So I went out on the stoop this morning in the drizzle to get the local paper, and of the 5-7 headliners on Page 1, I found this:
Item One: in my own town, a report on the trial of a cop who allegedly hacked into the police computer system to get personal records (exam scores) of fellow officers. Even more disturbing, yesterday's testimony seemed to suggest that a mysterious individual in a trenchcoat, who can't be identified from the surveillance video, was also on station premises at the time of the hacking. (Defense trying to introduce "reasonable doubt" I suppose: but why are unidentifiable persons freely roaming the halls of the station???)
Item Two: two towns over, the selectmen are trying to decide the fate of an officer accused of dealing percocet. He allegedly also would trade drugs for sex: nice for his wife and kids, huh?
Item Three: two towns over in the other direction, an officer is on trial for accelerating (0-60 in something like 11 seconds, in an urbanized area) up into a parked car and killing its occupant. Defense is now alleging some sort of seizure - having given up on the equipment failure defense: "It wasn't my fault; the cruiser was defective." It surely wasn't his fiddling with the Very Large Orange Soda he had just put into the beverage holder that was the issue. (He was pissed off that it was all soda water and no syrup; I am resisting a Chief Wiggum joke here.)
Public trust indeed. Remind me not to call 911.
Argh - while waiting for this silly program to load, I totally spaced what my basic premise for writing was.
Oh, yeah: my MIL is on lockdown in the home due to some sort of virus, so we are perhaps totally free from a trip to the State of Insanity this weekend. I have dangled the promise of painting my SIL's living room soon though - so perhaps next weekend.
Annoyance-du-jour: students unclear on email-as-professional-communication. A sample: "Hey. did u get my last email? i was wondering if u wd give me more time on [assignment] b/c i am now just getting [insert Classroom Management System name here] to work on my computer."
Dude. That's "Professor SnoCones" to you. It is 7 weeks into the semester. I have been posting notes and announcements and lectures on the course website for 8 weeks. Where have "u" been????
I am just too old-fashioned, perhaps, in dreaming of old-skool decorum. (E.g.: there any reason nowadays why men shouldn't wear hats indoors? I am always tempted to mock the hat-frat-boys for lack of manners - but what is the reason, I wonder, for asking boys to remove their hats in the classroom? (For starters: so I will know their names; one hatted joe looks just like the next - but perhaps they like it that way? but I really know all their names and can call on them at will - even if they are slouched down as if lack of eye contact makes them invisible. (Hint from the world of optics: it does NOT.))) Not rocket science, boyz.
Related annoyance: homeworks that produce the bare minimum, in which students are not willing to expend a single second to produce a better product, when in their judgment (ha!) the slacker half-assed job adequately meets the requirements of the assignment. I'm talking about graphics here, and students who wouldn't take 30 seconds to clean up a chart or graph of extraneous information, because "it's good enough."
I exhorted them yesterday: "have some pride in your work, people!" They stared dully straight-ahead, unimpressed by the harangue.
Good advice from an unrelated meeting yesterday: make all your objectives align; be strategic in what you do (and don't do) so that you move your own goals forward. Ha ha. If academics really took that dictum seriously no one would serve on any dopey administrative committees and the whole structure of academic governance would fall apart. (But would anyone notice??)
Ah, onward! I strive for excellence in a milieu of mediocrity.