Teacher claims not using Microsoft is “holding our kids back”. Letter received by HeliOS, a firm that issues refurb machines to poor kids with Linux distros installed.
Ridiculous. I kinda wished his reply included the “free as in beer” and “free as in speech” lines just to watch her head pop off.
I just bought Adobe Lightroom 2 as I really like it for simple post processing and with my now waning student discount I can get it for just shy of a benjamin. I buy from a student software site that just changed their UI and it has the intuitive qualities of the Quantum Holographic Principle. Each page in checkout has the “continue” button in a different place and where the “Buy” button would normally be in the lower right hand corner of the center frame there’s a rotating sequence of “subscribe”, “verify student identity” (which is even displayed on the screen that tells you that your student ID has been verified” and my favorite: recommend. Yes, I’d like to write a review on a student software site frequented by kids who have to buy this stuff for a product I’m in the process of buying. If only supermarkets asked about the quality of their fruit as you were packing it into your car.
I received my degree today.  Finally. It nicely states my name and degree and university in a lightly serifed font like an elegant combination of Copperplate Gothic and Cooper Black. I take it out of the protective case, show my dad, he shakes my hand and I put it on the table to clear space to put it in a place of honor upon the refrigerator.
Aside: Importance on the Robinson fridge is determined by proximity to the calendar. You ain’t worth shit if your art/report card/degree/honorific doesn’t at least make it onto the freezer.
I decide to put it directly on top of the calendar and return to see the face of horror: My father’s over-iced screw driver in a plastic tumbler we stole from my aunt’s house slowly approaching the surface of the one indication that proves in the eyes of God and/or the world’s credit agencies that I’m better than my brother. I see the first drips of condensation held to the plastic of the cup only by a prayer and water’s electrostatic adhesiveness thinking that only the intervention of Le Chantelier himself could change the laws of chemistry such that my symbol erudition and triumph would remain unbesmearched when I receive a deus ex machina: the soft baritone of Shelby Foote announcing factoids of the Civil War stills my father’s alcohol impeded heart enough that I can wrench the 80 lb bonded paper from the Van Der Waals force-induced grip of the table.
Temple requires that term papers be submitted through a service known as TurnItIn which purports to check for plagiarism not just with other papers but with THE ENTIRE INTERNET. A task that’s beyond even the best webspiders and the Internet Archive can apparently be done by a piddling plagiarism policeman. Laughable. Anyway, I submitted my term paper and received a note back two days later from the instructor that the paper had been flagged for plagiarism and that I needed to explain myself.
Me: I didn’t plagiarize anything.
Instructor: Well, large portions of your paper were highlighted in red, indicating that they were copied.
Me: Copied from where?
Instructor: It doesn’t matter, plagiarism is plagiarism. The Fox School stands for the highest standards of education. Don’t think you can slip one by us.
Me: I didn’t plagiarize, I’m too arrogant, what now?
Instructor: You need to explain this to the department head.
Me: Can you at least tell me what was apparently plagiarized?
Instructor: I’ll see if I can send a copy.
I received the copy, and you know what my plagiarism was? QUOTES, FUCKING QUOTES. Magazines, articles, surveys and webpages all meticulously cited in the end-notes showed up as plagiarized. How fucking dumb is that?
The irony is that being cited for plagiarism by using citations makes it more likely that students will take other people’s ideas without citation and simply modify them slightly to avoid being accused of plagiarism, which increases plagiarism. Two weeks folks, two weeks.
I regained my faith in the youth of America today. That happens every two months or so, but this day’s was particularly refreshing. Today was the case competition for all graduating seniors and as we watched 3 crappy presentations and one stellar one the listlessness in the audience became palpable. The judges left, and we were guaranteed a quick return as the presentations had already run over and then the trouble began.
The BA coordinator, herself having no reasonable business skills, opened the floor to questions. The first was could graduation fees be rolled into admission fees? The answer, yes it was part of the next “fee upgrade”. The student fired back that the fee upgrade was several hundred dollars a semester to which he was met with silence.
Question 2- Integrated Experience
Student: The financial ratios section of the course was hard. Is there any idea to remove that for non-finance majors?
