How do you feel about backing up your computer data in the Cloud? Basically, we’re talking about using someone else’s servers as a gigantic external hard drive for your data storage.
One of the guys in my business group, a PC tech, urges friends to use Carbonite, a service that offers unlimited backup capacity (“no limits on your backup storage space”!), a powerful encryption program, and ongoing automatic backup, all for $55 a year. That seems amazingly cheap for unlimited storage.
Just now I’m using Apple’s ME.com, which puts an icon in Finder that effectively works as an external drive. It gives you 20GB of space (you can upgrade, if you can afford it), you can use it to back up data from mobile devices, and you get MacMail with it. Annual cost is $99, which is kinda high…but on the other hand, I’m not getting rid of my years-old mac.com address, because so many of my friends and business acquaintances have it. I’d lose a lot of contacts if I dumped the e-mail now, and so in effect the 20 gigs of storage in the cloud comes with the overpriced mail system. Although it can synch all your devices and allow you to access your Mac from a remote computer, as far as I can tell ME.com does not have an automatic backup feature. Uploading an entire directory can be excruciatingly slow. However, backing up just a file or two is fast and simple.
Apple also provides a system called “Time Machine” with an automatic backup feature, but as far as I can tell, it only backs up files to a hard drive; apparently it doesn’t yet talk to ME.com.
Backing up your data to the Cloud has a lot of advantages, the main one being that when the burglar steals all your computer gear or the house burns down and melts your desktop, your laptop, and your external drive your data will be safe somewhere else. Because it’s “out there” with the Truth, you can access the stuff from any computer, so you don’t have to carry a flash drive or hard drive around with you. And as we know, all hard drives eventually fail, whether external or internal; moving data to the cloud lowers the probability that you’ll lose data in a hardware crash.
On the other hand, IMHO relying on someone else’s servers is a bit scary. I’m not real confident about any of these outfits’ hacker-proofness. Carbonite encrypts your data so thoroughly that if you lose your password, you’re SOL, because no one there can recover a password. ME.com is protected only by whatever password you cook up. As we know, no matter arcane you try to be, passwords can be highly vulnerable.
What do you think about the advantages and trade-offs of backing up data to the Cloud? And if you’re storing your backups online, what system are you using?
Well, not much: student papers will come in on Thursday, needing to be turned around by the following Tuesday. But all things said and done, reading 50 comp papers is one heckuva lot better than hauling back and forth across the freeways to Tempe ten times in the cheery company of my fellow homicidal drivers.
Spent the better part of the weekend in the company of my friend KJG, now also a certified escapee from the Great Desert University. She went over the wall a few months ago, and like me is only just beginning to fully unwind from the stress of working in a psychologically crushing environment. It truly takes a good year to recover from the effects of spending eight or ten hours a day in a place where management works at making everyone miserable.
You realize…? There are therapists in this city who specialize in counseling GDU employees. Is that or is that not amazing?
Saturday I drove out to her house, way on the far west side (halfway to California). She and her husband, a firefighter, have built a lovely home on an acre of land out there. She’s very, very good at gardening and housekeeping; now that she’s home all the time, the place looks gorgeous.
KJG worried, as the opportunity for her to retire approached, about no longer contributing to the household income. She actually felt guilty about the prospect. Yesterday, though, she remarked that she no longer feels that way: “We have plenty,” she observed.
Indeed. And as a matter of fact, to pay for the gardening, housekeeping, cooking, and homemaking services she does could cost them more than she was earning at GDU. Sometimes having one member of a couple not work costs the household a great deal less than it would appear at first glance.
We took the dogs for a hike in the White Tank Mountains, which was quite an adventure for Cassie the Short-legged Little Corgi. KJG has a well trained and mellow doberman, one of whose steps equals about ten of a corgi’s.
The day was so gorgeous, there were quite a few people out, although not so many that the trail seemed as crowded as those in town. We did run into one chucklehead with a gigantic bulldoggy looking critter, probably a mastiff mix. He stood aside and cooed, “Don’t worry, he’s fine!” Of course the instant KJG approached to pass them, his huge dog lunged for the dobe, who, though generally a laid-back sort, wasn’t inclined to take any guff. Fortunately, Kathy is a good dog handler and managed to get by without contact. As she and her dog reached the other side of this obstacle, the doberman turned around, glared back at the guy and his mutt, and emitted a deep, alarming growl: Make my day!
