Life's Better in Montana

"I like can I touch"

Here's some highlight clips from our family vacation in Whitefish, Montana. Most of the footage comes from a day at Tally Lake.

The vacation was not without controversy. The third clip of me throwing a football into the lake APPEARS to show my dad making an impressive catch. He holds the ball out of the water before he re-surfaces in order to sell it to the referees. However, when you stop the tape, you can clearly see the ball resting for a brief moment on the surface of the water.

I don't want to accuse anyone of Ratchmistruck-ing a pass and then pretending he caught it, but the footage doesn't lie.

I'll let you decide.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

The internet is our campus

Summer semester is finally over and now the grading begins. I went to lunch with a friend from the department who told me a great story.

Last semester in his World History course he assigned a final paper analyzing the novel 'Gulliver's Travels' as a historical source. When he began grading the papers, he noticed that three separate students submitted the exact same paper, word for word.

So he goes into class the next day and announces, without providing any specific details, that he has caught several students cheating. He offers a amnesty period for any student who comes to his office and confesses their crimes. They will still be penalized, but can avoid failing the course or being referred to the Ministry of Character Development.

Two interesting things happened...

First, instead of three students, he had over a dozen people (from a class of 150) come to his office to talk about their papers. This included people who admitted plagiarism, other worried they hadn't properly cited their work, and a variety of other concerns.

Second, the Gang of Three did put in an appearance. My friend interrogated each of them, certain that one person had actually written the paper and then shared it with his two buddies.

He was surprised to learn that the three students had not collaborated with each other. In fact, they had never met before.

But they did have one thing in common - they each decided individually to purchase a paper on Gulliver's Travels from the internet.

Gulliver's Travels is a very common book for this type of assignment, and there are probably hundreds of papers you can buy from various websites. These three bobbleheads just typed the title into google, then bought their paper from the very first website that popped up.

Let this be a lesson to all of you. If you're going to cheat on a term paper, at least take the time to re-type it using your own words.

You can't spell vacation without CA

This summer Kaddi spent three weeks out in California visiting her family. Since I was locked into teaching Summer term I spent my days at the office and my nights alone, curled up in the fetal position chanting "Find a Happy Place, Find a Happy Place..."

Apparently all I missed was a lot of sitting on the stairs.

"Uh, did I say you could sit next to me?"

Is that in the syllabus?

When I was first hired as a professor, the department told me to plan on teaching a 2-2-1 schedule. Two classes in fall, two in winter, and one during the spring/summer terms. I planned out my year accordingly.

Then towards the middle of winter semester, the dept. secretary told me they'd made a mistake, and that I was required to teach an extra course during spring/summer, making it a 2-2-2. Panic-stricken, I looked through my graduate school notes and tried to figure out how to invent a new course in a few weeks.

One of my fields for the preliminary exams at Wisconsin was 'Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia." So, I took many of those reading selections and slammed them into a seminar style course. Hoping to boost enrollment I even gave it what I thought to be a sexy title, "Dictatorship and Genocide in Southeast Asia." Six students found the morbid topic interesting enough to sign up, and this was more than enough to carry the class.

Because I didn't have the time or the knowledge to write thirty-five hours worth of lectures, I made the course discussion-based. As part of their grade, each of the students are responsible for presenting one set of readings and leading the discussion. We explore theoretical conceptions of power in Asia, the vulnerabilities of democracy, US foreign policy, and the natures of genocide, among other topics. For Friday's class we were exploring the book, "To Destroy You is No Loss," a fascinating first-person account of life under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Unfortunately, the student leading the discussion did not have the strongest presentation skills. He's uncomfortable in group situations, doesn't articulate well, and hates to have attention focused solely on himself. It's a lot like having Piglet in class. Everytime I ask him a direct question he begins with..."Oh, d-d-d-dear me...." He's so awkward it's almost charming.

As part of his introduction I asked him to generate a discussion explaining the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. The students were using the terms interchangeably, even though they're quite different. Even though I had prepped him the day before, poor Piglet still managed to botch it.

He went up to the white board in front of the class, shaking like a young sapling on a blustery day, and drew two interlocking circles. I can only guess he meant to show how the two systems of government were similar, yet distinct simultaneously. Then he proceeded to label them, but because he was so nervous he didn't want to risk spelling one or both terms wrong. So, he abbreviated, writing only the first word for each system above the circles.

The he turned to the class with his voice quivering and stammered, "Okay...let's begin today by talking about T&A...."