The Fora: A Higher Education Community

Quote from: fishbrains on Today at 08:16:36 AM

Quote from: AmLitHist on Today at 06:08:47 AMI'm down to 3 people still enrolled in my developmental Comp I co-req class (started at 8).  Only 2 of them have a chance at passing the Comp I. 

Neither of those 2 showed up to class yesterday.

On the other hand, a woman who dropped the class 2+ weeks ago did show up, so I guess there's that. (I sent her home and went to my office to hang out until the Comp I class started later in the morning.)

I've felt that pain. A super-small co-req course is just another form of walking death. Sometimes a semester just can't end too soon.

Ugh!  I think that teaching evaluations should be entirely optional for a class that small. No way to get any useful feedback if the students aren't actually going to class and/or have no chance of passing.

So you have forgotten prof's name-- 'Dear Sir:' worketh well, or at least, 'Dear Professor:'.

Apparently I was blind - thanks!

Good morning!

Got to genius with pangram, which was a guess.  Yesterday we needed bee buddy for octopi.  I needed husband help for piccolo, lollipop.

I also had flower-riverbank.  Some good contenders so far, so we'll see.

I'm glad you enjoyed your visit, cathwen! So cool that you were able to chat with your grandson every day, too.

Pyrrhuloxia are back, and the roses are coming up.  Yay, spring!

Happy solving!

Final decisions are soon to be made for who and what lives and dies here at Artem U.  The atmosphere is a toxic soup of pain, anger, resignation, and finger pointing. Factions are being formed.  Rumblings about the nuclear option - votes of non-confidence - are heard in quiet corners.  Magical thinking abounds for possible solutions to what some refuse to believe is a crisis.

Twelve months ago, I would have said it was inconceivable that we would find ourselves in this situation.  But here we are. 

As the saying goes, at first you go broke slowly, and then all at once.

Right now, we are in a fight to avoid the "all at once" stage of the process.  I think the president and provost have a reasonable approach to do that.  Unfortunately, with remarkably little support from the faculty.

A bit of grading and a bit of T1 today.

Quote from: AmLitHist on Today at 06:08:47 AMI'm down to 3 people still enrolled in my developmental Comp I co-req class (started at 8).  Only 2 of them have a chance at passing the Comp I. 

Neither of those 2 showed up to class yesterday.

On the other hand, a woman who dropped the class 2+ weeks ago did show up, so I guess there's that. (I sent her home and went to my office to hang out until the Comp I class started later in the morning.)

I've felt that pain. A super-small co-req course is just another form of walking death. Sometimes a semester just can't end too soon.

I fixed the droopy front end of my car with zip ties. Looks good. We'll see if it lasts.

Having a 15-year-old car pushes one to do self-repair when possible. To have a pro do it probably would have cost more than the car is worth.

For my next stunt: An oil change.

I'll also say they don't know names of things in other contexts either. One of the most missed questions on quizzes are things like "what's the name of the main character" or "Who wrote this essay" or "Which of the texts was written by Harriet Jacobs." In class discussion, students generally say "they say...." and I make them clarify "they." Do you mean author, narrator, character (the differences of which we cover in the first few weeks). Heck, many of them don't know the names of any of the other people in class.

I think that for underclassmen it's incredibly difficult for them to think with any specificity. Why? I dunno. I do know that I spend more time than I used to on things like vocabulary -- the story is called "The Piazza," so what is a piazza? What's a pew? What's a cottage?

Quote from: waterboy on Today at 07:02:39 AMPerhaps I missed this, but was there some understanding of what she planned to say that scared off the admins?

Her previous social media presence:

QuoteIt cited her social media bio that included a link to a page that calls Zionism a "racist settler-colonial ideology."

Interesting bit:

QuoteAnuj Desai, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, suggested that Ms. Tabassum could have legal grounds to sue, particularly in light of California law that supports students' First Amendment rights.

"If the reason they're removing her is because of her views, then that just feels much more like a free speech problem," he said. "Ordinarily we would say, beef up the security."

But Mr. Desai said that the university could be warranted in shutting down her speech, if it learned that Ms. Tabassum planned to use the address as a forum, as graduation speakers sometimes do, to discuss their outrage over issues of the day.