Punishment

Ever wonder how colleges punish professors who don't toe the line? I got an e-mail from Ashland University warning us not to sign overload forms for our classes. Here's the threat:

Seriously overenrolling sections can result in penalties such as assigning you to teach 8:00 am sections at MedCentral for their winter and spring quarters.

"Seriously overenrolling" means one student over the limit—though I wonder who gets punished when the department chair manages to squeeze a couple of extras into my class at the last minute without asking me.

Can't Generalize

I'm teaching at NCSC this summer, and as usual I've forgotten just how concrete-minded my students there are.

They have a paper coming up, and they asked how to write it. One guy was perplexed because the minimum length is five pages and that seems like a lot for a five-paragraph essay. They asked what they should do with the assignment, so I said something like, "Well, if I were doing this, I might choose William Faulkner's 'Barn Burning,' and do thus and such." The obvious question: "So we have to write about 'Barn Burning'?"

Chinese AGAIN?

If you are one of my friends and your server has a Chinese-language address, I apologize. The post comments in pure Chinese have stopped; now I get an English-language comment that doesn't appear to relate to the post, an executable file, and a Chinese-language address. Those all get deleted without being opened.

So if you're trying to send me something cute from China, write to my usual e-mail address and tell me that you're doing it.

Struggling to Recycle

I'm in the middle of a household cleanup campaign. So now I have a working (but not wanted) Hoover vacuum cleaner, two saucers, a cup, and a sifter in the back of my car. I tried to drop them off at Salvation Army, but they don't have bins any more and the entrance was chained (at 2:30 p.m.). I wonder if they take things like that any more. Goodwill is apparently still in business, though not where I thought it was. So I drive around town with these things in the back.

Bottles? Cans?

Recycling is one of those liberal political ideas that's designed to limit the freedom of patriotic Americans, so I've never been surprised that it's nearly impossible in Mansfield. Yes, there are bins in small villages and yes, there's a trailer that makes brief stops at random locations, but the whole idea is to simply fulfill the letter of the law, not to make recycling easy. The general public hasn't got the idea, though. Every time I go to the trailer in Butler, it's stuffed to overflowing.

No riches in trash

Years ago, someone figured out that glass, even though it's easily recyclable, isn't a source of great numbers of dollars, so we can't recycle it here. Never mind that we do have to spend public money to bury the stuff somewhere. The terrible national government, though, got irritated at us for burying fluorescent tubes (which contain a lot of mercury), so just to shut the EPA up, we now collect those tubes. And charge people a buck each to drop them off. What an incentive to keep from throwing them in the dumpster!