And so we see again the uses of a small dog that can be picked up. Because Cassie only weighs 25 pounds, I could pick her up, climb off the trail, and wait for the guy and He’s Just Fine to go on their way.
Why do people take animals like that on narrow public paths?
That notwithstanding, it really was a beautiful morning and a nice hike.
Later we junketed around to several big nurseries on the westside—the area still has surviving pockets of agricultural land, some of which are occupied by wholesale nurseries whose proprietors will allow the general public to wander around. Then we took it into our heads to look at model homes in the very few surviving new-home developments.
And that was something to see. If you’re in the market for a new home in the Southwest, now is the time to buy! They’re practically giving the things away. We went into a set of Shea Homes models—Shea is reputed to be one of the better tract builders in Arizona—where we found several very attractive designs in what appeared to be pretty decent construction. Interestingly, the lots in this tract were sized for human beings living in single-family homes, with enough space between the houses to allow air to circulate. For $177,000, you can buy a large, intelligently laid out house with lots of big, bright, airy rooms, a kitchen to die for, and a master bathroom best described as “sybaritic.” Of course, by the time you added the amenities that made the models desirable, you’d be pushing three hundred grand… But it was clear that for about what my house would sell for, you could get the basic floor plan plus a few upgrades that would be hard to retrofit—the top-quality cabinetry, for example—and then over the next few years make the improvements you’d like as you could afford them.
For me, the disadvantage (besides the noise from the F-16s flying out of the nearby Air Force base) is the enormous distance from everything I like to do. It’s almost an hour’s drive from the central city. Moving out there would mean the end of choir participation, the end of the regular jaunts to AJs and Whole Foods, and the beginning of impossible drives to the nearest community college.
But it was fun to look at the houses. It really would be perfect if you could get Shea to build one of those places on an infill lot.
Sunday KJG drove into town, because we wanted to go on the Willo Historic District tour. This has become quite a shindig! They’d blocked off the feeder streets one street south of where I used to live, and the street where my son’s two babysitters used to live was filled with vendors’ booths. We came across one of my choir coconspirators, a lovely alto who owns Ecocentricity, an environmentally conscious shop right in the middle of the Willo commercial fringe.
She was selling a big purple purse one of her suppliers had made from a 1970s leather skirt. It was incredibly cute, and the leather was so soft and light the thing hardly seemed to weigh anything. The price was a bit stiff, though—ninety bucks. Coveting it, I set it aside to think it over while we were walking.
The day grew warm, though, and before we could get back to the Ecocentricity booth, we faded. Ended up going to lunch at our favorite uptown restaurant instead of wandering back whence we’d come.
In the real estate department, I really do miss my beautiful old house in Willo. Occasionally, I think I’d like to move back there. However, the historic district designation and the huge demand from affluent DINKs has pushed the prices out of my range. Oh well. It’s a lot of work to keep those old places up, anyway.
At Evensong my choir friend told me that the purse had almost sold three times, but she still has it! So I’ll probably drive down to Ecocentricity today, after I call the arborist to see what he can do about the trees damaged by the idiot roofers.
I intend to bill Crown Roofing for the cost, and also to post a report about the tree assault on Angie’s List. Every time I look at my poor tree in front, I could just cry.
The afternoon rising to the high 70s, had a nice snooze on the hammock before heading out to Evensong, where we listened to another of our music director’s awe-inspiring organ recitals and then sang a couple of really nice pieces for the service. That was fun.
After Evensong I went to the wine and cheese reception, where whom should I meet but a fellow who works for Pearson Publishing. This outfit contracts to my partner in business crime, Tina, who does project management for them. Turns out this guy writes science and tech textbooks for Pearson—he’s got a fulltime job with them, but because they allow him to work from home three days a week, he’s able to live in town, instead of out in the sea of houses that is Chandler, where the megapublisher’s Arizona quarters are located.
