Good point. But I think ambergris comes specifically from the stomachs of sperm whales — “Protein Wisdom Whales”, if you prefer — whereas the Icelanders are targetting minke and fin whales. So don’t worry about price changes, if you happen to be investing heavily in whale-puke.

Yes, but now that Iceland has announced they’re taking up commercial whaling again, I expect the price to fall.

So, slightly less valuable chunks of whale puke…cheers!

Picking nits here, but, no, Dad didn’t shoot old Yeller–

. . . To protect his family, Travis tearfully shoots Yeller and in doing so takes a painful first step into manhood.

And mikey, I also had a couple of teachers, both in high school and college, who let me play with the assignments. One I will always remember fondly is the guy who let me bag the analysis of thematic significance in a Greek myth and instead write a one-act play in which Jason was a beer-drinking redneck and Argo was not a ship but a hunting dog. I also got an A.

altho maybe its just our generation. As the parent of the college freshman, I had some conflicted feelings when we took him around to tour campuses. We saw some pretty incredible schools, and I remember wishing that I were the one considering attending. Perhaps to pursue my dream of studying….I dunno….Medieval History, perhaps, or Botany, or International Studies…..

Although I am grateful to my parents for footing the bill for my undergraduate degree, I have to say that I cannot remember ever having a serious conversation with them about where I would go to college. I went to the college my friends were going to. I don’t recall anyone ever asking me what my learning style was, what fields I was interested it, what kind of environment I wanted…..I never even visited a college — except for the time my high school band played in All State at one school, or the time my friend and I went up to the Big State College where her brother went to attend a football game.

I did, in fact, find my passion in college, but only by happenstance — it was certainly not one of the best schools in that field, and after I left and began working in my field, I was struck by how many things I’d been taught that were wrong.

I’ve actually spent a lot of my life in an academic environment, as a staff employee. And one of the perks of being a staffer is that you can take classes.

So I’ve come to actually value college later in life, and am a much better student now.

Smiling Mortician: A paper retrieved from one of those pay/password sites can slip by Turn It In as well, but only the first time. Once a text is run through the Turn It In checker, it is incorporated into its ever growing database. So the second time the text is used, it’ll get caught.

Yep. The teachers that seemed to me to be “good teachers” were the ones who let me turn in fiction, complete with dialog, even in classes other than creative writing. My report in 11th grade about Slaughterhouse Five was set in Dresden the night before the bombing, and got an A.

On the other hand, I HATED Fitzgerald, and when I had to do a book report on Tender is the Night, I flipped through it, read maybe a total of five pages, and figured I had it. Except I got that Dick and Nicole were brother and sister, making the entire premise of the paper laughable. Ouch. Got an F on that one…

mikey

Here’s one running challenging Bill Nelson for his spot in the Senate—Roy Tanner. Yeah, I know, he has no chance, but it’s fun to check out the kooky ideas anyways. Like his positions on security (don’t miss the picture) and something he calls sanctity.

As for your theory, mikey — I wish it were true more often than it is. I have occasionally had a student learn a lot through plagiarism (typically, the lesson learned is that everybody’s stealing from everybody and nobody bothers to check their facts — academia’s a lot like the webbosphere). And as for the myth of “buying a good, well-conceived paper”? Sadly, no. They’re very expensive if they’re any good at all, and most students who can afford those prices won’t even take the time to read the papers they’ve bought (I once had a student so lazy that he turned in a purchased paper without bothering to substitute his own name for the fake-student name with which the paper was equipped).

But the good news is that the “rotten, angry, rebellious, troublemaking smart underachiever class” typically doesn’t cheat. They’re the kids who get in my face and tell me how stupid the assignment was and tell me what they’re going to do instead. Generally I say OK.

It’s so demoralizing, earnestly talking to a largely unimpressed audience about academic integrity as a positive thing (instead of as a thing you’ll get in trouble for not having . . . ) In their defense, I think it’s getting harder and harder for students to see much rationale for integrity, given the role models they have in government and business . . .

This is one reason why I’m probably going to turn away from academia as a career path once I’m done. I just don’t want to do this anymore, and I don’t mean that in a “kids these days don’t want to work” geezer sense; there are very good contextual reasons why we see the lack of enthusiasm we do. Instead, I would say that it takes a certain talent to be able to break through that, and I don’t think I have it.

mikey

And I really hate having to think in terms of how to catch them. It’s so demoralizing, earnestly talking to a largely unimpressed audience about academic integrity as a positive thing (instead of as a thing you’ll get in trouble for not having . . . ) In their defense, I think it’s getting harder and harder for students to see much rationale for integrity, given the role models they have in government and business . . .