idlestudy

[idlestudy]

[idlestudy]

"Alright, time to see what this animated poetry movie is like-

Oh jesus christ"

#woah!! #I need to watch this #to see if it will work for my #heroes unit

[idlestudy]

me when my ears dont work n im also a white man

#yo I’m teaching this movie next quarter #thanks for the free essay prompts!!

[idlestudy]

this is the study snoopy. he bestows good fortune to all the students that cross his path this exam season. he believes in you and so do i

[idlestudy]

I teach a lot of undergrads these days. About 3 years ago, I started dedicating a full two hours early every semester to a lecture and discussion about the history of the concept of plagiarism, because I was so annoyed that my students were walking into my classroom with the ironclad belief that they weren't plagiarizing when they were. Sure, the university had some official plagiarism guidelines that they could hypothetically read in a code of conduct somewhere, but they didn't. All they had was a vague memory of some teacher in Grade 8 telling them 'don't copy and paste from wikipedia' and a little learning from experience afterwards.

My hypothesis (which I was delighted to find is shared by Brian Deer, the journalist who broke the Wakefield story and who was the source Illuminaughti plagiarized in the hbomberguy video) is that the rise of automatic plagiarism checkers meant that, in the minds of many students, the formerly more abstract concept of plagiarism ('passing someone else's work off as your own') became a more concrete concept operationalized by the plagiarism checker. Under this concept, a text is plagiarized if (and, implicitly, only if) it is detected as plagiarism by the plagiarism checker. I have spent many hours with students sobbing in my office after I told them that their essays were plagiarized, and they all say that they thought changing the words around was sufficient to make it not plagiarized. Maybe some of them were lying for sympathy, maybe they all were, but I see no reason to not take them at their word. They think that what they're doing is dubious (hence the shame) but they don't think it falls under what they take to be the definition of plagiarism - the thing they can face sanction from the university for. They need to have it pointed out to them that there has been plagiarism for a lot longer than there have been automatic 'plagiarism checkers' and that as their professor, I'm the only plagiarism checker they really need to be concerned about.

It's really easy for me to get frustrated about this. It's frustrating to me that the American public high school system (the source of the majority of my students) has failed to prepare them to think about information, facts, and where they come from. It's frustrating that students can't be arsed to read the university's code of conduct and that the only way I know they have is if I read it straight to their faces. It's very frustrating to see the written scholarly word, a medium to which I have dedicated no small part of my life, treated like it's not worth anything. I'm frustrated to know that most students are not in my class, or in the class of someone else prepared to teach this lesson, so they'll go through their whole lives thinking that an uncited light paraphrase is enough to be worthy of credit. I'm frustrated that people with such a lax attitude towards information are my fellow voters. I once read a real fucking academic essay that was submitted for grades that cited a long quote from Arthur Conan Doyle that, when I traced it, was actually a quote from a fucking TJLC blog. That one isn't frustrating, I guess, that's just funny. It's not all bad.

I'm glad for the hbomberguy video. I hope it will make it easier to convince my students in future. It's too bad he didn't go into the academic context, but it's not like he was short on things to talk about already.

But this is a more general problem than just the video essay context shows. If we're not careful, the very concept of plagiarism can get eroded. I'm not a linguistic prescriptivist, either! If enough people start taking this new concept as plagiarism, that will be what it becomes. I think a world in which that notion of plagiarism is the relevant one would be a worse world. Don't let people erode the idea of credit. You're going to want it later.

[idlestudy]

#girl I am trying ;-;

[idlestudy]

#this is a brilliant metaphor for scaffolding

[idlestudy]

public libraries in the usa offering free digital library cards to people not in their areas (as of october 2023):

brooklyn (13-21yo us residents)

seattle (13-26yo us residents)

boston (13-26yo us residents)

los angeles (13-18yo california residents)

san diego (12-26yo us residents, not the whole collection just commonly banned books)

these cards (part of the books unbanned initiative) get you access to each library's complete libby/overdrive collection (unless otherwise mentioned), no hoopla/kanopy/physical copies included.

ebook collections are expensive to maintain (many american libraries have annual fees for non-residents because of this) but because of an uptick in book banning (particularly brutal in mississippi last summer) larger libraries have opened their doors more, which is very kind of them!

i've used my seattle card for the last several months and their libby collection has about three times the books that my local library does, which is wonderful for accessing more niche titles or skipping a waiting list. would love to hear of similar ebook initiatives internationally!

i use library extension (firefox/safari/chrome compatible) to check all my collections (+ the internet archive) at once, works for several different countries highly recommend it.

spotify seems to be offering 15hrs/month of audiobook listening to premium subscribers and while that does seem useful if you're already paying and are after a new release with a long library waitlist, libraries are better for everything else.

[idlestudy]

how to read a paper.pdf

[idlestudy]

I just had a look online to find if anyone had made a list of all the names of fighters in the Iliad, and I discovered that someone in fact had.

I had.

Me.

In 2015.

I have absolutely no memory of this.

I made a spreadsheet, and even wordclouds ffs.

It’s even got what side they’re on, where they’re originally from, their epithet and patronymic if they have one. Wow.