The guy started as a high-school teacher in one of the top science and technical high-schools in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. He says the school was outperforming most other schools and had a nationally top-ranking science program. When the No Child Left Behind legislation kicked in, the faculty were informed that they had to stand down from what they were doing and instead focus on getting their kids to pass the standardized exams—whose standards were lower than what the kids were already achieving.
This lock-step dumbing-down degraded the school’s quality—it no longer ranks at all in science and technology—and so demoralized staff that many people quit. He said that the year he left, 25 other teachers also departed.
Pearson pays quite nicely…given the cost of textbooks, they can afford it. You can be sure this guy is earning more than he did at teaching, and pretty clearly America’s school system lost some talent. Ohh well.
Anyway, the guy has a fair amount of music background. Maybe he can be persuaded to join the choir. He seemed like a nice man who’d fit in well.
Then it was back to the Funny Farm for a 9:00 p.m. stroll through the neighborhood with Cassie, a nice wrap-up for a fun weekend.
Oh, God, I don’t know when I’ve ever been so tired.
Up at 3:00 a.m. Work until 4:30 or 5:00, wrestling with Excel: check and check and double-check to be sure my English-major arithmetic is right before transferring a ton of money to joint checking to cover about half of my share of the 2011 PITI for the Black Hole of Money in downtown Phoenix. Figure out a way to get the tax covered as well as the other fun parts of this bill for the entire freaking year (assuming I don’t drop dead between now and next December), and still have a little to spare.
Not bad, for a bleary-eyed predawn foray into personal finance.
Stagger back to bed, shivering…it is sooo cold in a 59-degree house. Well, not really; but sometimes it gives the distinct illusion of chill. Fall asleep.
Wake again at 9:00, when I’m supposed to be at Financial Advisor Dude’s office, thereinat to get the new will signed, witnessed, and notarized. Cope with a flood of e-mails demanding immediate response. Fly around to feed the dog, wash the stink off myself, throw on some clothes, and dart out the door. Streak across the city, not arriving too obscenely late. Complete this little piece of business. Stop by the grocer’s to pick up some bacon; it’s close to M’hijito’s house and sort of on my way home. Figure to drop off the package with the updated will, new powers of attorney, new living will, freshly recorded…uh oh!
Forgot to bring the beneficiary deed for the house. Sumbiche.
Schlep uptown to my shack. Have NO clue where the beneficiary deed is, in the piles of paper scattered all over my desk. Have to clean out the office to find the thing, if I can find it.
Shovel, shovel, shovel, shovel, and shovel. Push papers around, pull papers around, organize papers, toss papers, shred papers, file papers, God how I hate paper! Find the recorded beneficiary deed. Lawyer only sent one copy. Photocopy it with my printer. Stick original in packet. Send e-mail to M’hijito explaining the importance of storing the originals of these documents carefully and not losing them, and also explaining why he needs the copies.
Phone rings: insurance adjuster. He’s sending an extra $550 to cover the cost overrun for the roof and AC. Says he might send more if I come up with an invoice for repainting the fascias. I hang up, kiss the ground upon which he adjusts claims, and call the painter.
Climb in the car and drive back down to M’hijito’s place, enormous waste of $3.15/gallon gasoline. Deposit fat packet of paper on his dining room table. Burn more gas driving home.
By now the dog resembles an overstuffed bratwurst.
Take the dog for a long walk in the park. Poor beast has to relieve herself not once, not twice, not three times, but four times. Good thing we brought plenty of blue New York Times plastic newspaper wrappers.
Unbelievably beautiful day. This is why we live in Arizona, why we tolerate intermittently being made the nation’s class clowns. Gorgeous. Dog finds a ball left behind in the park by some other, careless dog. Exhausts herself playing with it. An hour later we drag back in the front door.
Start to clean. Oh, this house gets filthy! Oh well, at least the office is picked up. Dust and dust and dust, scrub bathrooms, clean stove. Stop long enough—very hungry—to grab some cheese, fruit, crackers and wine.
Client e-mails to say he’s written another book; will we edit it? Will we edit it! Hell, yes we’ll edit it. Tina and I are both running low on editorial work; mighty glad to get this guy’s business. Back & forth with Tina, figuring out what we charged him before and how much time this is likely to take. Highly technical stuff, but the last book was generally coherent and easy to copyedit. Yes, she said. Yes.
