Bad grammar, dangerous and possibly explosive:
Image by BEattitude.com
Carin Ford at HigherEdMorning.com has compiled a list of the Top 8 ways students are cheating today. This is the list (in no particular order):
- Copying — Whether it’s eyes roving during a test or a so-called “study group,” it’s still copying.
- Buying papers online — It doesn’t get much easier than this. Papers on just about any topic you can think of are available — and most can be downloaded instantly.
- Cheat sheets — This perennially popular form of cheating is made even easier with today’s electronic devices.
- Take a picture — If a professor leaves a test on his desk, all it takes is the click of a student’s cell phone camera to steal it.
- “Can I go to the bathroom?” — Once there, a student can call or text friends for answers during a test.
- MP3 players — Students can put anything on their iPods — including lecture notes. And with many professors letting students listen to their MP3s during tests in order to focus and relax …
- Cell phones — Is there a better — or easier — way to store data?
- When is a candy bar more than a candy bar? — Believe it or not, some students have peeled off the wrapper, scanned it, edited the nutritional info into test answers and rewrapped the candy bar — where it sits on the student’s desk during an exam.
I encourage folks to follow the link and read the comments for more of the sneakiness of our technological age.
From PHD Comics.
My favorite line of the Daodejing:
不欲琭琭如玉
珞珞如石Do not desire what jingles like jade,
but what rumbles like rock!
Text via Wengu, translation by Philip Ivanhoe
Just a reminder, Dec 7th is the deadline to submit proposals for the 2010 Mid Atlantic Regional SBL meeting in New Brunswick, NJ. Instructions on how to submit can be found at SBL’s website:
Religion can be a confusing thing. When we talk about religion do we necessarily imply belief in supernatural beings? What qualifies as a supernatural being? How about aliens, vampires or the great pumpkin? How is a philosophy different than a religion? Are humans, as a species, inherently religious? The questions go on and on.
In some Christian circles, Christianity doesn’t count as a religion. Witness this shirt available at Christian Book Distributors:
Front Design: CHRISTIANITY is not a religion with black paint spots in the background.
Back Design: RELIGION IS HUMANS trying to work their way to God. CHRISTIANITY IS GOD coming to men and women through a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Nothing like all caps to make your point. I’m guessing that Hammurapi thought he had a relationship with the gods through Shamash, but you see there point.
Yet, yesterday Pat Robertson stated that Islam is not a religion:
Christianity isn’t a religion, and Islam isn’t a religion? What exactly would be a religion? How about vampires and zombies?
Truly, this is religiously confusing.
Wonderful posts on Ugaritic abound.
Karyn Traphagen at Boulders 2 Bits has a nifty Ugaritic Transliteration Bookmark. She recommends keeping it handy when using the Inscriptifact database. I concure and suggest also using it with Pardee and Bordreuil’s A Manuel of Ugaritic.
Hardy at Daily Hebrew has put forth a yeoman’s effort and posted a massive Ugaritic-Hebrew Bibliography. This is a wonderful resource and I highly recommend it.
Bibliographical Bonus: Along the lines of the last resource, here is a link to Chiara Peri’s bibliography for Poemi Ugaritici Della Regalità: I Poemi Di Keret E Di Aqhat.
Enjoy
My students have a paper due Saturday before midnight. The assignment is simple: write a dialog between two of the main characters/thinkers we’ve read so far this semester.This paper is causing anxiety in them and headaches for me.
There are a few more specifics to the assignment, but basically the paper prompt gives a lot of room for students to play with the texts, the ideas in the texts and the characters who inhabit those texts. I’ve given similar assignments before; but for some reason, students are really having a hard time this semester. Seemingly, they would much rather write on a theme in Gilgamesh than a dialog between him and Socrates.
I’m not sure what this means. There could be an inherent resistance to discourse longer than 140 characters. Or, a desire to keep ideas compartmentalized by historical context and never let them interact. Or again, it could simply be that I’m finding more anxiety because I’m teaching more classes.
Regardless, I’m very confused by this resistance to dialog.
