Bounded in a Nutshell

This weekend I was staying at a Days Inn in Muncie, IN, and I'm a little puzzled. First of all, the advertisement at the front desk for frequent-stay rewards makes a big deal about how rewards can be earned (or possibly redeemed, I didn't really look that closely) at some number of retailers. One of the retailers was Canadian Tire, which is a logo you don't see much of in Indiana.

If that's not weird enough, in the hotel guide in the room they give a brief list of local radio stations... only it's not really local stations. In fact, all of the call letters begin with "C", and some of them -- CFRB, for instance, or CHUM, or CFNY aka "The Edge" -- are very familiar to me from when I lived in Toronto. Did someone do a cheap photocopy from a Days Inn Scarborough or something?

Forgive me, but I'm going to complain about students for a bit.

So it's my usual practise in lower-division courses to put together a sample test a couple of classes before I give an actual test. On reflection, this is perhaps not the best idea; I do it in part because of the somewhat peculiar instution of the Exam Bank at my alma mater, where students can borrow and photocopy several years' worth of past exams. We don't have that here, and so I wanted to give my students some idea what to expect in terms of testing style.

The problem that I'm running into is that students -- at least, students here, or rather my students here -- seem to be a uniquely literal-minded bunch. They don't generalise correctly; they seem to assume that if I give a word problem involving airplanes and the Pythagorean Theorem on the sample test, then I'll do the same on the actual test, changing only the numbers to protect the innocent. Then when the real test rolls around, it's something about streetlamps and similar triangles and no one knows anything about similar triangles so they all write the Pythagorean formula on the page and then go off and die somewhere. Messily. With numbers scattered arbitrarily around the page.

My other concern is that... well, so the day before the test is typically a review day unless I'm horribly, horribly behind in the course material. The review generally ends up being answering questions about the sample test, and quite frequently becomes just going through the entire sample test question by question. And while that's not ideal, I'm fine with that...

...until I start getting e-mails from students saying things like, could you please send me the answers to the sample test. Frequently, these are coming from students who were in class when we went through the sample test. So I don't know what's going on here. It could be just an inability to take coherent notes, but in my day people with that issue -- i.e. me -- would just suck it up, listen extra hard, and make sure to have a roommate or other close friend with excellent note-taking skills in the same class. So for my money, I think what I'm seeing is indolence raised to the level of high crimes.

One of the perils of staying on campus late -- at least, if you're like me and prefer to keep your door open to remind yourself that there's a world outside your windowless little cell -- is that confused students will sometimes wander in and hope that you know what they're talking about.

In this particular case, it turns out that I did know what they were talking about; the one student who came in was taking a class that I taught this past Spring, and thus I'm reasonably fresh on the finer points of double integration. He then wandered off again, only to return a few minutes later with one of his colleagues in tow.

I'm thinking that I should leave campus now for the night, since otherwise my doorway might be too jammed with calculus students for me to escape safely.

On NPR today on my way back from lunch, there was a discussion of the FDA and user fees. Apaprently, this is a system under which part of the cost for testing and certifying drugs is borne by the drug companies themselves. They had a former editor of the New England Journal of Medecine on the show, and he commented that this was in the way of a conflict of interest and should be abolished, since companies that are being regulated shouldn't have any sort of financial control over the regulator. The FDA, he said, should be funded solely using public money.

As I understand it, the Big Pharma companies all receive significant subsidies from the government. So why shouldn't it be the case that the pharmaceutical companies get cut out of the equation: the government cuts subsidies to the drug companies and uses it to fund the FDA directly?

Or am I missing something?

OK, so I don't know about all my Faithful Readers, but I'm feeling pretty damn crappy today. And I'm pretty sure it's not just the lingering fever.

So what have we learned in the past twenty-four hours? We've learned that a majority -- a majority -- of Americans are OK with torture. They're OK with secret police. They're OK with recklessness on the grand scale, both in foreign policy and government spending. And they're OK with letting the rest of the world know that they stand behind an administration that supports these things.

So what now? That ever-present conservative buzzword: accountability. The Emperor now has a clear majority in the House, and a clear majority in the Senate... not to mention a clean claim on the office this time, although admittedly lacking such has never stopped him before. And so, whatever happens now, there is not -- there can not be -- anyone else to pawn the blame off on. Where does the buck stop again, Mr. Truman?

As for myself? I want to go home.