Toughness

Big Bluestem roots

Good deep roots make a difference. The photo to the right is from the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, and it shows how deep and strong and tangled the roots of the prairie bluestem are. It’s impressive how robust prairie ecosystems are, and we rip them up and replace them with Kentucky Bluegrass, which has the most pathetic shallow mat of a root system. See?

My mother is in the hospital right now — she’s been declining for years, but she keeps bouncing back because she has deep strong roots. I’ve taken her for granted for my entire life, because she always perseveres. I’m hoping she pulls through this time, too.

Not in my home!

No barbarous carnivores here! Well, except for the spiders.

Our plans have changed. The original idea was that we were going to stay at home, and I’d grade lab reports and make a vegetarian shepherd’s pie. My son called, though, and now we’re driving to St Cloud (about 2 hours away) to join him for a mid-afternoon meal, probably at an Indian restaurant. I’ll make the pie and grade the lab reports tomorrow.

The end of Zoom…for me

I adopted Zoom in all of my classes when the pandemic hit — I liked the flexibility it provided for the students. I would offer the full combo: I’d have class in person, and simultaneously broadcast it over Zoom, and also record video that I’d put online. All exams were online, which opened up opportunities, because I wouldn’t have to waste a class hour watching students scribbling on paper. I’m done, though. It just doesn’t work, and this week has highlighted the problem.

It’s a short week because of Thanksgiving break, and instead of losing one lecture hour to proctoring an exam, I’ve lost a whole lot of student hours. Attendance is way, way down. I think some students have decided to start their break on Monday instead of Thursday, because I’ve fostered a classroom culture where everyone thinks they can make up absences on the fly. I’m a bit concerned that I’m going to go to class today in a nearly empty room.

So, next semester…no more Zoom. I’m going to block off days for exams and quizzes. If students don’t attend classes, they will just miss out. I’m going to be so traditional and old-fashioned, and I hope that turns things around.

Holidays coming! Let’s get depressed!

American Thanksgiving is coming this week! Many of the students are planning on escaping the university this weekend, traveling to visit family and getting away from homework (I’m assigning some anyway.) And then I read this complaint.

Dear Boomers,

I wanted to let you know why you’re all sitting around feeling sorry for yourselves because your children and grandchildren didn’t come to Thanksgiving.

Because after the last few times you guilted us into driving an hour to visit Because you “never get to see” your grandchild, you sat and stared at the TV (Fox News) obviously, watching people check ballots for bamboo. We were there 3 hours and you didn’t engage or play with your Grandchild. We all sat around, watching you watch TV.

Because we are tired of the passive aggressive jabs you make to our spouses. We are tired of the temper tantrums you throw if anything less than a parade is thrown in thanks to the dinner you made. A dinner that, all the ingredients were purchased by us, as we have always gone to the grocery store multiple times as thanks for letting us stay. A dinner that we volunteered to help make, and clean up.

We’re tired of your racism, the racism you only really show around family, and despite the fact it is 2023 and we’ve made our feelings known on the subject, you can’t help yourself. Maybe you do it out of spite in front of us because you know it bothers us. Regardless, we refuse to allow our children to be around racists that throw around the N word with such ease. To speak about anyone non white non “American” . You see, we can’t wait for the lot of you to go extinct and take your racism and homophobia with you.

Because we are tired of listening to you talk shit about everyone. Your “friends” and family cannot do anything right, according to you. Everyone is out to get you. The world is so unfair to YOU.

Because when we had kids of our own we found how easy it is to make it through the day without screaming, yelling and hitting our children.

Because after years of the above mentioned,. we feel physically ill around you. Because despite the fact that we are grown, professional, adult people, our bodies immediately tense up and ready us for the attack that will come.

Because you are toxic and angry and I don’t have to subject myself to a toxic environment, and I will not subject my partner and my child to that toxic environment either.

Uh, yeah, as a boomer myself I am simultaneously feeling insulted and thinking there’s a lot of truth to what they say. Some of you might have similar stories and similar concerns. I suggest you all invite Leslie Jones to your Thanksgiving.

I have to admit, though, that I have not had this unpleasant experience. I come from a family of blue-collar liberal Democrats. I was always happy to hang out with my brothers and sisters and parents and grandparents and cousins and uncles and aunts. A few individuals might have been closet conservatives, but they weren’t going to cause trouble at the dinner table, unless they wanted to be shouted down.

