Flattery just awakens me to the greater potential for failure

I get so much hate mail that I’ve become numb to it — I check it out in case there are grounds for amusement in it, and then automatically hit delete. Delete, delete, delete, delete…and sometimes I get lazy and just “select all” and then delete once. And then every once in a great while, I get a nice email, which mainly stirs up feelings of puzzlement. I have to stare at it and try to decipher the words, and all the while I’m wondering whether I’m being trolled or set up, or whether I’m being blasted with sarcasm. I can take the hate in stride nowadays, but pleasant email gives me a sensation akin to a stifled hiccup or sneeze, and it’s a little distressing.

I think there’s probably something wrong with my head after too many years of this. I should probably get therapy, but if I started caring what the assholes said about me it might be fatal.

Anyway, just because it’s unusual, I include the content of the message below.

[Read more…]

I must be a lousy teacher

Because my student evaluation of teaching scores are pretty good. Not the best, but OK. And SETs are terrible ways to assess teaching.

These kinds of evaluations are ubiquitous in the US university system, and they kind of drive me crazy: we’re expected to report the details of these numerical scores in our annual reports, I’ve been in meetings where we drone on about the statistics of these things, and of course everyone is expected to get above average scores on them. Personally, I find them totally useless, have no idea how to get a number 5 to a number 6, and basically ignore (except when making my yearly bureaucratic obeisance) the trivial 5 question numerical, so-called “quantitative” part of the student evaluations. What is far more useful are the short comments students get to make on the form: that actually tells me what parts of the class some students disliked, and what parts they found memorable and useful.

I’m not alone. Others find them useless, for good reasons.

There is one important difference between customer evaluations of commercial and educational service providers. Whereas with commercial providers ratings are unilateral, ratings are mutual in the education system. As well as students evaluating their teachers, instructors evaluate their students – such as by their exam performance. In US studies, these ratings have been found to be positively correlated: students who receive better grades also give more positive evaluations of their instructors. Furthermore, courses whose students earn higher grade point averages also receive more positive average ratings.

Proponents of SETs interpret these correlations as an indication of the validity of these evaluations as a measure of teacher effectiveness: students, they argue, learn more in courses that are taught well – therefore, they receive better grades. But critics argue that SETs assess students’ enjoyment of a course, which does not necessarily reflect the quality of teaching or their acquisition of knowledge. Many students would like to get good grades without having to invest too much time (because that would conflict with their social life or their ability to hold down part-time jobs). Therefore, instructors who require their students to attend classes and do a lot of demanding coursework are at risk of receiving poor ratings. And since poor teaching ratings could have damaging effects at their next salary review, instructors might decide to lower their course requirements and grade leniently. Thus, paradoxically, they become less effective teachers in order to achieve better teaching ratings.

The article goes on to show that by several criteria, what student evaluations actually assess is the easiness of a course, and how little the students are challenged by the material.

There’s more to it than that, of course. My campus has a lot of faculty who have won teaching awards, and we have a reputation for being demanding and resisting the trend towards grade inflation, and I know many of them are getting their high SET scores by being engaging and enthusiastic and making students think. Those are important aspects of teaching. But we ought to also be measuring faculty effectiveness at teaching the material, and those little forms don’t do it.

Because student ratings appear to reflect their enjoyment of a course and because teacher strategies that result in knowledge acquisition (such as requiring demanding homework and regular course attendance) decrease students’ course enjoyment, SETs are at best a biased measure of teacher effectiveness. Adopting them as one of the central planks of an exercise purporting to assess teaching excellence and dictating universities’ ability to raise tuition fees seems misguided at best.

Now throw in the fact that SETs are systematically biased against women faculty and that students tend to downgrade minority faculty (they are reflecting cultural biases all too well), and you’ve got a whole grand tower of required makework that doesn’t do the job, and also reinforces trends that we all say we oppose.

I don’t give a damn about your gun specs

Here’s a sure-fire way to annoy me: write and explain to me how I got the details of some stupid gun wrong. Har, har, it’s semi-automatic, not fully automatic. Don’t you know nothin’? It’s 7.62mm, not 7.63mm. The muzzle velocity is…

Just stop right there, go find a nice quiet place, and masturbate happily to your copy of Guns & Ammo. I’m not interested.

Henceforth, the official name of all guns and rifles and whatever fine distinction in the title you want to give them is irrelevant: they are all called Shooty McShootface. You can announce that their purpose is to shoot clay targets, or Bambi, or to look fine on your mantlepiece — I don’t care about that. Their purpose is to kill people. Got that? They are devices to hurl small pieces of metal at lethal velocities that are intentionally aimed at human beings to do them harm.

Your obsession with them is sick.


At least Samantha Bee knows how I feel.

Except…a plague of boils? That’s letting the NRA off easy.

Activate Streisand Effect: Donald Trump’s hair needs attention

trumphair

Peter Thiel, the obnoxiously rich right-winger and Trump-supporter who sued Gawker media into bankruptcy over unseemly stories about Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, is not satisfied. He’s now going after specific Trump stories he doesn’t like, and is bankrolling lawsuits about a couple of other Gawker stories.