Vacuum and vacuum and vacuum, climb under the bed to vacuum. Dustmop the rest of the dirt off all the floors, 1,860 square feet of tile. Steam-mop the grime off the floors. Climb on a ladder to reach the top of the refrigerator; Windex the grime off that and off the front of the fridge and off the fronts and trim of all the other kitchen appliances and the glass tabletops outside and…and…
Realize, really and fully, what an unholy mess the damn roofers made of my two most beautiful trees. The idiots hacked whole limbs off them…and they were NOT over the roof. What the hell got into those fools? They chopped a limb off the spectacular desert willow in front, leaving it sticking out like an amputated leg and yanking out a quarter of the canopy. That tree shaded the (very hot in summer!) front courtyard, and now it’s wrecked. The beautiful paloverde on the west side, which also provided enough shade to make a different sitting area tolerable, was not helped by their butchery, either. Lay a curse on them. Remind self to write a post on the hazards of relying on Angie’s List.
Throw the area rugs into the barely functional dryer, one at a time, along with rags laden with home-made fabric softener. This beats great wads of dog hair out of them, which collects in mats on the dryer’s filter. This, I reflect, may explain why the dryer threatens to burn the house down if it’s run on anything other than “air dry.”
Water plants. Feed the dog.
Finally finish cleaning. Just freaking beat.
Take the dog for a walk, bearing a mug full of iced tea. Glorious evening, Orion flying overhead, a brilliant half-moon silvering the yards, sidewalk and street. Enjoy the spectacular night through a haze of exhaustion. Stumble back in the house and, as I step over the threshold, watch the hard-fired ceramic mug slip out of my fingers and fly into the air.
Grab it! Just get my fingers onto it, only to see it slip free again, cartwheel across the room, crash onto the floor, and explode into a cascade of shrapnel.
God freaking dammit!
Get the dog safely around the sharp, broken pottery, lock her into the back room. Sherds of glass-like ceramic are all over the floor, under the sofa, on the sofa, between the cushions…what an unholy mess.
Haul out the broom, the dustpan and the vacuum (again!). Move the furniture, haul the gigantic sofa across the room, pick up sharp broken stuff, sweep vacuum vacuum sweep, vacuum the shattered pieces out of the sofa cushions. Haul all the furniture back into place, haul the cleaning gear back to the garage and the hall closet. Curse like a sailor all the while. Hate cleaning. Hate having to re-clean what I just finished cleaning even more than I hated having to clean it in the first place.
Have to be at KJG’s house, halfway to Yuma, by 8 tomorrow a.m., with the dog in tow. Great wads of dog hair are peeling out of her fur. Can’t take this animal over to her place, there to deposit fleece all over K’s house, always much cleaner than mine.
Take the dog out to the driveway and brush the bejayzus out of her. Friend suggested you can clean a dog’s coat a bit with a damp microfiber rag. Try that out. Dog doesn’t seem to mind. Concrete is hard, back hurts, feet hurt, eyes ache with exhaustion. But dog is de-fleeced, at least some of the gray grime wiped off her erstwhile white little paws.
Phone rings. Fly in the house, being sure the dog gets in, too. Miss the caller. Go back outdoors to collect the dog defuzzing tools. Phone rings. Race back indoors, grab the phone. Crate & Barrel lady. They just noticed that they ordered up the cushion for the ottoman I’m trying to buy from them, but not the ottoman itself.
What?
Why would they think I’d buy an ottoman cushion but not an ottoman? She says it’ll be another couple of weeks before the rest of the piece is delivered to the store. Since I’ve been waiting three months for this thing already, what’s another two weeks or so?
Just that much longer I won’t have to pay their bill.
Realize Funny didn’t post anything today; if a post is to go live tomorrow it’ll have to be written before I go to bed. Submit four posts to carnivals. Research Delta Dental: does it do business in Canada? Probably not, rendering the AARP Delta Dental rant ineligible for the Canadian Finance Blog Festival. {grump}
Write post.
Schedule post.
Go to bed.
Hypnos, the God of Sleep, and His Half-brother Death
We’re told that almost two-thirds of Americans over 65 will need long-term care. Nor are the young immune to these bankrupting costs: 40 percent of long-term care patients today are aged 18 to 64.
