I am absolutely convinced that all of this endless belly-aching about the horrible unfairness of student evaluations comes from people who are shitty teachers. Be a good teacher, and students will adore you and write you the kind of evaluations that will make you and your tenure committee weep.

Here are some alternatives to student evaluations the article proposes:

To do a review of the materials that professors use to create classes.

“Show me your stuff,” Stark says. “Syllabi, handouts, exams, video recordings of class, samples of students’ work.”

First of all, who in the fuck’s name are you and why should you opinion matter more than that of my students who were actually in the classroom? Second of all, what a great joy it will be to have one’s work evaluated by somebody who thinks that teaching is about syllabi, handouts and exams.

“Let me know how your students do when they graduate.”

How do they do what, doofus? Speak Spanish? Save for tracking them down all over the planet and speaking to them, there is no way whatsoever to measure that.

“That seems like a much more holistic appraisal than simply asking students what they think.”

I’m sure this creature gets really sucky student evaluations. And I’m sure it never occurs to him that this happens because he despises the idea of asking students what they think so much.

According to the idiots who inspired this article, students are incapable of forming an opinion on the quality of teaching but they can be used to spy on professors:

Both Pellizzari and Stark agree that student surveys should be used in a much more limited way, to capture student satisfaction. And they could perhaps be used to gather information on factual points like whether the professor showed up on time or canceled class more than once or twice.

I really like the phrase “gather information.” What a great way to foster a good working environment in the classroom. Just use students to gather information on professors. Who cares about their stupid opinions when they can be used to gather info?

What lies behind this approach is, of course, a profound contempt for students:

“If you make your students do well in their academic career, you get worse evaluations from your students,” Pellizzari said. Students, by and large, don’t enjoy learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some good.”

In my long teaching experience, students really want to learn and appreciate educators who teach them well. I meet an exception to this rule maybe once a year and normally end up discovering that the student’s problem was none other than my incapacity to engage.

My fever starting climbing up again in the evening. My favorite way of treating illness is massive immersion in the news cycle. For some reason, watching and reading the news (simultaneously) makes me feel better.

So I’m lying in bed, listening to a report about Khorasan, more Khorasan, and even more Khorasan. After an hour of that, I decided to make dinner, got out one of the new grain mixes that I recently bought, and discovered the word “Khorasan” printed on the grain mix in large letters.

For a person running a fever, this was a little bit too much. Of course, since then I Googled it and discovered that there is a type of wheat called Khorasan.

I really hope I don’t find a condiment called “ISIS” in my pantry next.

Here is a very interesting analysis of foreign policy:

The slaughter of more than 3,000 civilians and Ukrainian soldiers and a growing toll of Russian mercenaries and conscripts in southeast Ukraine can hardly compete with ISIS’s (or ISIL’s, if you like) grisly You-Tube beheadings, but the potential risk posed by Russia’s War of Southeast Ukraine exceeds those emanating from the ISIS threat.

As I said before, the problem with Obama’s foreign policy is that it is purely reactive and is not guided by any consistent philosophy. So it’s all “Let’s remove Assad! No, let’s not remove Assad, especially if Putin asks us not to! Now let’s pretend we are against Putin! No, let’s actually support Putin! And now let’s go defeat Assad’s enemies! Leave Iraq! Go back to Iraq! No, let’s go into Syria instead!” 

The linked article says that Putin has pretty much won his war in Ukraine right now, owing to the complete indifference with which the West greeted his open invasion of the neighboring country in August. I don’t think Putin is a greater direct threat to our daily lives than ISIS. However, when Putin destroys NATO (as the linked piece suggests), this will make fighting ISIS a lot harder. Plus, Putin has serious problems with wahhabism in his own country. He might be very interested in turning his homegrown Wahhabi in the direction of the West (which is something he has been very successfully trying out in Ukraine.)

Ukraine is fighting on its own with little or no help from its feckless allies. Those who stand next in the line of victims understand the urgency of the situation. Others do not, if Obama’s remark at a recent fund raiser is accurate: “Geopolitically…what happens in Ukraine does not pose a threat to us.” That remark may go down in history along with Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” statement.

