Category Archives: Education

Dealing With Plagiarism in an Academic Environment

Education, , ,

The other day, I was grading papers for the Communications course when I came across a paper that was so obviously not the work of the student who turned it in. As a matter of fact, it was completely stolen from an academic journal word for word. Finding the original source wasn’t difficult, but figuring out what to do wit it AFTER finding the original source then became the problem. I mean, honestly, what to you do after you find out a student has completely stolen his work that he has then turned into you?

Seriously.

That’s the dilemma I ended up with because there are no set answers as to what to do after you find out your student has dishonestly created his work for your class. Sure, you could just give him an F and move on, but is it really that easy?

Here’s the situation I ended up with, because right as soon as I found out, I didn’t know what to do. The work was obviously stolen, but my administration wasn’t around to really offer me any insight. As a matter of fact, because this was an evening course during the summer, my back up staff was nonexistent. The main secretary was “off” until the fall semester started up again, and even the “go to” person for her wasn’t in the office when I walked there to find out what to do going forward. Basically, I was on my own.

And to be honest, I didn’t know what to do. Sure, I could be an asshole and condemn the student right from the start, but really what good does that really do? It proves I caught the student, and he pays the penalty but does anything possible come out of that situation?

Yeah, I caught him. But so what?

This is a community college course where I’m an adjunct instructor. Catching a student teaching doesn’t really lead to any black and white solutions. Basically, a student gets kicked out school and that’s that. What exactly did we solve by my direct response? Personaly, nothing. A struggling student is now out of school and the teacher proved he was an asshole. Not really sure we got much out of this situation.

If I let him get off scot free, what do we get? We get a student who is going to go to his next class and see if he can get away with that one just as well as he got away with the last few ones, because you know I’m not the first one he cheated in. So, did I just kick the can down the read?

So, I ask you? What should I do?

Strangely enough, everyone but me is an expert on diabetes

Education, Healthcare, , , , ,

If you’ve been reading my blog for some time, you know about my whole adventure with being a diabetic. For a number of years, I lived on the edge of the problem by actually going out of my way to change my lifestyle so that what I ate was copacetic with what I needed. I completely changed my eating habits to compensate for this, and as a result, I’ve had to be very careful about what I put into my body.

Having said that, no matter how much work you do at this sort of thing, there are so-called “experts” all around me who are convinced that because they saw a TV show once, knew some guy, or just happened to hear something on the news once, they know more than someone who lives through it on a day to day basis. When I first started dealing with the problem, one of the first things I did was switch from regular soda to diet soda (or pop). This started the “you know that diet soda is just as bad as regular soda, right?” commentaries. Those ranged from the totally stupid people (“just because it’s diet doesn’t mean it doesn’t have calories”) to the New Age stupid (“the chemicals in diet soda are worse for you than if you were just imbibing regular cubes of sugar”). And there’s no shutting them up either. Go to the fridge to grab a diet soda, and you’re guaranteed a five minute screed on all things bad about diet soda. Tell them to stop lecturing you, and they do it anyway, because they’re convinced they’re doing it “for your own good”. One day, I was actually lectured by a woman who felt that diet soda would one day kill me. She would have continued the lecture, but she had to take a break and go outside because it had been fifteen minutes since she last had a cigarette.

I went to work out a few weeks ago, and someone told me that my choice of exercises (the exercise bike) was a poor choice for someone with diabetes because it didn’t affect the cardiovascular system as well as some other exercise he named. The fact that I went from sitting in front of the television set to actually working out should have been an indication that criticism wasn’t necessary, but strangely enough that fact had little sway or influence.

The other day, I was in the cafeteria choosing EXACTLY the same thing I eat every day in order to constantly maintain the correct blood sugar. Someone who knew I had just come out of the hospital felt it necessary to criticize me over my choice of lunch food. I know the person meant well, but just once I wish people would just shut the fuck up and leave me alone. I choose what I eat because a) it appeals to me, and b) it works. I don’t want to hear about tofu, soy milk products, modified starches or whatever. It’s bad enough I have to change anything in my life because doctors inform me of what I should or should not do. Having some clueless wannabe interject with naive information is really annoying.

Supreme Court health care decision reveals how clueless mainstream reporters really are

Education, Healthcare, News, Politics, , , , , , ,

Like a lot of other people, I was waiting on the Supreme Court decision over health care legislation. At the time, I happened to be in the hospital awaiting the decision, but that’s really not a significant factor. However, when CNN, and then Fox News, announced the decision IMMEDIATELY after it was written, I didn’t get very excited. The reason being: I figured they’d probably get it wrong.

