I’ve been employed as a stats lecturer for a year today!

AND SPEAKING OF SCHOOL:

I respectfully disagree with this to a certain extent.

[Realizes she is positioning herself in front of the verbal firing squad by disagreeing with Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Students want good (or at least passing) grades because they want the class to “count” as being mastered. They want the class to count because it’s one step closer to a degree. Why do most students want a degree? To get a good, well-paying job.

In my (probably stupid) opinion, I don’t think the blame for cheating can rest solely on the school system. It rests, rather on the fact that we value the eventual end product—tolerable job + money—over the actual learning itself.

Of course, I’m likely being idealistic if I say, “we should value learning for learning’s sake LOLZ,” but I think we’ve passed the point where that’s even in the back of our minds. “Gotta pass calc II to get into CS 352 to graduate! Who cares about the harmonic series?”

(You should care, dammit, it’s cool.)

I’d like to actually try to better defend my position on this, but I have a super bad headache tonight and I probably just typed a bunch of gibberish up there. If I remember later, I’ll add more to this.

Necessary side rant: why in the name of Captain Buttswag am I still working on this story? The chapter names are hilarious because a few of the chapters are solely about specific numbers. So I’ve got stand-in names like: “Chapter 5: 5” and “Chapter 7: 2.” UGH.