Proctor: Yes. We’re thinking of dropping that.
Another student: Then what’s the point of making it an integrated experience between courses if you leave out large portions of them?
Proctor: We’re going to add a simulations course as a pre-requisite to take care of that. Financial math doesn’t represent the main focus of the business world. (at this point, she made an enemy of every econometrics, forecasting, finance and actuarial science student in the audience)
That other student: You’re adding a pre-requisite to cover finance? Since it’s a capstone, aren’t all the courses pre-requisites, including the finance ones we have to take anyway?
*silence*
Question 3- Common Experience
Student: A lot of us feel that there was an unequal experience between people taking this course. Some classes got to hand in essentially fluff.
Proctor: There’s a common syllabus for instructors to follow.
Me: But, CIS 1055 (basic computing) is regulated to within an inch of its life, you’re telling us that basic computing should be subject to more academic rigor than the capstone for all business majors?
Proctor: Next question
Question 4 – Ethics
Me:Â It’s great that business ethics was added as a requirement, but what does it teach when we’re chided for filesharing as a generation while at the same time you show copyrighted films in the large session that I’m sure Temple doesn’t have re-broadcast licenses for.
Proctor: Educational institutions have a different standard, we’re using it for educational purposes.
Me: By that logic, we can photocopy text books as they’re for educational purposes, but students have gotten expelled for that.
At this point there was much loud talking and the questions got more derisive from here until it ended with the Dean herself being attacked.
Dean: we believe that your degree is a share in Temple University and we want that share to gain value and…
Student shouting from audience: How do I sell my share!
Another student shouting from audience: What firms require stockholders to pay the dividends? (I’m assuming referring to tuition)
My heart lept. How many places have you seen a dean get heckled?
This was the last time I could lord my superiority with computers over my classmates, sigh. I still salvaged these two incidents:
This was the last time I could lord my superiority with computers over my classmates, sigh. I still salvaged these two incidents:
More CIS 1055 presentation notes:
Each Tuesday and Thursday, I have a 3 hour break at midday between two classes and it doesn’t make much sense for me to go home, so I tool around Temple, hit up Turkish Lunch Cart #2 or Greek Lunch Cart #4 (combine them and you get Cyprus, oh!) for a wicked gyro (they like that I don’t pronounce it JI-rho). Today, I ate my gyro and promptly fell asleep in the Speakman study area. For some strange reason, when I fall asleep on the train or at school, I don’t move around nor make much noise compared to my normal heavy breathing when sleeping. Today was an exception.
I woke up with my arms flung out to the size of me my head back, mouth open and somehow I was in the exact middle of the aisle of 10 partitioned desks in the study area. Apparently I’d been like this for some time, as the aisle dead-ends and to the right of me all the chairs were full while those to the left were empty. Temple follows the urinal rule of only using every other desk space when possible, I’d clearly broke that up. I went to the restroom and I had sleep lines on my face like I’d rested on something, yet I had no jacket, pillow or bag on which to sleep. So I think someone’s got an odd story to tell about a man stealing their jacket to use as a pillow, I hope that person comes to school on Tuesday and tells me. Hopefully I don’t fall asleep.
We had presentations today in BA 4196, goody. The teacher spent the session staring at us unhappily and I spent the session looking quizzically at poorly wrought PowerPoint presentations. At then end, the group answered a question really poorly and the teach popped.  While I hate it while it happens I love it after the fact when a teacher blows up. In particular I like two speeches:
1) My generation is superior to you generation
2) You’re undervaluing this useless and valueless material
There’s also the “Your ethnicity is inferior to mine” speech but that can only be implied and generally comes from grizzled Soviet bloc mathematicians. This professor wins the award for being the first instructor to give both in one semester! He beats out my stat professor who did both but over two semesters. He even walked out angrily two minutes before the regular end time of the class.
Later, I got my test back in Act Sci 3505 and there was a rare instance where I bit my tongue. I had been out the previous week and after reviewing the test angrily told a classmate that the 2 points I received off for failing to explain an answer properly robbing me of a 90. He said he’d lost 30 points for similar things and was unsuccessful arguing it. His grade was a 50 while the class averages was 48. Whew…