Excuse me, she prefers Ke$ha.
I think it is hilarious that Ke-- can I really bear to type that again? --$ha as a younger person was one of the rubes that Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie visited on The Simple Life.
Was she really? She couldn't have been on the farm. When they were travelling in their RV?
This gives me an excuse to link to this Ke$ha cover, which I just listened to ten minutes ago.
2: Yeah, they stop in Nashville and visit with her family.
Say what you will about her music, I just don't think it adequately demonstrates her qualifications for the Supreme Court.
I am impressed that she manages to spin "has breath like an alcoholic vagrant" into a sign of good-time-havin'. In Tik Tok 2 I'm hopeful she'll start the evening by washing her clothes in urine.
Or she could write a song extolling the pleasures of disco dumping.
At 3:24 on Supersonic, they each break it down in superfast rapping style. The third girl's rap is hilariously great. I forgot about that altogether.
The best thing about Tigra and Bunny is that they call themselves "Tigra" and "Bunny."
I loved that song when I was in elementary school! And I had not realized until hearing it again just now just how spectacular their New York accents were.
||
Aargh. I just taught one of the most aggravating calculus classes of my life. They were insanely bad at algebra. As in failing to understand factoring and cancelling.
Somehow the homework scores ended up so high that everyone's grade is passing. The final exam average was a 69 and yet the class semester average was an 83. I'm so annoyed that all these students are getting grades which do not reflect how abysmal their final exam was. Nobody failed the course, and yet several ought to fail the course.
|>
Are you publicly committed to the weighting of everything? Probably yes -- I suppose that's all usually in the syllabus. But if your formula is private, I'd totally screw with it until the grades look like what you think is right.
I'm going back and revisiting the finals to see if I was unduly generous out of laziness.
Old-school rap now sounds incredibly innocent. It's like watching little kids with a new toy.
After some aimless clicking from heebie's links: I had no idea this song was by En Vogue.
Its important, when designing your grading rubric, to think about what grade you want to give someone who shows up and does everything you ask, but is basically clueless about content. I actually peg these people at a D, in part because I'm less confident of my ability to measure how much people understand philosophy and can do philosophy. I could easily see being harsher in a math course.
Woody Allen has a line about how 80% of life is just showing up. I think this is pretty indicative of what the world was like for middle class baby boomers. That certainly isn't the world I grew up in, and its not a world I'm letting my students grow up in.
I'm actually wondering if there's something screwy about the culture of homework assistance at Heebie U. There was an earlier conversation where we were talking about people who get great grades on all the homework, and still failed the tests, and that sounded weird to me too. Is there maybe too much help available, and it's too painless, so homework grades don't mean as much as they should?
I have heard of precisely zero of the artists mentioned in the OP. I feel so old and un-hip. And I don't even have a lawn.
There is a ton of homework help available. There's free tutoring, lots of office hours, etc. We market ourselves as a super supportive institution.
Furthermore! I've heard about this kind of insanity from many different districts, other than just Dallas.
Decided at a district level, all public school teachers must implement the following:
•Homework grades should be given only when the grades will "raise a student's average, not lower it."
•Teachers must accept overdue assignments, and their principal will decide whether students are to be penalized for missing deadlines.
•Students who flunk tests can retake the exam and keep the higher grade.
•Teachers cannot give a zero on an assignment unless they call parents and make "efforts to assist students in completing the work."
•High school teachers who fail more than 20 percent of their students will need to develop a professional improvement plan and will be monitored by their principals. For middle school the rate is 15 percent; for elementary it's 10 percent.
This doesn't entirely trickle up to the problems that I'm seeing. But there is a lot of momentum towards giving all sorts of points opportunities that aren't linked with understanding.
Let me go in the background and fix that last comment.
And I don't even have a lawn.
Wild onions count.
22: Yeah, what I'm finding myself wondering is if the free tutoring is, out of a desire to be supportive, slipping into handing out the answers rather than teaching the math. If a student doesn't get the homework, and can go to a tutor and come out with a completed assignment that will get a good grade but still no understanding, then that's bad tutoring. Maybe the department should look into training and expectations for the tutors?
I feel so old and un-hip.
I think actually you're too young and un-hip.
I never knew that the artists I thought of as "Tigra and Bunny" were actually called L'Trimm.
1.2 has made my day. "I brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack" is actually a pretty good line.
Maybe the department should look into training and expectations for the tutors?
It's a problem we pay attention to, and there is an entire course that the tutors take.
My belief is that the students don't know that they are expected to internalize the material. It is okay to get substantial help on a homework assignment. But that means you have a lot of work ahead of you, until you thoroughly understand why the problems work the way they do.
At some point, learning the material has got to be internally driven, and I think that's what's failing to happen.
25: CA had a problem recently with what he thought was plagiarism. The paper seemed smarter than the student, and the student couldn't answer fairly low-level questions about the paper topic. It turned out to be a case of "too much help" with the rough draft, but the whole thing ended up so juiced by the person helping him with his writing that it ended up more than he could understand. I mean, I guess this sort of is plagiarism, but everyone involved was good intentioned.
Tutors should just walk students through similar but nonidentical problems that exercise the same concepts.
Just!
Perhaps heebie U. should instead assign the students Tudors, for they have the best manors, in my humble opinion.
Oh come child
In a cross-product style
Oh come child
Come and rescue me
'Cause you have seen some
Steeply-pitched roofs
As long as we're discussing explicit demands in the other thread, I demand more recognition of the insanity of the bullet points in 22.
Don't make me make a post out of it.
|| No more masturbating to Frank Frazetta, and I'm including these photos as a derivative work. |>
It is insane, but haven't previous threads established that standards are almost as lax at the Ivys?
33: This one: Students who flunk tests can retake the exam and keep the higher grade. Is utterly insane unless some provision is made to ensure that the student takes a different test covering the same material.
It also sounds like the kind of rule that's made when a member of the PTA or School Board has a lazy or stupid kid in High School and wants to bend the rules to the maximum for the benefit of the child.
I forwarded the article to someone I know who lives in Dallas, and they informed me that Dallas ISD still paddles students. So being a teacher there isn't all bad.
37: Administrators and politicians who come up with rules like this often think of education is simple memorization. It wouldn't surprise me if some policy maker was imagining that it would be just fine to take the exact same test again, because the policy maker doesn't see much of a difference between memorizing the periodic table of elements and memorizing "The answers on the test are A, C, C, D, E..."
That said, the requirements look like a response to No Child Left Behind/Race to the Top. If the school is rated on how well the students do in classes, any teacher who fails a student is bringing down the schools rating. They're almost traitors.
The current direction in education reform is to incentivize cheating at the institutional level.
And thus align incentives in education with those in the general culture.
I demand that someone at least listen to the song in #13. From 1979! Recorded before "Rapper's Delight" was released! A full nine years before either "Supersonic" or "Cars w/ Boom".
I listened! I know the song and appreciated accordingly.
The other classic early female-fronted hip-hop track is this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkcfU_oLbno
Released in 1980, but supposedly recorded earlier. The band on that are totally smoking, which you can't really tell from the low quality youtube audio. Her flow is really modern sounding compared to a lot of late 70s stuff, imho.
I demand more recognition of the insanity of the bullet points in 22.
All I could come up with was "holy fucking shit". And then I thought of how the students would end up doing on standardized tests or in the schools they moved on to, and how the teachers and their unions would get all the blame, and I had to leave it at that.
re: 44
Yeah, I put it on an unfogged mix a couple of years back. I have it on a compilation, and it's the only track of hers I've heard. It still sounds totally fresh to me, not just a historical curiosity.
I should point out that I learned of Ke$ha on
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/01/podcast_yo_planet_money_raps.html
Months ago ! Bonus: ancient YoYo.
Not particularly related, even less safe for work: road signage.
OT:
I love this: http://deadspin.com/5535220/fake-yo+yo-trickster-fools-every-tv-station-everywhere
Will, that is fucking hilarious.
I love that too.
Also, to tie this to another thread, I just noticed that the Kesha video features sexy bicycling. Possibly DUI-related.
"I asked a very close friend of mine and my favorite Dutch composer, Louis Andriessen, to make arrangements and he did this particular arrangement of 'Ticket to Ride' as it might be sung, mmm, by a Handel oratorio singer in the provinces."
At the start of a performance by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the troublemakers, who included the composers Louis Andriessen and Reinbert de Leeuw, began making noise with nutcrackers, rattles, bicycle horns, and other devices. They also distributed leaflets denouncing the orchestra as a "status symbol of the ruling élite." The Netherlands being both a tradition-minded and a tolerant land, the Nutcracker Action, as it was called, elicited an ambivalent response: the provocateurs were summarily ejected from the hall, but their ideas prompted much serious discussion. Forty years on, the Nutcrackers have become eminences: Andriessen is the most influential of Dutch composers, and de Leeuw, who has focussed on conducting, has held posts from Tanglewood to Sydney.
53: I like how she was careful to change the genders in the song.
Cathy Berberian and Louis Andriessen both rock.
Cathy Berberian
Well, she knows that there's one roulade she can't sing.