It’s true that my father had to have the TV on, but it was all football and never Fox News. He would also get upset at bad football and retreat to the bosom of the family, and was generally the primary cook and spent a lot of time in the kitchen. In fact, the last words I heard from him were when I called on Christmas, and he couldn’t come to the phone, and all I heard was “Goddamn it, cat! Get off the table!”

My kids all turned out well and I’m always happy to see them, but they’ve all dispersed, and we live in a place where the weather tends to screw up travel plans.

So I have the opposite problem. My wife and I will have a quiet time alone pining for our families. We do have some freedom, though, so if Leslie Jones would like to stop by for a respite, the door will be open. I’m planning to fix a vegetarian shepherd’s pie, if she’s interested.

Little victories

A few things made me feel good at work this week.

#1: We’re wrapping up the Evolution section of my Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development course. After a month of lectures and tree drawing exercises and discussions about good examples of evolution, I gave the students an overview of human evolution and a primary research paper, the Lee Berger stuff about Homo naledi. They were asked to critically evaluate the claims: did they really have fire? Did they bury their dead? Did they create crude art? As you probably know, Berger is emphatic about answering “YES!!”, but I urged them to think carefully…and they did. They stated some concerns and doubts, and talked about what they’d like to see to confirm the claims, like good little scientists. Then I gave them a paper by Martinon-Torres and others, “No scientific evidence that Homo naledi buried their dead and produced rock art,” and they saw what an active debate in science looks like. Warmed my heart, it did. This is what a good science class is about, tricking students into thinking for themselves.

#2: I’ve had nightmares about this one thing. Our university enrollment has been way down — I’m teaching a second year required course in cell biology, and I have TEN (10!) students enrolled. Most years I’ve had 50. Sure, a small class is nice in many ways, but not so great if you want to get active participation and discussion going. It took about 12 weeks to get the class warmed up and regularly asking questions! What was causing me some anxiety, though, is that I’m offering a 4000 level elective in ecological developmental biology next semester, the kind of course that lives or dies with student engagement, and really needs a critical mass of students if it was going to fly. I’d been dreading getting 3 or fewer students signed up (the administration would cancel it), or perhaps worse, 5 or 6 students, and I’d have to struggle all semester to get them active while not throwing too much of a burden on individuals. My ideal class size for this kind of course is 10-12 students, and I was dreading getting too few students for all the work involved.

Spring term registration started this week. I’ve already got 10 students enrolled! Maybe next semester will be fun, after all.

Sometimes there are little defeats, too. Our football team qualified for the NCAA DIII playoffs, and will be playing at the University of Wisconsin Lacrosse tomorrow. This is a very big deal! So I get to my cell bio class this afternoon…I’ve got two students. One has to leave early for an interview. So I get to lecture to a nearly empty room.

This sort of thing happened early in the semester and I just cancelled class, but I warned them that next time I’d go right ahead and lecture to empty seats, so that’s what I did. At least now I have a set of questions that will definitely go on the next exam.

Good riddance, Xitter

Would you believe I have 150,000 followers on Twitter? A lot of them are just hate-following me, but still, it’s a large crowd.

I’m abandoning them now. I’ve made my last post on that hellsite.

Elon Musk has promoted so much garbage that I can no longer in good conscience use the social media site. It’s just vile, and the final straw that broke my interest was the raging anti-semitism that’s flourishing there.

Elon Musk is an impressive business guy. In the space of a year, he turned Xwitter from a sometimes-annoying but vital source of information and community-building into an antisemitic dumpster fire in the middle of a racist tire fire atop a shit-encrusted mountain of misinformation and conspiracy theories — all while losing money at it, too.

Wednesday night, the techno wunderscheißhaufen poured gasoline on one of those fires, boosting a vile antisemitic tweet that echoed the deadly rhetoric behind multiple mass shootings by white supremacists. But he later said he didn’t mean to do antisemitism to all Jews, just the ADL and a lot of others, so no harm, no foul stench, and advertisers will surely not be further put off spending money at Xwitter, right?

Here’s another take.

“You have said the actual truth” was Musk’s Wednesday night response to a paid X Premium user who, in explaining why “Hitler was right,” accused Jewish communities in the U.S. of “dialectical hatred against whites” and blamed them for “flooding their country” with “hordes of minorities.” Musk went on to clarify that he was not talking about all Jews, just the Anti-Defamation League (which has criticized Musk for white nationalist content on his platform) and unnamed others he claimed were “unjustly” focusing on “the majority of the West” rather than “the minority groups who are their primary threat.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, all of it bad. Musk is promoting the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, as many have noted. That blood-soaked fantasy was touted by tiki torchbearers chanting “Jews will not replace us” and echoed by several murderous white supremacists, including the terrorist who massacred Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue, even as it spread through Fox News and the right-wing media and became a fixture of GOP politics. And unlike others who have adopted a less explicit version of the theory, Musk is, in the parlance of the white nationalists who applauded his remark, explicitly “naming the Jew” as the source of the problem.