And they did. CNN first reported that it was repealed. It wasn’t. Fox News then announced something equally stupid, and they were wrong as well.

The important question is Why did both of them really screw up the decision?

Well, the answer is simple. Reporters write differently than Supreme Court justices. You see, the reporter process is to report the decision first, and then they continue to write the story, filling in relevant facts later. The most irrelevant facts are left for the end, just in case an editor has to snip the end of a story. This way, the important parts of a story remain untouched.

The Supreme Court doesn’t work that way. If they issue a 30 page majority opinion, that means that somewhere on page 17 or 18 you might actually get the decision. Everything else is legalese and details that back up that decision. Quite often, you can read for pages and still have no clue where they’re going with the decision.

I learned this in graduate school when I used to have to write briefs on Supreme Court decisions. There were times when I’d read through the whole thing and still couldn’t tell you what was the decision. When you’re a reporter, you’re expected to be able to figure out that ruling quickly, and what happened was they failed at it. They kept trying to read the first few pages of the brief and basically got lost. So, when they got it completely wrong, it made complete sense.

That’s why I waited. I figured after a couple of hours, someone would actually read through the whole thing and then report what actually happened.

Hospitalization, Changing One’s Ways and How People Still Can’t Communicate

Education, Healthcare, , , , , , ,

I’ve been debating about writing this topic for a few days now, but I guess enough time has finally passed that it’s possible to at least try to deal with it.

I’m in the hospital today. It’s my fifth day, and the doctors still can’t make a decision on when I might get out. My life kind of hangs on the balance of some numbers on a blood test that gets drawn three times a day, and while it appears to be getting better, it’s not “out of the woods” yet, so no one will even conjecture at the possibilities of me ever leaving this place.

Some explanation is probably necessary. I am a diabetic. I have been one most of my adult life. Normally, I’ve maintained it by diet, exercise, a combination of pills and sacrifices to the Goddess Shania Twain. Over the years, my diet has wavered (not always for the best), exercising became easy to chalk up to “probably tomorrow…” and then “probably next week….”, although The Shania has never had a lack of constant attention and appropriate worship.

One of the drugs introduced into my regiment for dealing with this condition turned out to be a lot more toxic to me than it should have been (or so their theory is…can’t really nail the specialists down on what happened, or is happening, but that’s kind of the premise of the voices that are coming down from their mountain), and it managed to inflame my pancreas and turn off my kidney (or something like that). My first realization of something being wrong was waking up in the middle of the night and finding myself completely disoriented in my own room, unable to figure out how to get into the kitchen (where instinctively I realized I needed something to eat). For two hours, I was stuck in my bedroom because I could neither stand up and would come crashing down very fast every time I tried, nor could I turn the door handle of my bedroom door because in my state it was completely beyond me. After two hours, and breaking down my closet door by accident, thinking it was my bedroom door, I managed to open the door and then spent another fifteen minutes trying to crawl across the floor of my living room to my kitchen. Then I found myself completely unable to open the refrigerator (you know those super-security refrigerators that consist of a door that requires you to just tug on it softly to open it? Yeah, one of those). After awhile, I was able to grab a car of apple juice by flinging my hands at it and throwing it to the ground. Then I drank it down in little guilty sips. 15 minutes later, I started to return to normal again.

Apparently, that kind of alerted the medical community that Duane needed some assistance, and here I am at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

One thing I was always adamant about was that if I ever reached a point where I was forced to have to start taking insulin (instead of pills), most people who know me should expect to read of my untimely demise not soon after. I’ve watched too many people get devastated by this disease, and I always swore that I wouldn’t go down that road. Strange. Now, I’m on it. But that’s a subject for later, obviously.

The thing that’s kind of bugging me right now is this medical establishment behavior of always expecting the patient is going to just buy into the ethical commication “care” response system because they live in it every day. Let me give you an example. One thing I abhor more than anything is pricking my fingers with these little needle devices to check blood sugar. It doesn’t hurt that much. It’s not even that messy. But it’s MY FINGERS. I’m a writer who HATES to do anything to my fingers in this way, and even as I write this blog right now, I am reminded with each and every letter I type that something other than my creative thinking is driving my thought process right now. And it continues to hurt a long time. My whole right hand right now has been pricked so many freaking times that I lost count several days ago. By the time I finish this post, someone will come in demanding that either they prick me, or I do the “brave” thing and prick myself.

