Mountebank Blog

• “She favors smart students over the regular students which is bias.”
• “She expects us to be too mature”
• “She expects us to actually be interested in the course material on our own”
• “By requiring us to post on WebCT before class, she forced us to do the reading ahead of time, which is very difficult and unfair for students with other obligations”

And many more.

One of my own favorites (from last fall)
“I believe I would have enjoyed the readings more if they were written in Turkish.”

I’ve been seeing this blogged many places, but it’s just too good not to post it here, too. Aaron Swartz, in response to David Horowitz and others of his idiotic ilk, has discovered a true measure of the need for intellectual diversity at Stanford (and by extension, the rest of academia).

only 1% of Stanford professors believe in telepathy (defined as “communication between minds without using the traditional five senses”), compared with 36% of the general population. And less than half a percent believe “people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil”, compared with 49% of those outside the ivory tower. And while 25% of Americans believe in astrology (“the position of the stars and planets can affect people’s lives”), I could only find one Stanford professor who would agree.

Our students are clearly being denied exposure to the full range of perspectives. This disparity must be addressed! 😯

Just as the requests for letters are coming in this week (three in the past two days), Scribbling Woman points to this all-too-familiar piece by David Galef in Inside Higher Ed–“My 57th Recommendation Letter”

I wish to recommend Daryl Smith for entry into your graduate program, and I have twenty more of these goddamned letters to write. Daryl is easily one of the best twenty students I recall teaching this semester, and I’ve probably written recommendations for seventeen of them already. Daryl was in one of my composition classes, I feel sure of that, since that’s all they let me teach.

[snip–but read the rest. It’s worth it!]

Best end with some boilerplate. Any institution that accepts Derwood will definitely have gained another student.

When I write them, they’re nothing like this…oh no, not at all! 😉

I really do try to take them seriously, and do my best to make them meaningful…but I sure do wonder if anyone really reads them that way!

After the snow, I found a chance to take a walk in Central Park to see The Gates. People all over the park (including me) were walking around with big smiles on their faces. One big advantage of this installation is that it’s bringing people (non-New Yorkers and New Yorkers alike) into the park in the wintertime, when it’s very, exceedingly, beautiful. For me, that was a big part of what I enjoyed, just the lovely winter landscape.

But the gates really do add something. First (photos don’t really capture this), there are so many of them–but the park is still much, much bigger than they are. That allows long vistas of curving rows of gates, but even more it allows views of the park, long distance, with just a little hint of an orange glow somewhere off in the distance. I liked that–it’s a big park, with so many unexpected vistas, turns around a bend to a surprising nook, or stream, or cliff. That’s part of Olmstead and Vaux’s real genius, to me (and as a Brooklynite, I have to emphasize that it’s just as wonderful in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park).

The other thing that I’ve always loved about Central Park is not just the park…but where it’s placed (location, location, location). It’s a park right smack in the middle of the greatest city in the history of the world, and the views of the buildings surrounding it, the trees counterbalanced by the spires and towers, have always thrilled me. There were many places where the gates somehow echoed those buildings (rectangles echoing rectangles), and in that way they brought the city into the park, and spread the park out into the city, even more than I usually get to see.

In the unlikely event anyone hasn’t seen enough photos of the park this week (I think I counted an average of 2.5 cameras per person when I was walking around), I’ve set up a gallery of my own photos. And if you really want the full (or partial) immersive experience, I’ve posted a large, but low-quality (3 mb) and a small, but higher quality (1 mb) video creation (both are .wmv format).

I came across an interesting deal. I can’t vouch for the company myself, but Lunar Pages Hosting looks pretty legit, and they’re making a very generous offer available for teachers. They define teachers as only K-12, so that doesn’t include me, but they’re offering a webhosting package absolutely free for teachers (for educational use). The terms are liberal, the space is reasonably large, and they seem to be committed to doing this for the right reasons. And the price is certainly right! Any K-12 teachers should certainly give them a look.

After a lot of back and forth and logistical confusion, the arrangements are made. I’ll be accompanying my daughter and her chess team when they go to compete in Nashville, Tennessee, at the 2005 US Chess Federation Supernationals. The PS 282 Royals, in only their second year as a team, managed to score a wild-card slot in the NYC Chess in the Schools Grand Prix. That earns them a trip to Nashville. The kids are excited, the parents are proud, and the knights and bishops are ready to fly.

So in the first week in April, I expect I’ll be trying my first attempt at chessblogging.

Finally got everything validated, no errors, no warnings, the theme just the way I want it, after the upgrade. This is now (aside from endless fiddling) a WordPress 1.5 blog.

I upgraded my WordPress installation to 1.5, following the instructions to the letter, but I still (of course) managed to screw something up. Not a disaster, and I’m sure I’ll get it to work, but for right now, it’s impossible to read or write comments. And, the permalinks don’t work, either. 🙁

It’s Darwin’s birthday (196 years–approaching the bicentennial!), and in honor of the day, a good gesture would be to attend one of the events scheduled as part of the Darwin Day Celebration. Or, failing that, it would be a good time to make a donation to the National Center for Science Education. Or your local public school–to the science program. Or even take a few minutes to read the late Ernst Mayr on Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought.