hell’s handmaiden

I’ve been thinking a lot about grade inflation over the past few months, mostly because I am on the front lines of it. That is, I’ve been grading papers– a lot of them. I’ve been through 500 or so pages of freshman, mostly, attempts at writing philosophy… well, let me rephrase that… attempts at thinking for the first time in their short lives. Of course, each student is having thoughts they’ve never had before and each and every one of them thinks these thoughts are original and genius. They are neither.

A teacher in North Dakota ran a video in health class about “some kid who dies and writes a letter to his friend before he is sent to Hell bitching about how his friend didn’t expose him to Jesus before he died. The teacher’s reason? It was to show the dangers of drunk driving.”

CapoKT picked up the story and ran with it, focusing mostly on religiously blinded comments of some of the people responding to that article. It is a good read. I won’t steal the thunder.

“How many of you have been given information on how not to get pregnant?”

All the hands shot up.

“How many of you have been given information about birth control?”
All the hands went down.

Mystified?

lynn’s daughter, thinking: Just Say “No,” Redeux.

Oh, yes. I am, but not surprised.

Through her, we see the true face of conservativism and what it represents: shrill, bordering on manic; racist, homophobic, and unabashedly dogmatic. We see the right at its worst, in its hatred of public schools and teachers and dislike of anyone who dedicates their life to public service.

Not Saussure (a linguistics reference, maybe?) brought to my attention a few entries in Conservapedia, an online encyclopedia apparently intended to counter the liberal bias of such sources as Wikipedia.

Thanks to Not Saussure, whose source is an article at Jon Swift, I learned a few things. I learned about the uselessness of Einstein’s relativity. I learned about about kangaroos on Noah’s Ark. I learned that “The existence of unicorns is controversial. Secular opinion is that they are mythical. However, they are referred to in the Bible nine times, which provides an unimpeachable de facto argument for their once having been in existence.” Unicorns were probably on the Ark, too. I noticed that pictures needn’t be related to the text. Interesting concept. I was also fascinated by the article on the Pacific Northwest Arboreal Tree Octopus.

While researching Graduate Schools in Philosophy, I stumbled over something rather interesting, and sad. Take a look at the following paragraph from one of the University College London’s admission pages. The highlights are mine.

United States
For entry into UCL’s undergraduate degree programmes, students who hold A-Levels or the International Baccalaureate with good grades will be considered. The US High School Graduation Diploma on its own does not satisfy UCL’s general entrance requirement for undergraduate degree programmes. To be eligible for consideration students must have usually obtained passes in four, full year Advanced Placement (AP) examinations at grades 4/5. Alternatively the High School Graduation diploma plus a minimum of 1300/1600 or 1950/2400 in SAT I plus the successful completion of one year at a recognised US university would be considered.