Which is the other side of that issue that I wanted to discuss (by the way, someone just came in to prick my finger and has now moved on his way). The main nurse who has been working with me since I’ve been here has adopted a communication schema that has been driving me nuts. For those wondering what I’m talking about, a communication schema is a shortcut set of comments and statements that someone uses to deal with specific situations because a previous encounter using those same schema resulted in positive results. Think of it as a lion hunter who continues to run away from the lion until he picks up a chair and waves it at the lion, causing the lion to back off. Suddenly, he has a tool he can use to make sure that the lion doesn’t eat him. Okay, stupid example, but you probably get the idea.

This nurse, in order to get me to want to prick my fingers, keeps using the same schema of “It’s a horrible disease. It doesn’t care who you are. It’s unfeeling.” And if that doesn’t work, he ramps it up to:  “If not treated, you’ll end up having to come back here under the following circumstances: (fill in gruesome details).”

The problem with schema is that it has to pertain to the individual who it is being used on. If I was some young kid who thought that I could just continue living my life in a wild fashion, and I just wasn’t thinking about the ramifications of such things, his schema works really well. It would make me think. However, that’s not me. Consider what I said earlier. I said that if I ever ended up in this situation, there’s a pretty good chance I’d not be alive much longer. This means that I’m not thinking Bad Outcome From Disease vs. Not Doing Anything but my mathematics of a cost benefit analysis wavers the premise of Not Being Alive vs. Having to Deal With all the Shit. In that context, a reconstituted schema that pertains to the wrong emotions is probably not the one to be focused upon.

I understand the need to preach caring about certain things to people, but you have to at least appeal to the same contextual algorithms that drive each individual’s needs.

The truly sad thing is: I’ve been stuck in the hospital for about five days so I’ve been unable to do anything I enjoy doing. Hopefully, this will end soon and we can see where things go from here.

Yahoo CEOs Lying Proves Yet Again That Rules Only Apply to Those of Us Without Power

Business, Education, , , , , , , , , , ,

So, it turns out that the CEO of Yahoo made up information about his college credentials, claiming to have a degree in computer science rather than in something totally unrelated to computer science. In most cases, that wouldn’t be a big deal, but when you’re applying to be the CEO of a large computer organization, that might be somewhat important.  I know that whenever I submit an application for a job that needs a BA in communication and I have a MA in communication, I get turned down because I don’t meet their qualifications. No, I’m not kidding about this. It happens ALL OF THE TIME to me. So I could understand why Daniel Loeb, who runs the Third Point hedge fund (which has a stake in Yahoo’s ownership)  might be a bit miffed at CEO Scott Thompson.

The funny thing is: If this was me, I’d have been fired the second someone hinted that I made up my credentials. Someone from HR would have shown up with an empty box, had security have me clean out my cubicle, and I’d be lucky if the bus driver gave me a ride back to the parking lot where my car is parked. But does this happen to CEO Scott Thompson? No, instead he apologized to investors for misleading them, and Yahoo has gone suddenly silent about any possibility of him leaving the organization. So, as of today, there’s been no move to remove him from his position. He’s still the CEO, calling all the shots.

What kind of message does this send to the rest of the population? If you’re not the CEO, fuck you. Yeah, that’s the message. Sorry for the language. I just couldn’t find an easier way to say that if you’re not the CEO, you don’t amount to anything and you get absolutely no respect whatsoever.

None. Zip. Nada.

So, tomorrow, I think I’m going to apply to Yahoo to be their next CEO. I figure I’ll use my seven separate degrees in computer science to get in the door. After all, I graduated from Harvard, West Point, Western Michigan, MIT, Dartmouth, CalTech, University of the Pacific, Stanford and some other elite university I still haven’t figured out how to spell yet. Believe it or not, a couple of those are actually true, but because honesty doesn’t mean crap any more, I’m not revealing which ones.

Talking About Student Loans Is Pandering; Doing Something About Student Loans Is Progress

Business, Economics, Education, Politics, , , , , ,

The latest appeal to the votes of young people involves the student loan crisis. President Obama has started to “talk” about student loans to show that he’s paying attention to young people issues. Mitt Romney is talking about student loans to show that he’s not overlooking the issue either. Students (or former students with debt) are thinking, hey, they’re finally paying attention to an issue that’s near and dear to me.

Fact: They’re not. In fact, what both the president and his opponent are doing is called pandering. Pandering is when someone talks about an issue that is important to people, but in reality, they’re not actually going to do anything substantial about it. They might, if forced into a corner, make some minor stride, but when pandering, the point is to show that you care without actually really caring.

Obama mentioned yesterday that he just recently paid off his student loans. So young people should understand that he “feels” your pain. No, he doesn’t. He’s a one percenter who is filthy rich and will never have to worry about paying off a loan again in his lifetime. He mentioned he paid off his loans 8 years ago. 8 years ago, he was in the Senate, which meant he was in a position that allowed him almost unlimited access to the abilty to paying off his debt. THAT is how he paid off his student loans. Not through some great government assistance that came to his rescue. Unless you consider that government assistance to be a position in the Senate.

And Romney talking about student loans is just a filthy rich billionaire who doesn’t give a flying crap about people in debt. He made his money off of other people, and when people do that, they don’t care about the struggles of others, especially when your company that made you rich makes a mint off of people who are struggling anyway.

What’s of more concern here is the fact that so many of us are overwhelmed with student loan debt that we may never be able to pay off in our lifetimes. Generally, the response of the rest of society (usually from people who are well off and have never had to really suffer under any real debt) is that it’s all our own fault for going into debt, that we’re a bunch of lazy young people who need to go get a job, or some other innane banter that unravels once you actually start thinking about it.

Neither President Obama nor Citizen Romney have any intentions of doing anything to upset the apple cart of student loan debt that so many banks are profiting off these days. Government looks after the wealthy and the banks, not students or common citizens. Instead, government panders to the common people, throws them table scraps and then pretends they really care.

Expect more of this kind of drivel leading up to the Election of 2012. Neither Congress nor the President is going to enact anything that really helps students. Keeping a loan rate at a lower interest rate ISN’T assisting anyone in any great way as the debt still exists, the balance continues to increase, and nothing actually got any better. It’s just more of the same, kind of like “keeping Bush’s tax cuts” is somehow supposed to “create jobs” by doing exactly what we’ve been doing before when somehow that wasn’t leading to the creation of jobs in the past, but is somehow going to lead to a surplus of jobs that logical economics can’t seem to figure out how to make happen.

What would solve the student loan problem? Mass forgiveness of debt, kind of like people have been advocating for forclosures, which are forgiven through bankruptcy. The problem with student loan debt is that bankruptcy does NOTHING to assist someone. If you fall under, you fall under for life, and you’ll never get back out under it because the lobbyist groups that put our government people in power were on the side of banks that wanted to screw over students with student loan debt. Think about this for a moment. You can gamble away every cent you might ever borrow from a bank and be forgiven, but if one dime of that was in student loan debt, you’re screwed. As long as that one issue remains, no politician is ever going to help out the little guy. Why not? Because they honestly don’t care.

If they tell you they do care, they’re pandering. Remember that because no one else is going to tell you that. Instead, the media will tell us what a great job both sides are doing at “caring about” the problem by doing absolutely nothing but painting over the broken foundation.

The Energy to Post New Blog Content Just Isn’t There

Education, Memoirs, Relationships, Writing, ,

I haven’t posted anything in awhile, mainly because I rarely get any actual responses on my blog itself. A couple of my feeds move onto places like Open Salon and other such places, and they get a few responses there, but overall, my own web site sometimes feels like a graveyard.

Not really a lot going on these days. I’ve been voraciously trying to find a decent teaching job, but I’ve completely failed at almost every attempt. If lucky, I get a form letter rejection thanking me for applying. Otherwise, I get nothing. Not a damn thing. It’s not like I’m not qualified. It’s not like I’m not a damn good teacher either. I just get no response whatsoever. Or I’ll get a nibble, and then that nibble will run away, convinced that there is probably tastier bait out there somewhere else.

Lately, I’ve been working on a writing project with a former friend/romantic interest/really hard to define but always a positive attribution regardless. Our project is something that’s definitely up our alley, but our schedules don’t really seem to be all that copacetic, which means that I’m suspecting that as good of an idea as it is, it’s probably going to end up not working out in the long run. And that’s too bad. I’m slowly putting work back into energy towards one of my previous novels, mainly because I don’t feel right unless I’m working on something that’s moving forward. And I’ve been meaning to rewrite one of my old novels for many years now, especially now that I have the proper time and place for it.

I recently read Stephen King’s book on the JFK assassination, and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised at how well he carried that book through its entire process. He sometimes has a habit of becoming too wordy and sometimes “too Stephen King”, but this was one of his rare wonders. I can say that I’m very happy I read it. I immediately recommended it to Rick, and he read it too, thinking pretty much the same thing I did. I haven’t read too many great novels recently, and I was glad this one came along.

Which got me thinking about my own writing again, because it’s always a continuous work in progress that never seems to go anywhere. Unlike other writers who want to be writers but never write, I’m one of those who wrote a lot but never got anything for doing it. And I still continue to write. My writing has probably evolved to a point where I’m pretty much at the top of my game right now, and it’s almost completely useless. It’s like pissing in a fan, for lack of a better (or graphic) metaphor.

Relationships are still a dead zone for me these days. I live in Grand Rapids, which seems to be the furthest place of finding anything I’m seeking. I’d move anywhere else, but I’m like some unemployable crazy guy that will never get another job no matter how hard he tries. So I’m kind of stuck here. And stuck is probably a very apt description.

Not much else going on. Another semester is almost over here at GRCC, and my students probably couldn’t care one way or another if I was teaching them. It’s not like they’re bad students; they’re fine. It’s just that I don’t seem to be making much of an impact or a difference these days. That’s generally the story of adjuncts everywhere.

Well, have to head to class for the night. What fun.

I think I’m going back to school

Education, Memoirs, , , , , , , ,

Well, I’ve been mulling this decision over for some time now, and I’ve finally come to a conclusion: I’m going to go back to school. Even though I have enough degrees as it is, this isn’t about getting a new degree, but it’s much more about trying to find a purpose in life. Unfortunately, my current trajectory is taking me in directions that are suck in mud, and it’s been driving me nuts lately.

Unfortunately, all of my graduate degrees in social science have led me to absolutely nothing. I can’t get a job. At all. I’m qualified to teach political science and communication, and no one hires. I mean, NO ONE HIRES. Currently, I”m working as an adjunct, and I’ve been offered other “adjunct” positions in both fields, but finding a full time teaching job is not even possible. Most of the time, I’m lucky to get a form letter rejection thanking me and informing me they’ll keep my application on file. This has convinced me that the only way to actually get a college teaching job is to know someone in the school already, and unfortunately, I don’t know anyone in the school already. This means, I’m doomed to a lifestyle of submitting applications that will be circular filed and nothing else.

So, I started spending some time analyzing what it is I actually want to do. My forte is mathematics and hard-based science. It’s something I actually enjoy. It causes me to think. Right now, I hardly think at all. There’s no need for it. Political science requires no thinking. You either know it, or you don’t. Communication doesn’t involve that much more, other than a need to read more material. But in the end, the same ideas that were espoused in the 1950s, are the ideas that are ground-breaking today. Daniel Goldman just reiterated Sarni’s work, while practically every identity scholar reinvents Black. I tried to develop something completely new, designing an additive theory linking both political science and communication to produce a brand new strategy of international negotations. Was I successful? I think so. The result: No one cares. Diplomats are only interested in doing what they’ve been doing since Napoleon discovered he had a short person complex. Social science is a path to obscurity and reinvention (with a new paint finish!).

So, I’ve decided to pursue the biological sciences. My immediate goal right now is something involving forensic science, possibly leading to medical school (but not being a practicing doctor but more of a research-type professional). It was a direction I was going before, so at least now I’ll try taking it seriously.

What I have discovered is that I’m doing absolutely nothing with my life. I have a job where I do not feel respected as a professional in any way whatsoever. I’m literally a glorified editor (without the glory). During the year, I’m told I’m doing an “adequate” job, but whenever it comes time for the yearly performance review, I’m “just not doing enough”. But the job isn’t designed to give the opportunity to do anything, which precludes the possibility of “enough” in all cases. I don’t think I’ve really stretched my brain more than two times that I’ve been here. There will never be opportunities for advancement, as I’m not a medical professional, so I’m going to be stuck in the same job, same pay grade just shy of achieving the yearly cost of living percentage increase.

Therefore, I have to create my own opportunities, and that’s what I’m going to be doing.

So my quandary, or struggle, right now is trying to figure out exactly how to do it. I really don’t want to spend years and years starting over with school when I’m sure I shouldn’t have to. I tried contacting Western Michigan University (as their close to local) to inquire about their biology program, and basically the “counselor” responded by throwing the ball back in my court, as administrative types tend to do a lot. I asked specific questions, and not a single one of them was actually answered. I got a “send us all of your transcripts and we’ll see where you stand” response. My question was: “Does the local campus for WMU actually offer biology courses?” Anway, you’d think by now I’d be used to these types of responses from people.

So, that’s where I am right now. My life isn’t working as planned, mainly because I haven’t realy planned it out that well. So I have to find something else.