The government program, called CLASS (the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program) probably will pay about $50 a day. Compared to the cost of a nursing home, that’s a tiny drop in the bucket. In 2010, according to a survey by Metlife, the average cost of a semiprivate room in a nursing home was $205 a day.
That’s with some poor soul moaning in the bed beside you, not a desirable thing. When my mother was dying, one of the wretches in the nursing home was in such pain she believed she was on fire. She kept screaming for her husband Orville, who never showed up. She screamed and screamed and screamed. If that’s not what you’d like keeping you awake 24/7, you’ll pony up $229 a day to have a room to yourself.
The costs shown in the link above are just averages; real costs vary widely by region (as does quality of care). In New York State, for example, the median price of a private room in a nursing home was $359 a day. Here in Arizona, it’s a mere $245 a day. Texans pay $181 a day, Nebraskans $207, Californians $269.
If you’re ambulatory but no longer able to keep up a house or apartment, you’ll pay $122 a day to reside in an assisted-living community. Think you’ll try to stay in your home? A home health aide gets paid $21 an hour to come in and care for you: that would be $168 for an eight-hour day, and many elders need to have someone with them through the night. Having someone come in to clean your house: $19 an hour. The cost of adult day care, where you’re carted off to spend your waking hours in an institution and then hauled home to sleep in your own bed: $67 a day.
Before you can qualify for Medicaid, you have to spend down all your assets on health and nursing care. This may include having to sell your home and your car. If you’re married, it means your surviving spouse will be pauperized. To rescue his mother from this fate while his father was dying of Parkinson’s, SDXB had to arrange to divorce them, a painful end to a 50-year marriage between two faithful Catholics.
If you’re in your 50s, now is the time to buy long-term care insurance, which ain’t cheap itself but is a lot less ruinous than those costs. The longer you wait, the higher your premiums will be. Unfortunately, providers are beginning to reconsider the wisdom of these policies, and so it’s not so easy to find a good one. Metlife, which was one of the better providers, got out of the long-term care business last November. Policies that survive will have higher premiums; my policy, which started with TIAA-CREF but was sold to Metlife, hasn’t gone up yet, but I’m sure it will. I’m not looking forward to a stiff increase in the $75 a month I’m already paying out.
The options are not very good. For those of us who are less than wildly affluent, the projected $100 to $200 per month premiums for the government plan—assuming it survives the Republican onslaught—are way too much for way too little. I can’t afford to pay that for something that will not come close to covering my needs, especially on top of my existing plan, which also probably will not cover all my costs. Besides, if you’re already retired, you may not qualify: you have to work for three years to get the benefits. Alternatives include life insurance policies that allow you to tap the death benefit, which might help you to pay for some old-age or health-care costs, annuities that pay out either a lump sum or an income stream, or limited-pay policies in which the premium is paid once or over a period of just a few years.
Nevertheless, if you don’t already have a policy, now may be the time to look into getting one. Despite having ceased selling new policies and planning to jack up premiums through the stratosphere, Metlife at least is still servicing those policies it does have. You may want to lock in a policy with another insurer while some are still available.
Be careful, though. Like all insurance products, long-term care insurance is a field full of potholes. Learn everything you can about long-term care insurance before buying. Pitfalls include policies that won’t cover you if you move out of state; assuming the payout will cover all your costs (it probably won’t); limited coverage periods; recurring deductibles; and an array of other little surprises. Call your State Health Insurance Counseling and Assistance Program, which will provide you with unbiased information. The American Association of Retired Persons offers some in-a-nutshell consumer education, but you should be aware that AARP sells long-term care insurance and so is not a disinterested party.
Consider how much you’ll really need. If you’re not living in your home, most of your monthly expenses will go away. Thus about 90 percent of your Social Security and pension or savings income can go toward maintaining you institutionally. For me, that would come to about $78 a day. Here in Arizona I would need $245 a day to put myself up in a nursing home; thus the insurance would have to cover only(!) $168 a day.
Nursing home costs go up every year, and so you should look for a policy that offers you a chance to opt for increased coverage to adjust for inflation.
