The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Blog

  • Happy New Year 2007

    Yeah, it’s lame to post just a “Happy New Year” message. But it’s after midnight and I don’t feel like writing much more, so there. 🙂

  • The Holy Grail in Teaching

    The Holy Grail, in teaching, would be the development of an assessment tool that has the following properties:

    • It accurately reflects the actual learning that has occured.
    • It cannot be spoofed by students who don’t learn/prepare/read etc.
    • It is fair.
    • It is easy to grade.
    • It is, in like manner, easy to administer.

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  • Review: Eragon

    Eragon (the movie)
    fantasy/adventure
    Cast details, etc., are in the IMDb entry.

    InstaRating: 2 out of 5

    Having little else to do while school is out, I decided to see Eragon, this season’s epic high fantasy. I went with some trepidation, as the commercials made it seem overwhelmingly, well, cheesy. In hindsight, I had no idea…
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  • Makeover for 2007

    Yesterday I spent more time than really justified in playing around with the look-and-feel of The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach. It began innocently enough: I finally reached my breaking point on the comment spam, receiving two blocks of 48 spams within an hour. (And yes, they came in discrete quanta of 48. Odd.) Considering the very low output of this blog, it seemed ludicrous to be getting spam at roughly a 100:1 ratio. So I tooled around the Net for a while and found Spam Karma 2 (excellent tool for WordPress, by the way), which automates the process and so far is doing a great job.

    Then things kind of ran away from me…

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  • Saddan is Dead: Can We Go Home Now?

    Today, Iraqui President and dictator Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging after a conviction for atrocities committed in his name. Before going any further, let me clarify something so willfully obscured by some commentators on the right: Saddam Hussein was a Very Bad Man. He did terrible things and — while I am myself still uncertain of the ethics of state executions — he did receive a trial and was executed according to the laws of his nation. Opposition to this administration’s policies is not equivalent to admiring Hussein.

    All of which is prologue to the following: Now that George W. Bush has seen the conclusion of the twisted pyscho-drama that has occupied his presidency, will he now be able to cope, mentally, with the fact that the United States must move expeditiously to withdraw from Iraq?
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  • Death and The Pardon

    It was announced yesterday (2006 Dec 27) that Gerald Ford, 38th President of the United States, passed away at the age of 93. I will admit that I’ve always had a soft spot for the Ford presidency, derided in popular culture as one of the least effective in history. I generally root for the underdog, so I was once in the habit of quoting the stats that showed how Ford had begun to get the economy back in motion, had begun the rebuilding of American military strength after the Viet Nam debacle, and so on. I still think Ford deserves more credit for doing a difficult, almost impossible, task and doing it with some grace. Also, Ford was perhaps the last of the civil service Presidents: someone who saw government as part of the solution and not a problem in itself; someone who thought that the greatest calling for a citizen is to serve his fellow citizens.

    On the other hand…
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  • Review: Interface

    Interface
    by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George
    (c) 1994
    Bantam Dell

    InstaRating: 3.5 out of 5
    An experimental biochip is implanted in a governor of Illinois after he suffers a massive stroke. Its stated purpose is to repair the connections in his brain, giving him access to speech and motor skills again. Unknown to many, the chip also gives him access to up-to-the-second live polling data, making him an unstoppable Presidential candidate. But more than that — the chip gives a shadowy network of power-brokers access to him — making him their perfect candidate…

    Lots of spoilers follow.

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  • Politics and Teaching

    So, Election Day has come and gone. I took time to talk about it in each of my classes today — and yes, I know I teach physics; more on that later — and I thought I’d ruminate some here. Full disclaimer: I am a lifelong Democrat who had been reasonably certain they’d find a way to screw it up yet again. (Who knew they could make Kerry disappear?) And I am ecstatic over the triumph of the Democrats in both the House and the Senate. But this isn’t a victory lap. It’s about politics and teaching.
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  • *ping*

    Just a stay-alive post to indicate that I’m still around, though unable to write about teaching because, ironically, I am too busy teaching.

  • Running the Race (My speech given as Distinguished Faculty recipient)

    I have had the honor of being named as the Hun School’s first recipient of a new Distinguished Faculty Endowed Chair. One of the prices is that, today, I had to give a speech at the first-ever Convocation. Since some people have asked, and since I have an ego the size of Montana, I decided to put it up on the Web — to wit, right here on Mongrel Dogs.
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