Well, it’s not gone, but it certainly has gone out of fashion compared to when I was a kid. How many kids work on their own cars these days? Though I would note that just changing a head gasket is not equivalent to rebuilding the whole engine.
I think that this is part and parcel of the whole academic bubble, which continues to inflate beyond economic reason. Particularly in today’s economy, people should realize that plumbing can’t be outsourced.
[Update about noon]
Speaking of the upcoming pop of the education bubble, some schools are now not allowing parents to see their children’s grades in college. How many parents are going to put up with that and continue to pay tuition to such an institution? The notion of “treating students as adults” works fine for students who are actually adults. But adults pay their own way. There’s a lot more to being an adult than simply surviving long enough to reach the age of majority.
Senator Isakson isn’t very happy with the president’s invoking him as a supporter of health-care deform.
But actually, the reason I’m posting is for a grammar flame:
“This is what happens when the President and members of Congress don’t read the bills,” says Isakson in a paper statement. “The White House and others are merely attempting to deflect attention from the intense negativity caused by their unpopular policies. I never consulted with the White House in this process and had no role whatsoever in the House Democrats’ bill. I categorically oppose the House bill and find it incredulous that the White House and others would use my amendment as a scapegoat for their misguided policies…”
No, Senator. It is you who is “incredulous,” not what the White House did. What you find about that is “incredible.” This is a common error (like confusing “imply” and “infer”) but that’s no excuse for it in a written press release.
The best college in the country isn’t Ivy League, according to Forbes — it’s West Point. It doesn’t surprise me. It’s the Ivy Leaguers who have been running the country into the ground for the past several decades.
The case stems from the incident in which a professor in a speech class refused to grade a student’s presentation, apparently because of the religious nature of the student’s presentation, the student’s expression of opposition for same-sex marriage in the presentation, or both. (The professor apparently also called the student a “fascist bastard” in front of the class for having supported the anti-same-sex-marriage Prop. 8, and refused to let the student finish the presentation.)
A professor who confronted me declared that he was “personally offended” by my column. He railed that his political viewpoints never affected his teaching and suggested that if I wanted a faculty with Republicans I should have attended a university in the South. “If you like conservatism you can certainly attend the University of Texas and you can walk past the statue of Jefferson Davis everyday on your way to class,” he wrote in an e-mail.
I was shocked by such a comment, which seemed an attempt to link Republicans with racist orthodoxy. When I wrote back expressing my offense, he neither apologized nor clarified his remarks.
Instead, he reiterated them on the record. Was such a brazen expression of partisanship representative of the faculty as a whole? I decided to speak with him in person in the hope of finding common ground.
He was eager to chat, and after five minutes our dialogue bloomed into a lively discussion. As we hammered away at the issue, one of his colleagues with whom he shared an office grew visibly agitated. Then, while I was in mid-sentence, she exploded.
“You think you’re so [expletive] cute with your little column,” she told me. “I read your piece and all you want is attention. You’re just like Bill O’Reilly. You just want to get up on your [expletive] soapbox and have people look at you.”
From the disgust with which she attacked me, you would have thought I had advocated Nazism. She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed.
This is one of the reasons that the education bubble will eventually pop. Parents aren’t going to remain willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to send their kids to Indoctrinate U.
Good students from good high schools, who have not taken advanced placement, know how to play the repetition game. They cut class and recycle their high school term papers.
Early in my teaching career, I had a student from one of the state’s best high schools. She was bright, but hardly exceptional. I found she was taking more than a full class load and holding down a full-time job. I was amazed. She told me that her classes at a suburban high school were more demanding than their repetition at the university. She chose classes where attendance wasn’t mandatory. Was she recycling her high school term papers? Of course; so was everyone else from her class.
A student in the sciences or engineering could not remotely do this, but the liberal arts have become intellectual wastelands, with an emphasis on persuading a captive audience as to the eternal verities of professors’ beliefs about racism, sexism, and homophobia.
A colleague in engineering used to remind me that in his college “PC” stood for personal computer, not political correctness. His dean was reprimanded for not sending his graduate students to diversity training during orientation week. The dean stated that engineering was a serious subject and his students had important assignments during that week. Told that he would have to answer to an administrative hearing, he said that he would be pleased to show up along with several of his alumni, successful businessmen and big contributors to the university. He then said to the diversity apparatchik, “This is a career decision you are about to make.” The hearing never took place. An engineering dean could get away with this. A liberal arts dean could not.
Higher education is the next overvalued and overpriced bubble to pop, I think.
Via Derbyshire, who claims to have gotten eighteen right. My guesses (not open book, with Firefox spellcheck temporarily disabled) are over the fold. I haven’t checked to see what my score is, but someone else can, if they have the time.
I like the spell chequer in Firefox, but I’ve noticed that it doesn’t understand American spelling. On the previous post, it told me that “defense” was spelled incorrectly, and suggested “defence” instead. I’ve also seen it tell me that “favorite” is properly spelled “favourite.” Anyone know why?
Amusingly, I also note that it doesn’t think that “firefox” is a word.