My cat can dance

In response to this.

Teach and Bitch

I am teaching an undergraduate statistics lab this semester. It's not really hard, I only lecture for about 10 minutes every week and then I help students work on different assignments. We also hold review sessions before and after the exams. Overall, it's a positive experience. There are two things, however, that I really don't like about my students:

- they don't want to read. ANYTHING. I give them an assignment with instructions and they don't want to read the instructions. I am definitely willing to explain the instructions if they don't get it from the handout, but they expect me to TELL them what are the instructions. Also, they feel insulted if I tell them to read something in the book. "Why don't you tell us what's written in the book?"

- they have an extremely strong sense of entitlement. They think we should tell them exactly what's going to be on a test, they think they should all get A's just because they're in the room, and they feel I should be available for them 24/7. They think the teacher should do all the work humanly possible so they have the least work to do, studently possible. Notes, review sheets, formula sheets: it should all be GIVEN to them.

I don't know if this is because they are American. Or it's a "new generation" thing. What I do know is that we, as instructors, are slowly giving in to their demands. We explain things over and over so that they don't have to read the book, we give them better grades, or we post notes online. And then we bitch on our blog about it.

Dreamy

I had this dream tonight: I had to leave for Romania, and the plane was scheduled to leave at 1:56 pm, and it was 1:30 and I was still home and didn't want to leave yet because I wanted to have sex with M. one more time before I left. And I was thinking that I forgot to have my I-20 signed by the people in the international students office, and I would not be able to return to the US. And I kept thinking how my father called to tell me he'd found a job for me in Romania, a job I would like ("The kind of job you said you'd really like, Ionuka!", he said). And I thought that would be good, because I often doubt that I am good enough to get a PhD anyway, and I should just go home and mind my own life in my own country. But it would really suck to never be close to M. like this... And that's why I had to miss the plain, and I could almost hear the plane take off, because we live near the airport.

Post 100

The two of us.

Town-tagged

I've been tagged by Raluca. I live in East Point, Georgia, which is a small town south of downtown Atlanta. Because I don't know East Point that well yet, and because it is considered as part of the greater Atlanta area, I am just going to write about Atlanta.


3 places I love in Atlanta:
- Buford highway, a long highway with many many ethnic restaurants and markets.
- Little Five Points (L5P), because of the restaurants, shopping (that I can't afford yet, but I love to browse), coffee places, incense smell, colorfulness, and the street fashion.
- the roof top deck of Six Feet Under. There's no better way of reducing death anxiety than getting drunk by the cemetery (the deck overlooks one of the oldest cemeteries in the area).


3 places I hate in Atlanta:
- definitely Buckhead, a nouveau riche neighborhood north of downtown. It's the place you'd take your new convertible to show off.
- Virginia-Highlands area, a snobby and expensive neighborhood.
- Atlantic Station and Ikea. It's one of those areas that are so new and fake-looking that you feel you're on a movie set.

3 places where I like to go with my friends:
- Panahar, a Bangladeshi restaurant on Buford Highway, owned and operated by a quirky guy.
- Canton House on Buford Highway, where we go for dim sum.
- the front porch of our house


3 things an outsider would not understand about Atlanta:
- the abundance of HIV medication ads and HIV awareness banners
- people's love for Chick-fil-A, a greasy fried chicken fast-food restaurant.
- why there so many condos and lofts being built

The fanciest neighborhood:
- Druid Hills: beautiful houses, rich greenery, good schools.

The ugliest neighborhood:
- Bankhead. If you drive by at night you don't want to hit any red lights.


And now a random, new fact about Atlanta (thanks, Waver!): Salman Rushdie is moving to Atlanta, because he's accepted a position at Emory University. We're trying to figure out his office hours so we can stop by.

I am tagging:
Patti - Atlanta, GA
Waver - Somerville/Cambridge, MA
John - Atlanta, GA
Moni - New Brunswick, NJ

Stella's point of view

She sits like this all day.

Rank me!

Via Metropotam, I came across a ranking of World Universities, published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. I have been a fan of academic rankings since I was applying to PhD programs. Because of this, I am very familiar with rankings of Social Psychology graduate programs in the US, although some say that the overall ranking of the school matters less than the fit between the research interests of the student and the mentor. I am now finding out that it does matter, because most of my work depends on regulations imposed by the university or the department, and not by my mentor (course requirements and teaching are just some of the examples).

Knowing a little about academic rankings, this recent attempt seems especially courageous, given the difficulty of finding appropriate ranking criteria. This particular study used criteria such as number of alumni and faculty winning the Nobel Prize or number of publications in leading international journals. This brings back one of the current issues in higher education: research vs. teaching. At least for the North-American universities, it seems that there is an inherent trade-off between these two. Large research universities attract the best faculty and reward them for research performance, while teaching undergraduates becomes a secondary activity. In fact, most of the teaching is done by graduate students. Of course, these schools represent a great opportunity for those few undergraduates interested in research, because they can get research experience in famous labs. On the other hand, small liberal-arts colleges do better at teaching, with the disadvantage of being more expensive and not having famous researchers teach the material. Supposing your child is searching for colleges, where would you encourage her to go? If I had the money, I would probably choose a smaller liberal-arts college. So how would a ranking based on criteria such as "number of Nobel Prize winners" help me decide?

Two main questions came up as I was trying to understand these rankings, and maybe somebody could help me answer them:
- Who are academic ratings targeting? Prospective undergraduate students, graduate students, or institutions that give out grants for research?
- What would be appropriate ranking criteria for undergraduate institutions? And more interestingly, how could successful educational output be operationalized cross-culturally, such that we could have a somewhat accurate world ranking of academic institutions?

P.S. after the disappointment that my current school is not in the top 500 , I console myself with the thought that my boyfriend is a graduate of one of the top 20 universities in the world.

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