That’s about the best you can do to protect yourself. Otherwise…pray for a quick end. 😉
Bear with me, gents, while us chicklets indulge in some Girl Talk.
wook! See update, below!!!
Over at Out of Debt Again, Mrs. Accountability discovered a cool gadget to allow a woman with long hair to create a DIY bob at home. She tried it, and it turned out looking pretty darned nice.
This led to a rumination on the cost of hair maintenance, something I’ve held forth about, too. For years I wore my hair at shoulder length, partly because SDXB liked long hair, partly because I enjoy the sensuality of long hair, too, and partly because it saves hugewads of money when you don’t have to traipse into a salon once every four to six weeks. But eventually I got it cut short. It looked a lot better, and the effect on strangers, who had been given to taking one look at me and dismissing me as poor white trash, was marked.
When I got laid off, I could no longer afford Shane the Wonder-Stylist, and so he and I parted ways. For a while I was going to a woman in Tempe who did a good job, but that’s a long drive, and besides, just the site of the GDU campus gives me a flinch reflex. Once my work there ended, I started looking for people in town. Have been through four of them; one was very good, and the rest…well…
Last time I went in to the newest stylist, she cut my hair so short you could see my scalp through what remained! Since my hair is very thick, that’s telling. She cut off all the natural curl, so I could no longer scrunch it into a cute style and I had to stand in front of the mirror dorking with a hair dryer to get myself presentable enough to be seen in public. I hate that.
Since then I’ve been trying to let it grow out, figuring when there’s finally something to work with again, I’ll go back to the Tempe stylist. It’s been weeks and my hair is still too short to work with. And it just looks terrible.
The problem is, it’s very hard to describe to a stylist what you want, especially if you want something nonstandard like not having bangs flopping down on your face. “Please cut it short, go with the natural flow of the curls and waves, and don’t leave bangs falling in my eyes” doesn’t seem to register.
However, recently I found this handy site, which reveals the specific stylist-speak names of haircuts and coloring patterns. It’s kind of cool, because…mirabilis! It gives you a way to talk to your hair stylist! The drawings give you a clue to what each style should look like, and the names attached to them apparently are standard names for specific styles.
The site not only gives you the names of popular styles, it suggests what to say to the stylist to communicate what you have in mind: “Keep layers long in back and choppy all around. This cut is all about movement. Add heavy, uneven bangs. They can be tucked behind ears or left in front of face.”
If you google the style names given here, most searches will bring up photos showing what the cut looks like on a real (or nearly real) human being. Google “short bob” hairstyle (with short bob in quote marks), and up come a number of sites with images, some of which suggest my trashed hairstyle may be no worse than anyone else’s…
At any rate, it gives you a starting point for talking to your stylist: at least you can know what the style you think you want is called!
Update:
Mrs. Accountability reports that she did not use the bob-making device to get the cool hairstyle shown on her site. In fact, that style was created by a living, breathing, paid stylist.
Down the tubes, that’s where it’s going. Education, I mean. Especially higher education. And by extension, all that we know as America the Beautiful is in the toilet, too.
Mercifully I don’t have to teach in the lower grades, where administrators and taxpayers feel teachers should work for poor pay in worse working conditions and are reviled for daring to organize. Instead, along with legions of my colleagues, I get to teach the products of those conditions.
Here’s what’s on the wind at the Great Desert University: At a recent college meeting, faculty were informed that the university plans to eliminate as many faculty associates as possible.
“Faculty associates” are grossly underpaid part-timers, desperate enough to take contract work with no benefits and, given the de facto workload, at less than minimum wages. When I was teaching at GDU in a full-time adjunct position with a modest salary and benefits, I taught eight sections a year. For what my salary and benefits cost the university, GDU could have hired FAs to teach eighteen sections, and still had $945 left over. Most adjuncts teach the required lower-division scutwork courses, especially freshman composition, a hugely work-intensive writing course.
So, a large portion of the FAs are to go, but some will remain. Those who do remain will be required to teach a hundred and fifty students. That’s 75 students per writing course, since GDU limits part-timers to two sections per semester. A full-time adjunct, who teaches four-and-four, would be teaching three hundred students each semester in writing-intensive L-1 courses.
