NYT on professors, students, and e-mail

Stefan Hagemann pointed me to an article by Jonathan Glater in today's New York Times, "To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me." An excerpt:

One student skipped class and then sent the professor an e-mail message asking for copies of her teaching notes. Another did not like her grade, and wrote a petulant message to the professor. Another explained that she was late for a Monday class because she was recovering from drinking too much at a wild weekend party.

Jennifer Schultens, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, received this e-mail message last September from a student in her calculus course: "Should I buy a binder or a subject notebook? Since I'm a freshman, I'm not sure how to shop for school supplies. Would you let me know your recommendations? Thank you!"

At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.

These days, they say, students seem to view them as available around the clock, sending a steady stream of e-mail messages -- from 10 a week to 10 after every class -- that are too informal or downright inappropriate.

You can read my guidelines for e-mailing a professor by clicking on the link below. This post is, as the sidebar jokes, my #1 hit, with thousands of visits.

» How to e-mail a professor

Yet another word from the Greek

I've been wondering for a while whether to post this bit -- I just wasn't sure what to do. Merriam-Webster's (February 1) Word of the Day:

abulia \ay-BOO-lee-uh\ noun
: abnormal lack of ability to act or to make decisions

Example sentence:

"Since his college graduation, my son seems to be suffering from abulia -- —he just can't decide what he wants to do next," sighed Philip.

Did you know?

"I must have a prodigious quantity of mind," Mark Twain once wrote. "It takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up." The indecision Twain laments is fairly common; only when inability to make decisions reaches an abnormal level does it have an uncommon name: "abulia." The English term we use today comes from a New Latin word that combines the prefix "a-," meaning "without," with the Greek word "boulē," meaning "will." "Abulia" can refer to the kind of generalized indecision that makes it impossible to choose what flavor ice cream you want, though it was created to name a severe medical disorder that can render a person nearly inert.

» Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day

Laughing in the drugstore

My wife Elaine jokingly pointed out a line of Bald Guyz products in the drugstore this afternoon. After careful examination, I had to buy a box of Head Wipes. For $4.99, who could ask for a better typo?

Our cashier didn't get it. If I'd had a Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary with me, I would've said "mange: any of various persistent contagious skin diseases marked esp. by eczematous inflammation and loss of hair, affecting domestic animals or sometimes humans, and caused by a minute parasitic mite."

The other Bald Guyz products -- sunscreen, shampoo -- had awkward-looking blue stickers over the offending text, asking consumers to let the company know what they need. But the Head Wipes had somehow, err, slipped through.

I know what BG Products needs: more careful proofreading. (Moisturizes is a typo too.)

Update (June 7, 2007): An unexpected discovery about Bald Guyz Head Wipes!

Barbara Guest (1920-2006)

The poet Barbara Guest died on Wednesday in Berkeley, California.

The problem proposed to the lemon tree. When
will your green fruit turn yellow? When shall I
understand Minneapolis?

If not grain by grain, at least loaf by loaf.

If not the river flow, at least its turn and tributary.

Still there are permissions to approach through that
immigrant air.

From The Countess from Minneapolis (1976)

New, improved

If you're a returning visitor to Orange Crate Art, you'll notice that I've given my blog yet another makeover. The dotted lines and little arrows of the Rounders template no longer pleased me, so I spent a fair amount of time this afternoon deconstructing the template, risking disaster at every moment (because I have very little idea what I'm doing!).

I like the clean lines, white columns, and dark background very much, and the signboard at the top gives Orange Crate Art more of that same great orange taste. Reader, I hope that you like it too.

The poetry of spam

In my mailbox this evening, there was a plea for URGENT ATTENTION from one Gregorio Singleton. A name like that and he needs attention? His name bears a curious similarity to that of Faustino Pendleton, who showed up in my mailbox two days ago.

Thinking about the folks who live in the mail reminded me of a wonderful post by Sean Payne on his blog Sign Language. Therein Sean analyzes the gnomic utterances of "poet" Jasper Gamble, whose work arrives in unbidden e-mails sent under a variety of aliases -- "Summer Pitts, Thomas Colon, Wean Diesel, and even Rosetta Beard."

You can read Sean's witty commentary on Jasper and company via the link.

