Students get caught cheating massively on a test and get penalized. And here is how one of them reacts:

Julie Rothe, an 18-year-old finance and information systems freshman, said she plans to accept responsibility. But she will challenge the penalty, she said, because students cheated in years past. “I’m really angry at the fact that students got away with this in earlier semesters,” she said. “We are taking the hit, and I believe that is unfair.

Words cannot explain how this ridiculous, entitled, stupid attitude makes me feel, people. What’s next? You get caught driving drunk and you get really angry because other people drove drunk and got away with it? You commit a crime and get really angry because there are criminals out there who were never brought to justice?

Instead of getting angry with herself for being a lazy, cheating idiot, this brainless creature gets angry with the very people she tried to defraud.

This is just the limit.

I really hope she flunks out of school and goes to live under a rock someplace where she cannot harm others with her egregious lack of morals and responsibility.

And now I need to go do some breathing exercises to get over the shock of reading something like this.

A reader sent me the following article and asked me to comment*:

Stone was called to the principal’s office at Tartan Senior High School this week and told it was inappropriate to bring an adult film star to a high school dance, the Daily Dot reports. However, the 18-year-old student escaped disciplinary action and was not in any trouble with the school, Jennifer McNeil, a representative for the school district, told The Huffington Post. After sending nearly 600 Tweets, Stone had recently received responses from at least two porn stars who said they were willing to attend his prom as long as he provided money for airfare.

In a statement issued to parents and obtained by HuffPost, the North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale School District cited regulations to defend their decision to ban an adult film star from attending the event. In short, the rules state that the district has the right to deny any person admission to a school-sponsored event if “the visit is not in the best interest of students, employees or the school district,” or if it “substantially disrupts the orderly operation of school or school activities,” McNeil said.

All I can do in response is ask the following question: if we can’t trust an 18-year-old adult to decide who his date for the prom should be, then how can we blame the young people for being too immature, indecisive, and irresponsible? How come it’s OK to police who this guy’s date is? And how far will we take this kind of babying of people who are old enough to vote?

I also think that being judgmental of this man’s willingness to pay for companionship (in the form of airfare or any other form) is very hypocritical. How is this any worse than paying for your date’s meal or theater ticket?

As for this woman’s profession, it takes a lot of gall to bar people from anywhere because you don’t happen to approve of their career choices. Unless she is planning to engage in anything illegal right at the prom, then who’s to say that her profession is worse than anybody else’s?

Seriously, the amount of prudishness one encounters every day is daunting.

* By the way, I really love it when people do that. It’s hard to keep track of every interesting bit if news, but with the help of my readers, I can stay informed. Besides, it makes me feel important to be asked to comment. 🙂

You know that I’m not in favor of dumping on the young generations but some things are just too much even for me.

Today, less than half of the students showed up for class. Those who did show up came in anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes late. When I asked what was happening, they told me it was because of the “horrible weather.”

The horrible weather in question is a tiny little drizzle that you don’t even need an umbrella for.

Seriously, folks, I don’t get this. You are going to sit there at home, completely immobilized because of an insignificant little drizzle that doesn’t even deserve to be called “rain”?

I’d much rather people just invented some excuses instead of telling me they are late or absent because of this “severe” weather.

I read every article that mentions the word “statistician”, and here is one that I found today:

When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook username and password. Bassett, a New York City statistician, had just finished answering a few character questions when the interviewer turned to her computer to search for his Facebook page. But she couldn’t see his private profile. She turned back and asked him to hand over his login information.

My interest in statisticians has to do with my husband being one. When he was on the job market, I had a chance to discover how much bullying there is in his industry*. I have written before about the practice of forcing people with PhDs in Financial Statistics to solve some completely idiotic puzzles during interviews. N. initially tried to prepare for such questions by poring over collections of puzzles but then realized that his self-respect was of more value to him than any job and decided to terminate any interview where he would be asked to engage in such a stupid exercise.

Justin Bassett also terminated the interview when he was asked to offer the interviewer access to his profile. I congratulate him on this decision because working for a company that hires unhinged, psychologically unstable idiots like this interviewer is a place with no future. There cannot be any practical, job-related value in seeing anybody’s Facebook profile, which means that anyone who insists on access is a pervert desperate to rummage in other people’s lives for lack of their own.

* I’m not talking about other industries in this context because I have no information. In academia, nothing like this is remotely possible. The search committee that hired me, for example, was legally barred even from simply Googling my name.

So if people travel to London in May, what part of the city should they stay in? Something that is not too touristy but still close to where people are (coffee-shops, small stores, restaurants, etc.).

It would also be nice if it’s an area with some form of public transportation.

And a question from a paranoid fellow traveler: is public transportation in London dangerous?

I’m trying to make reservations in St. Louis for my birthday weekend, and all hotels are already booked full. Why does everybody want to be in St. Louis all of a sudden?

I wonder if this means that I will finally see some people in the streets of St. Louis. I call it “The Empty City” because nobody is ever there.

When I was doing my MA in Hispanic Studies, my thesis adviser would come to my office looking royally peeved and say, “So, Clarissa, you are not doing anything, right? You aren’t doing any research at all, right? You are just sitting here, doing nothing?”

“Professor,” I’d reply, “I’m teaching two courses, taking three courses, writing my dissertation, preparing for two conferences, and writing a SSHRC grant proposal.”

“Yes, exactly!” he would respond. “As I said, you are doing nothing. You need to be publishing. Here is a novel. Read it and write an article. I expect the first draft in two months.”

Then he would leave the office, muttering about “those useless people who just sit there doing nothing.”

That was a leadership style I loved. I was never as productive academically as I had been during those two years in the MA program.

I really appreciate it that the administrators at my current university love and praise me. And it’s nice to go up for review and hear how amazing I am and how everything I do is great. On a personal level, it’s very gratifying.

On a professional level, though, it’s not extremely helpful. Hearing how I’m doing everything just right doesn’t really do anything for me. It isn’t like I’m getting published in the PMLA or churning out books by the year, so obviously there is vast room for improvement.

Instead of hearing, “You got 3 articles accepted for publication, that’s wonderful!”, I’d like to hear, “Three articles, that’s very good. However, one of the journals where you got accepted is not very good. Why are you even submitting to such journals? Are you applying for any grants? Why on Earth not? Why is your goal to submit just 2 articles for publication this year? Can’t you do better? Are you sure this is the best you can do?”

Yes, I am aware that this probably makes me some sort of a masochist but I need for somebody to push me and drive me through negative motivation. I have this very annoying tendency to “like myself the way I am”, and that is very self-defeating.

There is a sale on these magnetic note-holders for the refrigerator at our university bookstore. I wanted to buy one when I noticed that every single one of them had a female name on it: “Caroline’s kitchen,” “Debras kitchen,” “Susan’s kitchen”, etc. There is a huge box of them behind the ones on display. I rummaged in it for 15 minutes and didn’t find a single male name.

Apparently, men don’t have kitchens in the Midwest.

I didn’t know such things even existed any more. Seeing these magnets was like traveling to the 1950s. And that was not a pleasant journey.

Expressions that really bug me are “children of broken families” or “children from broken homes.”

These expressions are always used by really officious stupid jerks who have a huge stick shoved up their asses and who feel the need to judge others in order to relieve the misery their pathetic personal lives bring them.

In the warped minds of these idiots, “a child of a broken family” is not the miserable kid whose parents only pretend to tolerate each other for the sake of appearances and who, in the meanwhile, saddle the child with an intolerable guilt s/he will carry for life. For such officious prudes, “a child of a broken home” is a person whose parents have terminated an unfulfilling relationship and have found happiness away from each other.