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.
April 23, 2003 - 10:49 p.m.
On Wednesdays I usually update from school but I’m home now with nothing to do.
I finished grading my good calculus class’ test. The average was 41.2. Now I have to figure out what to do about it. I know from talking to them that they didn’t prepare properly. So many told me that they didn’t study. I don’t want the whole class to fail though. The last test will be a take-home and that will raise their averages. I always let them correct their mistakes and get half the credit back. In this case if everyone got everything right on the correction the average would still be just a hair above 60; they never get all the credit back. I’m thinking of giving them back 70% of the credit. I’m going to have to give them a dressing down first. Part of me thinks I wouldn’t be doing them a favor by giving them the extra points. They need to learn to take responsibility.
The worst part is that several students cheated. They all failed badly but it is clear that the copied from each other. One student made a four that looked like a twenty-one and the others wrote down 21. That’s as obvious a proof of cheating as you can get.
When I was in grad school one professor said about another, “He thinks you were born knowing the Cauchy Integral Theorem.” I’m wondering if my students think that about me. They are having trouble picking things up that I’ve never come across before. My students at Queens College and Hofstra never made some of these mistakes. Many of the calculus students don’t seem to understand that there is a difference between 3(x+2) and 3x + 2. I’ve shown them with numbers that you get different answers. I stress over and over again how important the parentheses are. Yet they still confuse the two. About half the class lost credit through mistakes of that type. I don’t mean that I took off for them forgetting a parenthesis. I mean they actually got the wrong answer because they confused themselves. I never had a teacher who did more than state the distributive property, which states that a(b+c) = ab + ac. We learned that in grade school and that was it. I have to figure out a way to get these students to understand. They obviously have never been properly taught. I’m afraid it might require a large amount of rote work. I hate doing that. It is also hard to justify spending so much time on arithmetic in a calculus class. I’ll try one more time in class today.
Leah says that she loves me because I let her abuse me. She and Carey compete to see who can be meaner to me. Why do people relate to me like that? They aren’t the only ones. It is perfectly OK from those two of course. I’d have to far more insecure than I am now to not know that they loved me. There are some people that it does bother me from. I never want to tell people that though because it’s like saying “I don’t like you well enough for you to get away with that.” If you are on my buddy list don’t worry about it. I don’t mean you.
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 April 23, 2003
