carrideen

carrideen, 9 months ago to random

I finally received a long-overdue incomplete assignment that is just riddled with the kind of errors only an AI would make, from a student who threatened legal action when I said a paper of hers made errors only an AI would make. There is an obvious grade for papers that are the right length but don't fulfill the assignment, and it's a D. It's bullshit whether it's written by the student or by an AI. But students don't tend to invent quotations from books that are right in front of them.

carrideen, 4 months ago to random

The discourse about Tracy Chapman "finally" being recognized for Fast Car is weird because it was a huge hit. Massive. Rolling Stone called it the best song ever written by a woman (and it was still no. 167 on their ranked list). I'm delighted that she's getting new royalties, new awards, new invitations to sing it, but there's this edge like she's supposed to be so grateful to Luke Combs. No, Luke Combs should be grateful that she let him sing it. Audiences should be so grateful to hear it.

carrideen, 10 months ago to random

I've been looking to join a gym in my neighborhood, but the only local one has personal trainers that use a bunch of fatphobic language in their bios, talking about having lived in the "prison" of "morbid obesity" and having defeated the hideous monster that they used to be, and I'm like, man, I just want to work out a little more? Can I do that without telling you I hate myself 50 times in a row?

carrideen, 5 months ago to random

The course evaluation program at my new job is hilariously pushy. I get a new email every day (even weekends) about cool hip strategies I could use to maximize my response rates, like using ⭐ s and ❤️ s in my emails, or booking an entire class meeting in a computer lab and standing over them while everyone proves to me they've finished. (This idea is credited to a named professor in Texas who, by doing this to all of her classes, gets an average response rate of... 83%, which... isn't great?)

carrideen, 11 months ago to random

Hey #admin people, does anyone know why, when you click on a post (from a connection), it doesn't display posts or replies from servers you are not connected to? Most threads are unreadable unless they're made up of people you are already following. Has this changed recently? Is there a setting I need to change so my instance can read whole conversations here?

Ex: I see Eugen post an @ reply, I click, and see only his post, replying to nothing, and no one responding to it. Over and over.

carrideen, 8 months ago to random

After last night's documentary about vaccine hesitancy, a "medical economist" got up to "ask a question," which turned out to be a 15-minute lecture in which she translated every scene in the film, which she enjoyed, into the language of economic choice, assuming absolute rationalism, in which dark money invested in quacks and charlatans is just one more kind of economic fact. No one stopped her, so she just kept going and going.

Please don't do this.
Moderators, don't let this happen.

carrideen, 9 months ago to random

It seems useful to discuss our sense of how to use moderation tools here. This is my understanding:

1. Mute/filter: This content bothers me but I will keep the connection

2. Block: I don't want to see this person again

3. Report: No one on our instance should interact with this person

4. Defederate: No one on our instance should interact with anyone on this instance

5. Fediblock: No instances should interact with this instance (and it's new information for other instances)

Is that right?

carrideen, 4 months ago to random

Here's something I think about a lot:

Remember in Candide, when they find El Dorado? Gems and gold are sitting there for the taking. Everyone is rich, but because no one is poor, it's boring, so they leave.

I think there is an El Dorado fantasy at the basis of Euro-style capitalism. There's an untapped resource out there and all we have to do is pick it up off the ground to be rich, with no costs, no labor, no consequences. But the costs are devastating and invisibilized, every time. 1/5

carrideen, 1 month ago to random

I don't know if this is known outside of academic circles, but most universities are desperate for enrollments these days. Over the past 10ish years, unis changed tactics from attracting students with perks (some of them admittedly dumb) to slashing everything in sight--support staff, new faculty, majors, equipment, software, facilities, retirement plans, landscaping, even PR and marketing. Radical top-down decisions like "Who cares about foreign languages?" made whole divisions disappear. 1/

carrideen, 1 year ago to random

Didn't there used to be a lot more LGBTQ+ people in universities and schools? I had out gay teachers from junior high on, in Kansas. In college, half of my department was bi or lesbian, the chair of chemistry was gay, the main statistics prof was trans. There were so many queer people that, as a queer student, you didn't even have to get along with everyone.

I got my evals this semester, and a junior film student said he'd never had a teacher/prof who talked about LGBTQ+ people before, ever.

carrideen, 10 months ago to random

I know that Althusser is totally cancelled, but the guy was right about ideology. What you "believe" is meaningless; what you are willing to do, even in contradiction to your beliefs, to get resources, or just to be seen as "good," is what gives power to the powerful and hurts less obedient people.

Eventually, a lot of us who got somewhere by bending ourselves into doing things against our beliefs start to look around at what we got for it and realize it's not worth it. That's a midlife crisis.

carrideen, 9 months ago to random

Twelve years ago, I started using the phrase "recursive remediation" to refer to the bizarre effect that hypertrophied assessment has on pedagogy.