Enough, enough, enough. Fuck that guy, and fuck his company.

Anyone who wants to follow me on social media can find me here:

https://octodon.social/@pzmyers (@pzmyers@octodon.social)
https://bsky.app/profile/pzmyers.bsky.social (@pzmyers.bsky.social)

And if you don’t care about social media, that’s fine, I’ll also be right here.

The problem with college athletics

It’s out of control. It’s insane. Look at this story out of Texas:

The concept of the college football coaching buyout reached its historical apex Sunday, when news broke that Texas A&M would dismiss Jimbo Fisher amid his sixth season as head coach. That dismissal would figure to entail the school and its boosters paying Fisher the remainder of his contract, which infamously totals around $76 million.

$76 million. What’s worse, they’re paying one man $76 million to stop working so they can hire someone else for an equivalent salary…a single salary that could instead have paid for over 700 full professors in real academic disciplines to work. And this is one guy! Imagine how much money is getting thrown down the rathole of recruiting and bloated coaching staffs and taking the players out for steak dinners every night. This is madness. This is college football.

This Jimbo Fisher guy never deserved that kind of extravagant salary, and even had a winning 6:4 season so far. You know what happened here: some absurdly rich asshole donor started complaining that “his” team wasn’t winning enough, and decided to meddle, so he could pretend to take credit when some young kid throws a touchdown pass.

This is no way to run a university.

The students don’t even notice because they’re all distracted by these phony rivalries. All they know is that to defend their honor their football team has to defeat some other football team in Texas, or Nebraska, or whereever. No, kids, that doesn’t matter.

Some days…

I had to finish grading an exam for one class, and compose an exam for another class, which will soon bounce back demanding that I grade it. Also, this week is dedicated to advising, so I’ve had a stream of students coming to my office for assistance in getting ready for spring term. That’s been a real roller coaster: some students are sailing through, excelling at their courses, so we have to talk about what gets them excited, while other students are struggling, so we have to talk about what to do to get back on track and just plain survive. I’m starting to feel drained.

I mentioned that I’m not getting a sabbatical next year (but definitely will in 2025), so I’ve been working with the discipline to revise my schedule. There’s some happy news there: this spring I’ll be teaching ecological developmental biology, and then, in the fall, Developmental Biology! I am floored! For the first time in way too many years, I’ll be teaching courses in my specialty, and I’ll be doing it over two consecutive semesters! It almost makes up for not getting a sabbatical. Almost.

Now I have to get back to the student train — I have another scheduled appointment in 5 minutes, and then my cell bio class.

Minnesotans detest our state flag

It’s far too busy, racist, and ugly. The state is currently accepting submissions for redesigns, and you can view all 2,123 online. Yikes.

As you might predict, there are a fair number of joke submissions, a lot of ugly flags (but none as ugly as the original), and many that are just trying too hard. So I’m gonna make it simple for you all. This should be the new flag, entry #408:

It’s original. It’s simple. It’s beautiful. It’s appropriate to our state. And best of all, it will strike terror in the hearts of our neighbors, which is what you always want in a flag.

Let the gnashing of teeth commence

OK, I have to add another grievance to the pile. We’re getting ready for spring semester registration, and our students are expected to meet with their advisors in the next few days, so I’ve got appointments stacking up — but that’s not the grievance. I like that we require students to get regular advising sessions, rather than suddenly having deficiencies show up as they’re trying to graduate.

The problem is that all student records are now computerized (I remember when we’d have file folders full of pieces of paper, instead). Preparing for an advising meeting involves going to a link on the university website, which is supposed to give us all the relevant student records. This is what I see when I go through the prescribed channels:

System data is currently unavailable. Some content may not be available at this time.

I’ve got requests from students to enroll in some of my courses, and I was trying to get the necessary permission codes to send them so they could do that. All weekend long, all I saw was

System data is currently unavailable. Some content may not be available at this time.

I’ve got three students scheduled for advising meetings this morning, and like a responsible advisor I go to look up their academic records, and what do I see?

System data is currently unavailable. Some content may not be available at this time.

This is a centralized service provided by the entire great big University of Minnesota system, and it fucking doesn’t work. We’ve got a database we need to do our job, and we are constantly locked out of it.