Posts Tagged ‘assistant vice-underprovost for bee-watching-watching’
Sunday Afternoon
* This is, I think, literally the first time I have ever heard of university budget cuts impacting administration. Meanwhile.
* Meanwhile meanwhile, Congress talks adjuncts and adjunctification. I’m sure they’ll come up with a good solution soon.
* Tressie McMillan Cottom on race and adjunctification.
* Yo novel so staid and conventional, it’s taught at over 50 MFA programs.
* Submitted for your approval: An OCR of the MLA JIL list, 1965-2012.
* Bérubé’s last post on MLA 2014.
* Harvard, MIT Online Courses Dropped by 95% of Registrants.
* Inside a for-profit college nightmare.
* Inside the “longform backlash.”
* How Student Activists at Duke Transformed a $6 Billion Endowment.
* “Income inequality” has proved a very successful framing for Democrats discussing a massive social problem, so of course the Obama White House is rolling out a much worse one.
* Pope Francis Is Drafting An Encyclical On The Environment.
* Demographics is destiny: Latinos overwhelmingly want action on climate change.
* How nonviolent was the civil rights movement?
* It’s 1968, and Esquire is interviewing James Baldwin.
* Chris Christie says no to dashboard cameras.
* The coming Common Core meltdown.
* Highly Educated, Highly Indebted: The Lives of Today’s 27-Year-Olds, In Charts.
* America’s nuclear corps are a mess. Dr. Strangelove was a documentary.
* A journey to the end of the world (of Minecraft).
* Science has finally proved that sex reverses cognitive decline in rats.
* This World Map Shows The Enormity Of America’s Prison Problem.
* The New York Times has the tragic story of a man with a million dollars in his retirement account struggling to scrape by on just $31,500 a month. Truly, there but for the grace of God go we.
* Bucking trend, Wisconsin union membership grows.
* Fox to strand reality show contestants on an island for an entire year.
* Woody Guthrie’s daughter wants to preserve Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.
* The “okay, fine, let’s abolish all marriages” response to marriage equality is so strange to me. I know things like this happened during the civil rights movement — and one might argue that precisely the same thing has been happening in slow-motion to public education over the last few decades — but it still seems like such a strange, uniquely twenty-first-century temper tantrum.
* Behold, the 90s! The Most Impressive Costumes from Star Trek: TNG’s First 3 Seasons.
* Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath.
* We Didn’t Eat the Marshmallow. The Marshmallow Ate Us.
* And Stephen Hawking wants to destroy all your silly, silly dreams.
Dr. Seuss Explains Assessment, Metrics, Administrative Blight, and Pretty Much Every Aspect of the Contemporary Education System
From Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?, way back in 1973:
Oh, the jobs people work at!
Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch
there’s a Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee-Watcher.
His job is to watch…
is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee.
A bee that is watched will work harder, you see.Well… he watched and he watched.
But, in spite of his watch,
that bee didn’t work any harder. Not mawtch.So then somebody said,
“Our old bee-watching man
just isn’t bee-watching as hard as he can.
He ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher!
The thing that we need
is a Bee-Watcher-Watcher!”Well…
The Bee-Watcher-Watcher watched the Bee-Watcher.
He didn’t watch well. So another Hawtch-Hawtcher
had to come in as a Watch-Watcher-Watcher!
And today all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch
are watching on Watch-Watcher-Watchering-Watch,
Watch-Watching the Watcher who’s watching that bee.
You’re not a Hawtch-Watcher. You’re lucky, you see!”
And friends, I’m here to tell you, it just gets worse from there. On the very next page:
And how fortunate you’re not Professor de Breeze,
who has spent the past thirty-two years, if you please
trying to teach Irish ducks how to read Jivanese.
Gerry Canavan 