It begins by saying "Our students will never [X]; they can't even [Y]!" where X is some mature intellectual task and Y is e.g., spelling their own name, writing a complete sentence, reading a news article.

"They'll never understand Moby-Dick; they can't even read the syllabus!"
"They'll never write a legal brief; they can't write an email!" 1/7

carrideen, 1 month ago to random

Trauma is information. Someone who has experienced violence knows more about violence than someone who has always been safe. Someone who has a disability knows more about disability than someone who has always been able. I think about this whenever big criminal trials are in the news, that they weed out jurors who have been assaulted, violated, attacked, discriminated against, because they can't be "objective" about violence. I don't trust anyone who thinks inexperience is objectivity.

carrideen, 11 days ago to random

I know Althusser (caveat), but his insight that there is nothing outside of ideology (which for him is actions that support power, not beliefs) is undervalued. I'm so tired of obviously fascist patriarchal oppressors telling us they're "critical thinkers not ideologues" when they obviously do everything to uphold power as it is. You can't step outside of ideology without stepping into another ideological system. Better to know what system you are promoting rather than "unwittingly" back evil.

carrideen, 2 months ago to random

The past two years of in-person ASECS meetings were pretty stressful for me. Being around a lot of people, esp c18 scholars, used to be a great joy, so I was sad to feel so drained and frantic in Baltimore and St. Louis. #ASECS2024 in Toronto felt like a new kind of joyfulness and warmth, more even than before. I got to talk to several grad students and ECSs for whom it felt productive and encouraging, rather than intimidating and even vicious, which it so often used to be.

carrideen, 8 months ago to random

When high school teachers are asked by their former students to evaluate the curriculum of their college courses, does it ever occur to them that they could just not give an opinion? What is it that empowers them to feel so confident proclaiming that their college professors are "not teaching college-level texts"? Do they think we're working from a standardized list of difficulty?

Several semesters in a row now, some HS teacher has told my student my class is "basically grad school."

carrideen, 9 months ago to random

For Labor Day, I got to wake up from a dream in which my old job said I still "owed" them committee service, and when I showed up to explain that, no I don't, it turned out to be a committee that had organized solely for the purpose of denying resources and support to adjunct faculty. One of their proposals was to send $500 to everyone with tenure to remind them where their bread gets buttered. (From reading @SethRudy asking about academic strikes before bed, no doubt...)

carrideen, 5 months ago to random

Trapped in the "how could I possibly have earned an A- when all of my grades have been A-" email loop.

carrideen, 3 months ago to random

Last night, I mentioned having watched Close (2022) and being shocked by how extremely sad it is, and I keep seeing reviews saying it's sadistically sad, which seems off to me.

As someone about to teach Jude the Obscure, I've been thinking a lot about what tragedy is for, emotionally, and why it seems to have disappeared. You can make a movie about cynicism and corruption, but not one in which people are just sad and there's no solution or intelligent framing for it that makes it stop hurting.

carrideen, 8 months ago to random

"Meeting students where they are" is a phrase that I used to like, as a college instructor, because I thought it suggested "and then taking them where they want to go." But the more I see this phrase in Forbes headlines and publications for uni administrators, I realize it suggests "and then patting everyone on the back and going home."

I became an educator because my own teachers believed in me more than I believed in myself, and they set much higher goals than I did. It inspired me. 1/

carrideen, 1 month ago to random

Maybe it wasn't a good idea to turn the police into the world's most overfunded and ignorant paramilitary organization in the world?

carrideen, 1 year ago to random

I honestly don't see how the US can tolerate having a Supreme Court any longer. We know without a doubt that at least four justices are openly corrupt, bought and paid for by corporate wealth that has altered the interpretation of federal law for the foreseeable future, and at least one more gleefully champions a vision of racist patriarchy beyond anything in modern memory. How is this bearable?

carrideen, 4 months ago to random

My least favorite kind of movie is the kind in which, instead of speaking the language the characters should be speaking, they speak English with a thick accent.

carrideen, 4 months ago to random

Oh fun, I just blocked someone who responded to a one-off comment that (very vaguely) described my (very specific) next book with "And what makes your book different from the hundreds of other people writing about the same thing???" People of Mastodon, don't do this. This is why people don't enjoy talking about their research here.

The other one I'm getting a lot is "You used a word I didn't know! Everything you write should be pitched precisely at me, a stranger who found your post!"

carrideen, 1 month ago to random

Baby Reindeer on Netflix is super-intense, but all very recognizable to me as a bisexual who has loved many bisexuals. We are the sexual identity most likely to experience domestic violence, partner assault, and stalking, especially when we enter into relationships/friendships with monosexual people--and being bi and trans increases the risk.

It's definitely not for people who avoid representations of queerphobic violence. For people who have endured it, it may be cathartic and even healing.