David Foster Wallace’s senior year

In his senior year at Amherst College, David Foster Wallace wrote theses in English (creative writing) and philosophy. The one became the novel The Broom of the System (1987). The other will be published by Columbia University Press next month as Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. From James Ryerson’s introduction:

Even just the manual labor required to produce two separate theses could be overwhelming, as suggested by an endearingly desperate request Wallace made at the end of his letter to [philosopher William E.] Kennick. “Since you’re on leave,” he wrote, “are you using your little office in Frost library? If not, does it have facilities for typing, namely an electrical outlet and a reasonably humane chair? If so, could I maybe use the office from time to time this spring? I have a truly horrifying amount of typing to do this spring — mostly for my English thesis, which has grown Blob-like and out of control — and my poor neighbors here in Moore [Hall] are already being kept up and bothered a lot.”

Despite the heavy workload, Wallace managed to produce a first draft of the philosophy thesis well ahead of schedule, before winter break of his senior year, and he finished both theses early, submitting them before spring break. He spent the last month or so of the school year reading other students’ philosophy theses and offering advice.

In a 2008 New York Times article, Ryerson presents the gist of Wallace’s philosophy thesis: Consider the Philosopher.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard

“I even use . . . chalk”

From the New York Times, in response to an article on the use of clickers in college classes:

I teach college writing at a huge state school, and the other professors all request the “technology classrooms” so they can have all the gadgets and diversions — the big screen, the audio, the clickers. This year, I experimented with having a technology-free classroom. Students write with pencil and paper, we sit in a circle and look at one another, we talk, and we have discussions using rules of civility. I even use . . . chalk. The writing and learning has been absolutely amazing. Not every college classroom will be technology experience, so don’t forget to warn students they might get a professor like me.

This professor is on to something. There’s nothing more exciting in teaching and learning than unmediated communication in the little village of the classroom.

An Eleanor Roosevelt photograph

In the New York Times this morning, a short meditation on a photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt:

“Why is she carrying her own suitcase?” I asked my wife, Mary. She gave me a look as if I should know and answered, “Because she’s Eleanor Roosevelt.”

“HOT PIANO”

[“Ultramodern Piano Jazz taught by mail. Note or ear. Easy rapid lessons for adult beginners. Also Self-instruction system for advanced pianists. Learn 358 Bass Styles, 976 Jazz Breaks, hundreds of Trick Endings, Hot Rhythms, Sock, Stomp and Dirt Effects; Symphonic and Wicked Harmony in latest Radio and Record Style. Write for Free Booklet.” Popular Mechanics, June 1934.]

I like the idea of learning by ear by mail. I found this ad while collecting “Learn at home” ads to go with John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (in which Connie Rivers plans to study electricity or radios through a correspondence course).

Related posts
Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer
“MONEY MAKING FORMULAS”
“Radios, it is”

A voice from a term-paper mill

A writer of “custom essays” tells all:

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.

The Shadow Scholar (Chronicle of Higher Education)

One way to defend against it: occasional short in-class writing.

Related posts
Adventures in cheating
“Plagiarism free”

(Thanks, Carrie and Elaine.)

String bags FTW

The New York Times reports this morning that reusable grocery bags (the ones made from recycled plastic) may contain “potentially unsafe levels of lead”:

“Bummer! We’re still not doing the right thing,” said Shelley Kempner of Queens, who was looking over the produce at Fairway on Broadway at West 74th Street. She prefers a reusable bag, she said, because she “likes the idea of not putting more plastic into the environment.”

Told of the recent lead findings, Ms. Kempner sighed — “It’s still not good enough” — and wondered if she would have to switch to something else. “Are we going to have to start using string?” she asked.

String bags are terrific. They’re inexpensive, durable, and fit easily into a pocket or bag. And because they stretch, they hold a lot. How much is a “lot”? A lot! Elaine and I bought our bags from a natural-foods store. As you might expect, Amazon has them too.

A mystery challenge

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Can you identify the object in the photograph above? The object is made of plastic, 2 15/16" long, 1 5/16" wide at its base. The black-and-white is meant to suggest “the past.” But not the distant past. (Yes, that depends upon how one defines distant.)

Reader, I invite you to play twenty questions or shout out the answer in the comments. I have no idea how recognizable this object is, and I’m curious to see what happens.

7:34 a.m.: The mystery is no more. Emerick Rogul identified the mystery object as a floppy-disk notcher, used to turn single-sided  5 1/4" floppy disks into double-sided disks by punching a notch into the side of the disk’s plastic housing. Congratulations, Emerick!

A Google Books search for suncom notcher turns up the following item:

[InfoWorld, January 20, 1986.]

And suddenly I’m back typing on my Apple //c.

Domestic comedy

While watching five minutes of Jeopardy:

“Who would name their kid Jove?”