And, you can filter it by any of these to find which version of a character you need.

Oh my god I even put if they brought SHIPS? I made an excel spreadsheet of the CATALOGUE OF SHIPS. (I’m Dyscalculaic though so they might be wrong ha!)

Anyway, thanks, past-fugue-state-me?!

The post is here with links to the spreadsheet: https://greekmythcomix.com/2015/07/21/fighters-in-the-iliad/

Have fun with it!

[idlestudy]

[“When you are speaking with someone who triggers intense emotion, you usually don’t have the luxury of following that trail inside to discover and heal your exile. Instead, you have to deal with the person in that moment despite what feels like an inferno in your gut, a huge boulder on your chest, or an explosion in your brain. You have to stay calm even while the urge to smash the person in the mouth or race out of the room is on the brink of overpowering you. You have to seem confident while your knees want to buckle and your hands tremble and sweat. You have to think and speak clearly even though your mind is full of panicked and angry voices all shouting at once or the gears in your brain seemed to have locked. You know how important it is to keep your heart open and listen, even though all you hear are your own parts complaining about how hurt or mad they are.

In such situations, most people are relieved if they are able to pretend to be in control and succeed in keeping their extreme impulses from taking over. They are happy that they don’t say or do something they will later regret. Is it possible not just to pretend to feel confident, compassionate, clear, and calm but to actually be in that state even while you are highly triggered? Because many of us have been socialized to believe that we have only one personality, this idea is foreign: “You are either angry or you are calm. How can you be both at the same time?” Once you get to know your parts and your Self, you understand that it is possible. Your Self becomes the “I” in the storm—the calm center of the inner tornado of your triggered parts and the outer hurricane of upset parts in the people around you.

Achieving that state requires that you do the opposite of what you are used to doing. Ordinarily you feel the impulse to lash out and then try to control it with shame (I’m bad for feeling angry), scare tactics (I’ll devastate him), or minimizing (It’s not that big a deal anyway), all of which foster inner polarization. The angry part feels discounted, and the protectors are overburdened with responsibility for controlling the situation. If, instead, you immediately attend to the impulse with compassion and confidence, with inner words like, “I get that this is making you very upset, but I can handle it. Let me speak for you right now, and we’ll talk more later about how to go from here,” parts are often able to not blend with you totally so you (as your Self) can be present with your partner even while a part is fuming inside. Later, when you’re alone, you can talk to the part about all of its concerns and make a plan of action or help it unburden. The goal of maintaining Self-leadership with someone who provokes you is not to get that person to change, although that is often a fortunate side effect because your Self may elicit their Self. Instead, you interact from your Self for its own sake—for the growth that comes from showing your parts that they can trust you.”]

richard c. schwartz, from you are the one you’ve been waiting for: bringing courageous love to intimate relationships, 2008

#love the terminology self leadership

[idlestudy]

Short stories that live in my head rent free and make me go a little crazy:

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (horror)

Lamb to The Slaughter by Roald Dahl (horror)

We Ate The Children Last by Yann Martel (satire/horror)

The Empty Prison by Matt Dymerski (horror)

The October Game by Ray Bradbury (horror)

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison (horror/sci-fi)

A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor (horror)

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (sci-fi)

[idlestudy]

[idlestudy]

Are you constantly wanting to do A Thing but never know how to do The Thing?

Does figuring out where to start a task and knowing what steps need to be taken to complete the task stress you out?

Lemme introduce you to…

goblin.tools

For example, you want to clean your oven.

You simply go to the website and in the “Add new item” box, you type “clean the oven”. You can then also use the lil chillies next to the plus to change the level of breaking-down you’d like. Next, hit the magic wand-looking button to break it down!

You can check off items as you go, and further break things down if desired!

It works on large tasks such as planning a cross-country trip, writing a book or going on vacation and smaller tasks such as cleaning an oven.

There’s also tools for task time estimation, meal-prep that takes into account dietary constraints, equipment and such, and a braindump compiler.

It’s available as an IOS/Android app for less than a dollar, or a free web app. I can’t hype this up enough, the developers deserve so much love for this.

[idlestudy]

Halloween is the perfect time to read the incredible works of Emily Carroll, my absolute favorite horror cartoonist and storyteller. You can read many of her works free on her website!

I especially love His Face All Red, The Groom, The Hole the Fox Did Make, and Out of Skin.

I cannot over-recommend Carroll’s short story collection Through the Woods, which is one of the best works of fiction (horror or otherwise) I’ve ever read. If you can, get a copy from your local library or bookstore!

Got to go, it’s Halloween and I’m spending my evening sitting in the dark, drinking hot chocolate, re-reading these spooky comics while the wind rattles at the windows.

#may try to read some of these to my students!

[idlestudy]

Gender Troubles: The Butches

#I think abt this every time I wear a tie to work #:’)

[idlestudy]

a bit of a blog rebrand, courtesy of @santapau ‘s patreon rewards portraits! I’m starting teaching high school this year, so my studyblr will remain lightly active, with a slight shift in content. cheers!

#mine #studyblr #idlestudy