» Jasper Gamble, the poetry of spam

Update: I've given Faustino Pendleton and Gregorio Singleton imaginary lives as designers whose product lines are featured on the Home Shopping Network -- "Faustino for Her" and "The Singleton Collection," respectively. I'm not sure though what products these lines feature.

Overheard

"Is he involved with anyone -- besides himself?"

Scary mail

This sentence, from today's mail, needs rewriting:

I am excited to tell you that we have selected your English department as one that will receive the special attention of a [publisher's name] English discipline specialist this spring.

What's up, .doc?Or, another reason to hate Microsoft

(That's a wizard?)

I've been saving word-processed words as .rtf files (rich text format) for years. They're small, safe (no virus-carrying macros), and can be opened and edited with virtually any word-processor. In an idle moment yesterday, I thought it might be smart to convert all my old .doc (Microsoft Word) files to .rtf. I had no idea how difficult this seemingly simple task would turn out to be.

I knew that I couldn't do this work by hand. So I downloaded a free renaming program to change the file extension of my .doc files. As it turns out though, changing the extension of a .doc file doesn't change the file's identity. As I found when re-checking the size of my documents folder and comparing a few "changed" files and their backed-up .doc versions, there had been no change in size. That was the first sign that this project was going to be more complicated than I thought.

And things were now rather confused, because the files that were now labeled as .rtf files in my folders were still identified as .doc files in Microsoft Word's Open and Save dialog boxes. I started to get the sinking feeling that I get whenever things have gone really wrong on a computer.

All was not lost though. (If it had been, I'd be doing something other than writing a blog entry.) I changed the extensions back to .doc and did some online reading (there seems to be very little about this topic). What I really needed, it appeared, was the Batch Conversion Wizard in Microsoft Word.

I've been using Word for years, but I'd never seen this tool. It's found by going to File, New, Templates, On my computer, and Other documents. I think of a template as a tool with which to design a new document, so a tool to change what's already been created seems oddly placed among the templates. The directions for the Wizard's use in Word's Help file are clearly not for someone working with a large number of files: "Place the documents you want to convert in a single folder." Ha. As one would expect, there is no acknowledgement in the Help file that rich text format makes it easy to share one's work with people who don't use Microsoft Word. The only reference to other programs is to Microsoft Works.

The Help file's advice to work with a single folder deftly avoids acknowledging what immediately becomes obvious: the Wizard cannot see files in subfolders. Some Wizard. So I changed my .doc files by going through each folder and sub-folder and sub-sub folder in my documents folder, selecting "all," and letting the converter do its thing.

Some .docs wouldn't convert automatically; I converted those by opening them and resaving them as .rtf files. And while doing so, I noticed something curious -- when one "saves as" with a .doc file, "rich text format" is not visible in the drop-down selection box (even if it is Word's default for saving). "Rich text format" shows up only after scrolling.



The ordering of "save as" options here seems haphazard. Is "document template" really a more likely choice than rich text format for saving a file? Clicking ".dot" is certainly a tedious mistake to undo -- one has to dig down to the Templates folder in Application Data to get to the accidental file. So why is "document template" more accessible than .rtf? And why is .rtf not visible among the first few choices? Is Microsoft's intent to make it just a bit more tedious to save files in formats other than its proprietary ones?

Consider finally the look of the Wizard at the top of this post. That's from Office 2003. What can one make of a corporation that allows such shabby inconsistency in its user interface? Right now, that jittery, garish, circa-1997-turquoise-and-teal Wizard embodies for me all that's ill-planned and shoddy in Microsoft's software.

All thumbs

This morning, 6:30, rising and shining, I felt the following words flash into my mind:

Where is thumbkin?
Where is thumbkin?
Here I am.
Here I am.
How are you today, sir?
Very well, I thank you.
Run and hide.
Run and hide.

A small but crucial part of my poetry base, forgotten for a long time. I was fascinated as a little kid by the idea of fingers having polite conversations but then running away. And I sang this song with my children when they were younger.

Why did this song return? Perhaps because I'm looking forward to trying out the Thumbthing, a nifty tool for reading. I am all thumbs.

Update: I tried the Thumbthing. It is a nifty tool, but I'm going to stick with my thumbs.