Student evaluations suck, mostly.

Imagine that you’re up for a promotion at your job, but before your superior decides whether you deserve it, you have to submit the comments section of an internet article that was written about you for assessment.

Sound a little absurd?

That’s in essence what we ask professors in higher education to do when they submit their teaching evaluations in their tenure and promotion portfolios. At the end of each semester, students are asked to fill out an evaluation of their professor. Typically, they are asked both to rate their professors on an ordinal scale (think 1­–5, 5 being highest) and provide written comments about their experience in the course.

We’ve repeatedly seen studies that show that student evaluations are skewed to favor popularity and attractiveness of the professor (damn, I lose), and this article points out that there is a gender bias as well: male professors tend to get higher ratings than female professors (so that’s how I’ve managed to get along), and that means these evaluations are discriminatory. And therefore illegal. Cool.

Now I said that student evals suck, mostly. They’re sometimes helpful — not the goofy numerical scores, and I ignore comments that whine about how hard the class is — but the productive, thoughtful comments can be very helpful. If a student says “X worked for me, Y didn’t”, I’ll seriously reconsider X and Y.

The last batch of evaluations I got back I just ignored the numerical scores and browsed through the comments for practical concerns. I got one: there’s a lot of grade anxiety out there, and they really wanted the gradebook available online, so they could see exactly where they stand, point by point. OK, I can do that. Not with our existing software, Moodle, in which the gradebook is a confusing nightmare, but we’re switching to new courseware next year, so I’ll look into it.

I guess it’s good that that was the biggest problem they had with the course. But it’s the stupid numbers that the administration will care about.

There’s been another school shooting, this time in Maryland.

Domestic terrorists are blowing people up in Texas, initially targeting black people, but now progressing to random explosions.

Our government will do nothing.

Situation normal. This is America now.

I’m just sitting here, behaving myself, writing some stuff this morning, when my wife gets up and says those words:

“Happy Anniversary!”

What? No! I forgot! Aaieee, I’m a bad, bad husband. I’m a trite cliche from a misogynistic cartoon. I hadn’t even thought…

It completely reset my brain. I had to think for a few minutes. What day is it? What year is it? When did I get married? It was so long ago! Deep breath. Deep breath. It’s no fair slapping me with arithmetic when I haven’t even finished my cup of coffee!

OK, let’s think. It is…16 March, 2018. We got married on…16 March (Damn! She’s right!) in 1980. That makes it 38 years…whew. At least it’s not one of the big round numbers. Think, think, think.

“Yes, happy anniversary! Shall we go out for dinner tonight? There’s that Thai place in Benson we’ve never been to before.”

She accepts! Score! Brain saves the day! This is clearly why humans evolved these large cerebral cortices, precisely for the purpose of thinking flexibly on the fly and coming up with solutions in moments of dire distress.

You’d think this would be a straightforward crime to interpret. A woman, Emily Javier, is fed up with her boyfriend, Alex Lovell, who spends all of his time playing video games, and further, she suspects he’s been cheating on her. So she buys a samurai sword, tapes it to the side of their bed, and in the middle of the night, while he’s sleeping, starts hacking him up.

At this point, I’m thinking she’s a terrible violent person, she deserves to have the book thrown at her, what a ghastly crime. But then the boyfriend, who did survive with some serious injuries, opened his mouth.

When police did arrive at the scene on March 3, they found Lovell curled up in the blood-spattered bedroom, according to the probable cause affidavit filed by police in Camas, a Washington state town northeast of Portland, Ore. Remarkably, he survived the attack despite serious injuries. Lovell almost lost the index, middle and ring fingers on his hand. But in interviews this week, the competitive gamer sounded happy to be alive.

“I was just so proud for beating this samurai wannabe crazy lady with hate in her heart,” the 29-year-old told the Oregonian/OregonLive. “I’ve been preparing my whole life for something like this.”

Javier — who pleaded not guilty this week to first-degree attempted murder, according to the Columbian — had also allegedly been preparing.

Alex Lovell — known as “Biggie” in his local gamer scene — is an avid player of “PlayerUnknown’s Battleground,” a multiplayer online fighting game. As he told the Oregonian/OregonLive, Lovell has been recently logging 12 to 13 hours a day playing the game. The regimen also required “exercises for his hands, wrists and shoulders and also practicing mouse moves and techniques to maximize performance,” the paper reported.

“I wasn’t a sweaty nerd, more of an Ethlete,” Lovell told the Oregonian/OregonLive.

And with that, I changed my verdict and started thinking it was more of a justifiable attempted homicide. They better keep me off the jury.