By way of pretending to accomplish this impossible task, the university will recruit undergraduate students to work as “peer reviewers.” These kids, whose job will be to “review” but not to grade papers, will be trained by the director of composition. In other words, they will not be true teaching assistants, but just one more responsibility for the adjunct to have to deal with.
One full-time adjunct on the West campus has already announced she’s walking, unemployment being a far more attractive option than slave labor of this magnitude. She told friends the work was crushing her…and that was before this announcement came down.
Such a short-sighted and merciless scheme came about because the state’s extreme right-wing legislature, while it’s busily engaged in passing laws that engender one costly lawsuit after another, in suing the federal government over health-care reform, and in fulminating that President Obama should prove (to their satisfaction) that he was born in the U.S., is killing the beast by cutting education funds to virtually nil. State funding for the community colleges was cut 85 percent this year, and you can be sure they’ll do something similar next year.
Students come into my classes from the public high schools better prepared (maybe) than they were a dozen years ago, but only by dint of ridiculous standardized tests that put them into ticky-tacky boxes so they all come out looking just the same. They can recite a few facts and they can organize a standardized three-paragraph or five-paragraph essay. But they still can’t formulate a logical sequence of thoughts on their own, they still can’t discern a reliable fact from raw baloney, and they have become artists at gaming the system.
This semester I decided that instead of knocking myself out riding herd on two or three dozen learning exercises and quizzes, I would take a leaf out of the University of Phoenix’s book: don’t grade the things. The UofP, according to a friend who teaches there, inflicts the same kinds of quizzoids and exercises on its lower-division comp/communication students that I do, with the same purpose: to focus attention on the high points of reading and lecture material. But instead of motivating students to do these exercises by paying them in the currency of the classroom (grades), the UofP tells them that the exercises are there for the students’ benefit. If you want a decent grade in the course, students are advised, you’ll do the exercises. If you don’t do them, you run the risk of getting lower scores on the assignments that are graded. And then: the only graded assignments are the actual, required writings.
For the English 102 sections, this cuts my workload from 23 graded assignments to nine. I’m still scoring drafts and peer reviews, since we’re required to teach writing as a “recursive process.” Drafting and peer reviewing is part and parcel of this theory of composition pedagogy. If that were not the case, making the students responsible for their own learning process would cut my workload to three graded assignments.
Okay, so this semester we’re seeing exactly how the new strategy works. Over the weekend I reviewed their responses to an exercise asking them to apply some new knowledge (i.e., stuff they should’ve learned in the fourth grade but didn’t) to some specific examples.
The exercise went online in one of Blackboard’s pseudo-blogs, which allow students to post material in a format that appears on the instructor’s end as long toilet-paper pages containing everyone’s work. The program eliminates the endlessly time-consuming task of downloading, opening, and re-uploading file after file after file. They can see each other’s work in the “blogs”; BB just changed providers for this program, and I can’t find any way to block students from viewing other students’ posts (as the previous program would do). I’m told it would do this, but apparently it won’t do it retroactively in “blogs” that were created before the program was {snark!} “updated.”
Of 50 students, 27 posted responses. And get this: a bunch of them cheated!
No joke. They copied each others’ work and posted it, for an assignment that bore NO CREDIT.
How do I know?
They copied and pasted the same typos. As in “the car cab goes from zero to 60….” They meant can, not cab. Or at least, the person who first wrote it meant that.
And how did they do on the fourth-grade work with which they were presented? Well, they had 20 questions. One of these snared 17 wrong answers from students (out of 27 respondents!). One had 13 wrong answers, and two had 12. These figures aren’t surprising, considering that they’re copying and pasting each others’ errors. What is surprising is that as they’re copying and pasting, they don’t spot typos and obvious bêtises. The only thing you can conclude is that a significant number of them aren’t even looking at what they’re pasting.
Cheating at solitaire…
Well, my friends. Those of you who work in HR, who run businesses, or who expect to do so in the future will soon have these fine young job applicants at your doorstep.
And that is why the future of America looks dimmer and dimmer.
Did you know that only 37 percent of white Americans have bachelor’s degrees? Those who do are getting them on the strength of this kind of work. By short-changing our schools, colleges, and universities, we’re short-changing ourselves and short-changing our country.
