Nomination Station – Lesley and Matty are working their way through every movie nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture in chronological order. They’re still only in the 1930s, but their reviews are funny, random, and they often provide their own sound effects.
Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog – And Katie hath a new way to waste time.
Awkward Family Photos – It’ll make you feel better about your family. Hopefully.
Colorado Girls – Forget California Gurls, it’s all about Colorado, baby! Katie recognizes far too many of these places (thanks to Jenny for this one).
As soon as Katie gets her Bronte Sisters Power Dolls, she’s carrying them in this tote bag…until it turns her brain.
From the pile of utter nonsense, the people you love are making you fat?!?!
These photos have been out for a while, but Katie can’t get over how gorgeous the Elle Vogue Plus Size spread is
There’s a great discussion of plagiarism in academia, and what drives it, over at Historiann. The comments are well worth reading, and I (Millie) am particularly taken with this bit, from a comment well down the page:
They’ve [students] been taught all along, they take the tutorials on the library website, they take the introductory English class (sometimes), but so little of this has sunk in because so many of them do not know how to separate the information conveyed in words from the words themselves. So few actually read or write anything that they don’t understand how to put ideas into their own words because they don’t have very many words — or ideas — at their disposal.
The discussion focuses on humanities and social sciences, but I’ve seen similar behaviour in TA’ing first year science courses, and it is an exasperating and depressing situation to try to fix.
Weird Conversions – Katie weights 13.1 spider monkeys (thanks to Rebekah for this one!)
1. I feel so famous!
2. I’m a serious reader and never plagiarize, but was horrified when I took tough classes and found myself unable to write convincing arguments or thoroughly examine any issue. I don’t condone plagiarism, but I wonder how many other “smart” students are unused to thinking critically or using real logic… and may take the low road.
There were times I definitely struggled in my biological science courses, simply because there can come a point where there are only so many ways to describe an experiment, function, anomaly, etc. It was so frustrating to write a report, look back at references, and realized I’d practically re-written them word for word. Oy.
Me too, though there was very little writing in my degree, and much more of an emphasis on problem solving. The courses I TA’d were also very based in problem solving, and what I found happened an awful lot was that there was the student couldn’t take the logic from one problem and apply it to another. They’d been taught all along (I confirmed this with a friend of mine who was teaching high school) just to regurgitate answers, not to think about how to get those answers, what the answers meant, or how to apply that knowledge in another situation. It’s physical science and not humanities, but work was often plagarized because (I suspect) they didn’t know how to handle a course that was not based on regurgitation of answers. That and partying is more fun than doing school work.
In fourth grade, my class was once assigned to read an article about spiders and then re-write the information on a piece of spider-shaped paper. We were warned about the evils of plagiarism, but we also had no spider-knowledge outside what we learned from the article….. so the POINT of the assignment was to reword someone else’s ideas? Foreshadowing of college, I suppose.
Urgh, totally. That’s what’s expected all the way along in elementary/high school, and then college/university hits, and the students are expected, for the first time, to think for themselves, and it’s a big shock. By that time, it’s so ingrained that it’s hard to reverse, and especially when you’re only seeing them once a week for a couple of hours. Throw in the social aspect of first year university, and you’ve got a recipe for academic disaster.