Read the article, it is shockingly good.

I just read that more than half of all cheese eaten in the world is gouda. And I thought I was so original in my preference for it.

I need a new favorite cheese to stand out more.

The Rude Pundit has written the best article ever. For some reason, the boring-as-stale-pizza-crust state of Kansas keeps inspiring people to come out with works of great brilliance.

I was forwarded these questions from somebody who is writing a book about the division of household chores. Here are my answers:

What is your experience with who does what around the house? – I cook, he cleans. I supervise the handyman, my husband mows the lawn.

Have you and your significant other ever had a big argument when it comes to household chores? – No, we have a happy sex life.

Who has the stronger urge to keep the place clean and tidy – you or your SO? – We both have a happy sex life. With each other.

Do you do more cleaning? – I do none.

Why? – I suck at it. A floor washed by me looks a lot worse than a dirty floor I haven’t messed with.

Have you ever hashed out a “To Do” list? – I’m not sure how to interpret “hashed out” in this context. I constantly try different productivity systems for work. Now I’m into “Have Done” lists kept on paper. My husband is not into lists at all, doesn’t have an agenda or a smartphone.

Are there certain chores that only one of you does? – I cook, he cleans. I supervise the handyman, my husband mows the lawn.

Why? – Because I’m good at cooking and supervising the handyman, and my husband is good at cleaning and mowing the lawn.

Does a messy partner make you feel resentful? – No, I have a happy sex life.

Does it impact your sex life or your feelings towards him or her? – It works the other way round. We have a happy sex life, so we don’t feel resentful or feel bothered by “mess.”

Who wants to bet my answers are not getting into the book because they don’t reinforce the stereotype of women who constantly cook and clean, feeling resentful against their husbands and denying them sex as a result?

Can anybody decipher the following for me:

Logically, I don’t have a problem with going poly–we’re atheists with no real reason to commit to monogamy.

I was born in a country of 200,000,000 atheists and never heard any suggestion that, in our day and age, monogamy requires any sort of religiosity. I’m religious, my husband is a profoundly anti-religious scientist but I can’t say that I’m more monogamous than he is because that would not be humanly possible.

It’s like people are so afraid of having sexual preferences that they keep trying to buttress them with ideology to make them more “respectable.”

Weirdness. 

People, make sure you watch Bill
Clinton on CNN right now. He is saying exactly what I’ve been saying about the advent of a new state-form. He doesn’t use the words ” nation-state”, but who cares.

Clinton said (I’m writing from memory, of course): information technology and all kinds of new technology have made the power in the world too dispersed. This created a new kind of threat. (He was answering a question about Khorasan here.) If we want the government to prevent bad things from happening, it will be up to us to make good things happen.

Got it? In the new state-form, the government’s role is to fight terrorism. And it falls to the citizens to provide for their own welfare. Just as I’ve been saying.

Have you ever met people with “disaster mentality”? The ones who see every contretemps as the end of the world, always assume the worst, and have trouble seeing their way past their problems?

More often than not, these are people whose parents adopted the pernicious maxim that they should always present a common front in any problems with the child and never take the child’s side against each other. Such a child grows up thinking, “If Mommy is hurting me, I can’t even tell Daddy, he won’t listen”, or vice versa. Later in life, their first reaction to any problem is despondency and the desire to give up without even trying. In their world, there is no alternative to a bad scenario. Everything and everybody in the universe is allied against them. 

Parents who adopt this parenting strategy do so in order to prevent the child from manipulating them by setting one of them against the other. Of course, the problem with this strategy is that it is all about protecting the parents from the child and setting the child up as their enemy. The child grows up with the belief that s/he is all alone in a battle against a hostile world and carries this attitude through his or her entire life.

I’m on bed rest and reading a novel by one Joel Decker purely for entertainment. The book does contain interesting insights, though. See this one:

We live in a society of defeated office workers, and to get ourselves out of this fix, we must fight – against ourselves and against the whole world. Freedom is a constant battle of which we are barely even aware.

This character is speaking about being a writer but isn’t this the greatest allure of academia, as well?