Dirty February

Grass, mud, leaves, afternoon.

It is, as Jane Austen says in Mansfield Park, "the dirty month of February."

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Ways to anger professors

Useful advice for students, from Lynn F. Jacobs and Jeremy S. Hyman:

Nine Ways to Get on Your Professor's Bad Side (U.S. News & World Report)

The only item I'd take exception to is no. 9: "Plagiarize in super obvious ways." True, blatant plagiarism won't endear a student to a professor. But crafty, sly plagiarism is much, much worse, in part because its discovery may call for a significant investment of professorial time. Blatant plagiarism in contrast is merely pathetic, as its perpetrator assumes the professor to be a co-conspirator in cluelessness, someone who won't recognize the details of diction and syntax that so often make plagiarism instantly clear. Jacobs and Hyman's no. 5 — "Seem really stupid" — already covers blatant plagiarism.

A better no. 9: Be honest.

A related post
How to e-mail a professor

Counting dropouts

Looking at my town's high school's 2007–2008 "report card" this morning, I see an overall graduation rate of 88.8% (62.1% for economically disadvantaged students) and a dropout rate of 3.1%. How to account for the missing 8.1%? I don't know. But a 2008 New York Times article makes clear that accurate numbers for graduation and dropout rates have been difficult to come by, with widespread undercounting of dropouts. Why? No Child Left Behind made possible a variety of ways to calculate graduation rates:

In 2001, the year the law was drafted, one of the first of a string of revisionist studies argued that the nation's schools were losing more students than previously thought.

Jay P. Greene, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research organization, compared eighth-grade enrollments with the number of diplomas bestowed five years later to estimate that the nation’s graduation rate was 71 percent. Federal statistics had put the figure 15 points higher.

Still, Congress did not make dropouts a central focus of the law. And when states negotiated their plans to carry it out, the Bush administration allowed them to use dozens of different ways to report graduation rates.

As an example, New Mexico defined its rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who received a diploma. That method grossly undercounts dropouts by ignoring all students who leave before the 12th grade.

The law also allowed states to establish their own goals for improving graduation rates. Many set them low. Nevada, for instance, pledged to get just 50 percent of its students to graduate on time. And since the law required no annual measures of progress, California proposed that even a one-tenth of 1 percent annual improvement in its graduation rate should suffice.

Daniel J. Losen, who has studied dropout reporting for the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he once pointed out to a state official that, at that pace, it would take California 500 years to meet its graduation goal.

"In California, we're patient," Mr. Losen recalled the official saying.

States Data Obscure How Few Finish High School (New York Times)

In 2008, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings began requiring states to use a common formula to calculate dropout and graduation rates. Read more:

U.S. to Require States to Use a Single School Dropout Formula (New York Times)

NEDAwareness Week

[Click to enlarge and read.]

NEDAwareness Week 2009: February 22-28

Things to Do (.pdf download, 112KB)
National Eating Disorders Association
NEDAwareness Week

No dropping out

These words must have made some younger viewers sit up straight. From President Barack Obama's address tonight to a joint session of Congress:

[D]ropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country — and this country needs and values the talents of every American.

Obama's "I"

Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman, in today's New York Times:

Since his election, the president has been roundly criticized by bloggers for using "I" instead of "me" in phrases like "a very personal decision for Michelle and I" or "the main disagreement with John and I" or "graciously invited Michelle and I."

Given the state of presidential English (aka "American") between 2001 and 2009, it seems a bit absurd to criticize the new president for a single pronoun problem. I too though would like to hear "me."

I've wondered: might Obama's "I" be intended to avert perceptions of error that might follow from the proper use of "me"? No, I don't really think so either. My guess is that the "I" is a matter of long-standing habit, which also explains why I still say "stove" for "oven."

Today's Hi and Lois

Today's Hi and Lois: where to begin?



With the Slylock Fox angle. Kids, can you find five differences between the two panels? (There are at least five, possibly six if you're a stickler.)

The semantic comedy reminds me of The Honeymooners episode "Head of the House," in which Ed Norton tells the Questioning Photographer that he is "an engineer in subterranean sanitation." Norton's joking; he helps out the mystified newspaperman with "I'm a sewer worker!"

But here the punchline is unfunny, partly because such a course would indeed likely be called "Suburban Archaeology." A slightly better punchline: "Yeah, but his students call it 'Garbage.'" Or "Otherwise known as 'junk science.'" Note that the punchline supplier appears to be carrying garbage toward the Flagston house. That's funnier than his punchline, and funnier too than either of mine.

The punchline supplier's name, by the way, is Fitch. The man in blue is Abercrombie. These terranean sanitation engineers have always had these names. Given what's become of the clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch since Hi and Lois began, it seems best that these men now work in the strip in relative anonymity.

Yes, terranean is a word.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Bach branches

E.S.P. Bach, L.O.L. Bach, O.T.B. Bach . . . the gang's all here, or there:

Lost Branches of the Bach Family Tree (Musical Assumptions)

The American List

From A Continuous Lean, a list of 100+ companies whose stuff is made in the United States: The American List.

Fair warning: you might end up buying something. (Like, say, a Leatherman Multi-Tool.)

Real Thin Leads

[1 3/4" x 1 1/4".]

I admire this arrangement in ivory and black: the tilting balloon of "ONE GROSS," the lower-case "e's" and "l" of "Real Thin Leads," the jaunty cent sign, the chuckle-headed repetition. Real Thin Leads. Real Thin Lead. Ask for it by names! And I admire the cursive Autopoint, the forward-looking sort of cursive one might see on a home appliance.

And I like that this little package has been marked by history: at least three different writing instruments, green, red, and purple, have been tested on its surface. Just scribbles — no room to inquire Does this pen write? One side of the package has been resealed with tape in a hapless effort to honor a stern directive: "SEE THAT THIS SEAL IS NOT BROKEN." Ah, but it has been.

The "2H" correction — made in the store, I assume — is a reminder that some people are persnickety about their pencil leads. The potentially misleading "Extra" won't do when the unambiguous "2H" is at hand.¹

I found these Real Thin Leads circa 1998 during a going-out-of-business sale at a downstate Illinois stationery store. The store alas had been quietly going out of business for many years before having a sale about it.

¹ In grading lead, B signifies blackness; H, hardness. 2B lead is darker than B; 2H, harder than H. HB is the familiar "No. 2 pencil."



[This post is the first in what will be an occasional series, "From the Museum of Supplies." The museum is imaginary. Supplies is my word, and has become my family's word, for all manner of stationery items.]