In other words: A Thiel-funded attorney is helping a man sue Gawker Media over an article that comes nowhere near invading his privacy, concerns a clear matter of public interest, and explicitly states that the subject is not guilty of a crime.

You know what this means: we have to promote the news story that’s being attacked. And it’s actually a rather interesting story, unlikely news of Hulk Hogan’s infidelity and bedroom antics — it’s an article that tries to untangle the mystery of what the heck is going on with Trump’s weird, unnatural hair. It makes a pretty good case that what’s going on is that it is a very expensive, rather finicky specialized hair weave by a company called Ivari International, which costs about $60,000 to install and $300-$3000 a month to maintain. (You might want to file that information away for the next time someone complains about the cost of Clinton’s trips to a hair salon, because you know the media won’t ridicule a man for spending that much on vanity).

Ivari is suing for defamation, which is peculiar. Accurately describing the technology used to stitch hair extensions onto a balding man’s head is not defamatory, and the only thing I can think of that might be defamatory is that Ivari might not want its name associated with that creepy skein of floss everyone can see in every appearance of that Republican slimeball. I know that if I were in the market for fake hair, telling me that their technique produces the thinning dead animal that Trump wears would not be a selling point.

Maybe Ivari should sue Trump for flaunting his handiwork.

Welcome Siobhan to their new home

One of the blogs here, New Frontier, is experimental: we bring in people who want to try their hand at this bloggery thing, and put them in that group blog, and give them an opportunity to see if it all works out for them. It’s a way to try out people who may not have much of a track record yet, but look promising.

Those of you who’ve been following the prolific Siobhan on that blog will be pleased to know they’ve been bumped up to their own independent blog: check out Against the Grain.

She’s persistent, I give her that

Today has been blog maintenance day. I’ve been tidying up some things behind the scenes here at FtB, and I’m also almost done with a chore over on ScienceBlogs. Some of you who’ve been around for a while know that 5 years ago, National Geographic took over the management of Sb (it’s one of the things that prompted Ed Brayton and I to move out, since they were going to have some new policies), and one of the first things they did was update the blogs there to WordPress.

In my case, they botched it. My site was so huge and full of comments that their scripts weren’t able to cope, and while they got my posts updated, mostly, they butchered the comments: an unknown number of comments were outright lost (I estimate somewhere around half a million to a million; don’t be surprised, we’re approaching a million comments on FtB Pharyngula soon), and another 750,000 were erroneously flagged as spam, and hidden away in the spam queue. Easy to handle, right? Just approve all those mistakenly filtered comments, and voila! Done!

Except…I don’t have direct access to the database, so I can’t just charge in and approve all those records through MySQL. No, I have to do it through the WordPress interface, which is limited to doing 250 comments at a time. It’s 3 clicks of the mouse to approve 250 comments, but 750,000 comments? You do the math. So what I do is once or twice a week, I sit down and plod through a thousand or two comments. When I feel like it. It’s really boring, so there are long lapses where I just let it go. But today, I got it down to just 20,000 comments held up, so I was going to power through and get ’em all done at last.

But…boring. Easily distracted.

So anyway, while doing all of that stuff, I ran across this old post of mine that made me chuckle. I’m writing about this woman who has been stalking me for decades. Decades, I tell you! Since 1957! It’s amazing how much similarity there has been in our lives. And then I realized that post was written ten years ago…and she’s still here.

Shhh. She’s in the next room. Don’t make a noise or she might notice. My knee is acting up, or I’d try to sneak out and make a run for it. Maybe you can get away for me and come back with help.

She just went into the kitchen. There are knives there. I’m so afraid.

Funsies

I just thought I’d mention that Convergence is coming up — I’ll be there the whole weekend and will be having a grand time. We usually go with the whole family, but this year we’re scattered and we’re just coming off an expensive reunion/wedding in Korea, so it’ll just be me and my son Alaric.

I’ve also just now learned that there will be another NerdCon in October. I went to the one last fall, and it was excellent — a very writerly sort of event, all about getting those creative juices bubbling. I’ll probably go to that, too.

If you see me, say hello! I’m always happy to meet you all.


As long as I’m planning ahead, how could I forget to mention Skepticon in November?

You know where you can find good writing?

snoopy-good-writing-is-hard-work

Right here on FtB! If you’re looking for something to cleanse the palate after this mess, I recommend…

There. Much better.

My favorite threat ever

Do you know what Obama is going to do as he leaves office?

The Viacom, CIA-run weapons system is activating the Beyoncés and all the rest of the folks to say, ‘Go out and kill the pigs.’

That sounds awesome. It’s so awesome, I confess that my brain locked up solid for a moment as I imagined it. So Obama has an army of Beyoncés? Please let them loose.

Unfortunately, this wonderful prediction comes from Alex Jones, so you know exactly how credible it is.