With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
2002-05-09 - 11:18 a.m.
I forced myself to get all my grading done since the last update. I let them correct their errors on the tests, they can work together, take all the time they want and even get outside help. Despite that so many people still get most of the questions wrong. I made an interesting observation today. They do their corrections on their own paper so you'd assume that the more questions they get wrong the more sheets they'd hand back to me. It isn't true, the people who do well use as many sheets as the people who do poorly. The poor students so often try to cram everything onto a page; they are totally disorganized. The good students know it's important to keep things orderly.
I sometimes feel guilty when I'm tough with them about the corrections. Then I realize that letting them do the corrections is a gift. I don't have to do that at all. If they can't hand it in on time that is their problem.
Another annoying thing, I ask them to staple the pages together. About half of them don't so I have to waste time stapling them myself. I bought a stapler in High School for papers I had then and still have it. Why can't they do that or if they are so poor that they can't afford one use a stapler at school.
I didn't do much else other than grade since my last update. I tried calling Lauren but as usual we didn't connect. I give myself a break to talk to Carey that helped.
Now I have to make up my final. I should do it today as I have plans for the weekend. I'm seeing The Beat Goes On show at the Bottom Line on Friday and Deni Bonet on Saturday.
That was the entire upbeat portion of this entry, now for some more rants.
I left the door open in my class yesterday. With about 10 minutes to go in the class people from the next class started congregating at the door and talking like chipmunks. They even started walking into the room a few times when I was still lecturing. Don't people have any manners?
My students kept talking too. Whenever they talk when I am I stop what I'm doing till they stop. It is very effective and causes less tension than pointing them out. The problem yesterday day was that one minute after they stopped talking they'd start again. I couldn't let this go. I told them that they were acting like second graders and gave them one of the dreaded speeches. I said they did that because they either had no respect for other people or no respect for themselves. Then I added on that if their attitude didn't change they'd be asking, "do you want fries with that?" in their careers.
Speaking of fast food servers. Does anyone else always feel anxiety every time you order because you figure they'll get it wrong? Yesterday I go to KFC and order a Zinger without lettuce and tomato with a diet coke without ice to drink. I didn't think she noticed I said no l&t so I repeated it. Guess what. It came with lettuce and tomato. When I told her and she sent it back she got my drink, guess what she started putting ice in it. Then came paying for it. It was $6.81 so I gave her $7.06 and pointed out the amount so I could get a quarter back not dimes, nickels, and pennies. I see her take out more than one coin so I know she screwed up. I though she was going to give me back two dimes and a nickel. Instead she gave me back 1 dime and two nickels. She not only gave me the wrong change she gave me more coins than she could have. When I got her to realize it was wrong she went to another register and got me a quarter.
The thing that really bothers me is that she did not apologize once during all of this. That happens far to often. People will not take responsibility. My students do it; service people do it, professionals like doctors do it. An "I'm sorry" goes a long way to making people feel better.
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile 2002-05-09