“Saturn?”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts
Jove Graham Wins on Jeopardy! (Swarthmore News)

The lobster, considered

Boing Boing considers the lobster, or the most humane way to kill one:

According to Jennifer Basil, associate professor of Biology at City University of New York, Brooklyn College, it’s boiling. That’s because lobsters, like most invertebrates, don’t have the same kind of brain we do. Instead of having one, big central mass of neurons — i.e., the brain — lobsters spread their thinking around their bodies in several smaller masses, called ganglia.

“Every segment has its own little brain doing its own thing,” says Basil. Which is why, she says, it’s better to boil the lobster and kill all those mini-brains at once. “Cutting it up just creates two uncomfortable lobsters.”

But consider David Foster Wallace’s essay “Consider the Lobster”, which begins its examination of these matters (in the pages of Gourmet) by quoting a statement of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council: “‘The nervous system of a lobster is very simple, and is in fact most similar to the nervous system of the grasshopper. It is decentralized with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain that gives the experience of pain.’” Says Wallace,

Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in this latter claim is still either false or fuzzy. The human cerebral cortex is the brain-part that deals with higher faculties like reason, metaphysical self-awareness, language, etc. Pain reception is known to be part of a much older and more primitive system of nociceptors and prostaglandins that are managed by the brain stem and thalamus.[12] On the other hand, it is true that the cerebral cortex is involved in what’s variously called suffering, distress, or the emotional experience of pain — i.e., experiencing painful stimuli as unpleasant, very unpleasant, unbearable, and so on.

Endnote [12] adds:

To elaborate by way of example: The common experience of accidentally touching a hot stove and yanking your hand back before you’re even aware that anything’s going on is explained by the fact that many of the processes by which we detect and avoid painful stimuli do not involve the cortex. In the case of the hand and stove, the brain is bypassed altogether; all the important neurochemical action takes place in the spine.

I’m in no position to decide who’s right here. I only invite you to consider what Jennifer Basil has to say, what David Foster Wallace has to say, and what the lobster might have to say.

“This is college. Everyone cheats.”

A leader of tomorrow:

“This is college. Everyone cheats. Everyone cheats in life in general. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in this testing lab who hasn’t cheated on an exam. They’re making a witch hunt out of absolutely nothing, as if it were to teach us some kind of moral lesson.”

That’s Konstantin Ravvin, a student at the University of Central Florida, commenting on a cheating scandal in professor Richard Quinn’s senior-level business-management course. Yes, the students involved — perhaps 200 of 600 — are seniors.

Konstantin Ravvin may be right about as if. The Orlando Sentinel reports that “Quinn brokered a deal with the business dean that would allow students to clear their records if they owned up to cheating before the rewritten exam started being administered this morning.” You read right: everyone gets to take the midterm again. That’ll teach ’em.

How might students get hold of an exam and its answer key? By breaking and entering? Sort of. If a comment at Inside Higher Ed is to be believed, students found the midterm and answer key online. Margaret Soltan draws the reasonable inference that the midterm was a canned exam, something supplied by a textbook publisher.

The University of Central Florida recently made the news for its efforts to stop cheating, which include surveillance cameras in “testing centers” and a ban on gum-chewing during exams.

[To readers visiting from this page:

From my perspective, one kind of cheating (if giving a pre-fab exam is cheating) doesn’t legitimize another. Two wrongs (if giving a pre-fab exam is wrong) don’t make a right. I’ve removed the final parenthetical sentence from the next-to-last paragraph — “(Everyone cheats!)” — so as to remove any confusion about whether I think cheating is ever acceptable. It is not, though cheating, like irony, abounds. I do think that Mr. Ravvin’s skepticism about moral lessons is reasonable: allowing a do-over here, because so many students cheated, seems to me to teach a very odd lesson about strength in numbers.]

Update, November 18, 2010: Details emerge in Inside Higher Ed:

What is clear is that some students gained access to a bank of tests that was maintained by the publisher of the textbook that Quinn used. They distributed the test to hundreds of their fellow students, some of whom say they thought they were receiving a study guide like any other — not a copy of the actual test. . . .

[M]any have noted that the students’ initial intent was less troubling than their conduct once they realized they had an advance copy of the test. No one raised his or her hand during the test to acknowledge having had a copy of it, and the incident came to light only after Quinn statically analyzed the scores and saw that they ran a grade-and-a-half higher than in the past.

It turns out that Professor Quinn is on tape stating at the start of the semester that he creates the midterm and final examinations for the class. Thus the defense offered above — which seems a pretty feeble one.

In my experience, academic misconduct has a simple explanation: the student doesn’t expect to be caught, an expectation stemming from cluelessness, hubris, or both.

Related reading and viewing
“This is college. Everyone cheats.” (The Cap Times)
UCF Students Busted for Cheating (ABC News)

[Thanks to Stefan Hagemann for pointing me to this story.]