taxes we paid in.  Thank you!  The check just arrived (and was cashed), so it appears auditing really can run both ways.

Apparently New York is cracking down and doing thousands more audits for 2006, since they have reason to think underpayment is costing them millions.  That would be the year in which I tried doing our taxes (my first encounter with any tax documents whatsoever), so we’ll hope for the best!

Erin

There is now a CV at my academic website (I think one of you said at some point that you wanted to see it — beats me why). I also updated the reading page to better reflect what a blinkered specialist I am becoming.

Sydney

An old post at Philosopher’s Playground explains why philosophers, at least those of the analytic persuasion, can’t dress themselves. In short, it’s because there ‘is no algorithm by which one can in a finite amount of time, much less in the morning before you are too late for class, decide with deductive certainty whether an outfit is sharp and properly accessorized’. But the fun is in the proof, so read the original post. As a bonus, it will also tell you what the real difference is between analytic and continental philosophers (people in my field spend way too much time thinking about this question).

Sydney

I’ve often wondered why news sites like the NYTimes, BBC, and so on bother allowing readers to comment on stories, since the comments are almost without exception so appallingly stupid that they make me embarrassed to be human. Since it’s so obvious that they’re attracting the wrong kind of crowd, why not just get rid of the comments boxes?

But I just came across a well-commented BBC piece that makes me feel a bit better about humanity. At least some people still have a sense of humour. The comments are in response to a piece on an alleged war against white socks in the Dutch Finance Ministry. Here’s my favourite comment:

In my office we have now banned white socks altogether. We used to have a special white socks room, but that has been claimed by the marketing department. Nowadays people have to take breaks outside to wear white socks. There are always a couple of white sockers huddling together near the entrance to the building.

Sydney

We need to get a cow.  Obviously.  Sydney has farmed his way into our vegetables, taken a stab at several favorite fruits, and canned until our shelves are full.  We have squash lining the walkway to our house, tomato juice on almost every bookshelf of the house.  What more do we need to ensure that we don’t have terrible grocery bills?  A cow.

Every time we go to the grocery store we buy two quarts of yogurt, two kinds of milk, at least two blocks of cheese (often three), cream, and sometimes butter.  I blame it all on Sydney.  I like milk and I love cheese (in volume), but at his parents’ place they have cream and milk sitting around in three-gallon pails all around the kitchen.  Yeah, I wasn’t kidding about blaming it on him.

Buying a cow is the thing that will ensure that when we retreat from public life (which, given that we’re both recluses who are fine with cat, book, and tea, is entirely likely) we will have everything we need to live a happy life.  And yes, I’m kidding, but only kind of.

Erin