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Yes, you’re all right. That last line was making light of what was done to Lovell, which he did not deserve at all, no matter how smug he seems. I apologize for a bad joke.

Washington state is exactly like this, too, but there we had a strict policy that when you were asked about the state, you’re just supposed to say, “It rains all the time.” Now Oregon is bragging openly.

Oregon, do you want Californians? Because this is how you get Californians.

The news has been full of destructive people who have stupidly made fools of themselves — real chumps. And they’ve deserved it.

• Betsy DeVos. She got in front of the television cameras and spoke to Leslie Stahl, and revealed that she is the perfect person to implement Trump’s scheme to destroy American education.

  All this proves that it is sheer (if perhaps unintentional) genius to have DeVos, who married into the Amway fortune, in her role in the Trump administration. If this is the caliber of the top education official in the land, it hardly speaks well for getting an education. People could quite reasonably conclude that education isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and they wouldn’t go to all the trouble of attending school.

  As it happens, this is exactly what Trump needs to secure the future of his political movement. For Trump, the fewer people who get an education, the better off he will be. Exit polls showed a huge education gap in the 2016 election. College graduates favored Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points, while those without college degrees favored Trump by eight points. That 17-point gap was “by far the widest” dating to 1980, according to the Pew Research Center.

• Matt Heimbach. This may be the most spectacular flameout in ages. Heimbach, a proud neo-Nazi and founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, was caught boinking his mother-in-law by his father-in-law and wife, and was arrested for domestic assault. The police report is like a caricature of redneck America.

  

  Down to the Walmart! Sex! Trailers! Familial affairs! And there’s a video recording!

• Dennis Alexander. He’s the reserve police officer who was supposed to be teaching a gun safety class in a high school (why?), who pulled out a handgun to show the students how to properly handle it, and ended up shooting the ceiling and injuring three students. It was such an effective demonstration of why guns are absurdly dangerous, even in trained hands, that I’m sure Alex Jones is going to come along any moment now and declare it a false flag operation.

• Alex Jones. He’s being sued by Brennan Gilmore.

  On Aug. 12, 32-year-old Heather Heyer was tragically killed and at least 19 others were wounded when a driver plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters during the weekend of the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, the close-knit college town where I went to school and where I live now.

  I saw this happen right in front of me. To me, it was clearly deliberate. I captured that horrible moment on my phone’s camera, shared the video with police and posted it on social media. Not long after that, I was verbally attacked by Infowars’ Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists, who wanted to portray me as a “deep state” operative motivated by a desire to undermine President Trump and his administration. As a result, my family and I have been attacked and threatened.

  That’s why I’m suing for defamation.

  The only question in my mind is why he wasn’t sued into oblivion long before this. This is what he does for a living: he makes up horrible conspiracy theories about the victims of crimes. His schtick is to lie to his massive audience about “crisis actors” and claim that the families of murdered children profit from the tragedy.

  Also mentioned is Gateway Pundit, another scurrilous source of fake news.

Even mine! But I feel obligated to read them and maybe even take an occasional token poke at the worst of them.

Crys and William have reacted to the news of the death of Stephen Hawking, and I have little to add except that he was a man who earned respect for both his contributions to science and his struggle against a debilitating disease. Also, he had a sense of humor.

It would be so useful if bad people were walking around with a great big neon “L” for loser attached to their heads — it would make it easier to avoid them. Unfortunately, they don’t. They’re not that stupid that they’d advertise their loserhood.

Or are they?

For years now I’ve noticed a very handy written/oral flag some of the bad agents willingly throw out there: it’s two magic words, “cultural Marxism”. Trust me on this, anytime someone starts babbling about cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt school, white genocide, any of that crap, you’ve got ’em pegged: they’re neo-Nazi ninnies. If, like me, you’re still confused about why you’re getting called a cultural Marxist in the first place, here’s an excellent overview of the history of the term. Bonus points for a cool deep German accent.

One thing briefly mentioned in the video is that the ninnies are beginning to realize that the words “cultural Marxism” is a give-away, and that they can’t even define it or explain the evidence behind the concept, so they’re transitioning to a new term: “post-modernism”. It’s the root of all evil, don’t you know. Of course, they can’t explain that one, either, but they trust that no one wants to be labeled with it, so they’re going for it. Also, the word has another useful property, in that it actually is a real thing, unlike “cultural Marxism”, and it has a real and useful meaning that is understood by people who actually use the concept, so it’s going to be harder to sort out. Not everyone who says “post-modernism” is a crank, just the ones who use it as a synonym for degenerate cultural practices and say it with a sneer.