Freethoughtblogs has given itself the goal of blowing your minds on Saturday.

I think I’ve got my final exam written — it’s an online exam, automatically graded, due on Friday, but I’ve posted it already. The students will have no excuses, they’ve got oodles of time, but I’m being absolutely rock-solid rigid on the due date. If they post it at 12:01 on Friday they get nothing, not one point.

I’m drawing a line here, finally, because the classes I thought were done (Yay! Relax!) suddenly received an influx of late submissions. “Here’s my lab report I forgot to turn in last March, can you grade it now and give me credit?” I’m such a pushover that yeah, OK, I’ll let it slide in, and so I’ve been grading old papers and catching up all over again. Now I’m behind where I thought I was.

There’s only one thing to do: run away. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, I’ve been sitting on my butt reading teeny-tiny print on my computer all morning, so I think I’ll flee the house and walk to a park and optimistically look around for spiders. Anything but thinking about these classes that I want done.

Bye!

Today was the very last day of lecture. It wasn’t even me lecturing — the students were doing presentations on ethics and and genetics. They were all very good! One of the virtues of working at a liberal arts university is that our students are good at comprehending and presenting their ideas.

I’m not going to be lecturing at anyone until mid-January 2026! That does feel good.

I’m not quite done, though. I have one lab section left, in which I’m just going to go through and make suggestions for their final lab report. Tomorrow morning will be spent going through all the papers and records for my 3 courses, so I can get their final grades together. Friday is all about grading those lab reports, and Saturday is about assembling a final exam that will be graded electronically. Then, with any luck, my summer break and sabbatical begin on Cinco de Mayo, and the university can just fade away for a little while as I spend my days frolicking with spiders.

I can feel the end of the semester coming. It’s creeping this way, like the small spiders emerging in my garage, anticipating a fabulous summer and fall of freedom.

It’s not quite here yet, though. This week it’s all about giving advice on final lab reports that are due on Friday — my entire afternoon is going to be spent reading drafts and checking the math on genetics papers, so that their final submission will be perfect and will possibly save their grades (I write evil exams, I’m sorry to say, and the students look slightly traumatized and shocked right now.)

And then I find some writing advice on the internet, which might be just barely in time!

I anticipate that most of what I’ll be reading today will be in the passive voice. I might just recommend trying passive-aggressive voice, or conspiracy voice, or if they’re really daring, active voice.

I intensely dislike accusations of ad hominem from people who don’t understand what ad hominem is.

Hello professor, I read your blogs from time to time getting different perspectives on important issues. The recent article about Krauss, there is allot of ad hominem, is that a good strategy to sway people towards a viewpoint, instead of arguing the specific points ?

He is referring to this post. It would be ad hominem to say “Krauss is a harasser, because he was a physic professor.” It is not ad hominem to compile a collection of observations and assessments by his peers that directly corroborate the accusation.

The idea that presenting evidence is an ad hominem fallacy is a defense used by people who want to suppress the evidence.

I should just get off the internet altogether, maybe. Get a tarpaper shack with no electricity or running water somewhere.

For those who don’t know, the NY Times Pitchbot posts humorous, sarcastic versions of the kind of centrist bullshit the NY Times is notorious for publishing. Sometimes it hits a bit close to the bone.

There’s a week and a half until the end of the semester…will I make it? I’m giving myself a 50% chance of crawling across the finish line and then curling up into a soggy ball of tears, vs. a 50% chance of exploding before the end of the term and then raining down as smoldering cinders.

I could see this coming way back in August — it’s been a long decade — so I cleverly scheduled student presentations for the last bit of the term. I don’t have to do any class prep right now, even though I’ve got a lot of material lined up just because…because I can’t help myself, and am always tweaking things and making additions just in case I need it. For the same reason, I can’t leave well enough alone and every year I rewrite and change my classes despite having taught this stuff for about 30 years. Nothing is going to help. No matter what, I’m going to be clawing my eyes out and suppressing screams as every term comes to a close.

I really ought to retire, but I can’t, not ever. I guess I get to look forward to death.

The weird thing is that I like teaching. This would be a lot easier if I didn’t care.

Never mind me, I just have to scream into the uncaring void every once in a while.

This past weekend, I had a brief encounter with a ranting, raving kook howling about nefarious Jews and the virtues of the Tao. He also predicted that the Pope would die in 48 hours.

Uh-oh. The Pope has died.

Pope Francis, the first Latin American leader of the Roman Catholic Church, has died, the Vatican said on Monday, ending an often turbulent reign marked by division and tension as he sought to overhaul the hidebound institution.
He was 88, and had suffered a serious bout of double pneumonia this year, but his death came as a shock after he had been driven around St. Peter’s Square in an open-air popemobile to greet cheering crowds on Easter Sunday.

He was 88, had been very ill, so it’s not much of a prediction, but OK, he gets to score 1 point. I’m going to predict that the street kook is feeling full of himself today and is babbling more nonsense more vehemently, a prediction that is even more predictable.

Last night, this beast nearly cost me a lot of money.

She decided to jump up on my desk, but she is not a sinuous, agile feline — she is an inept, clumsy idiot. She landed on my webcam and sent it flying, and then tried to recover badly by leaping up and back, ending up between the wall and my computer, where there’s nothing but a tangle of cables which did not provide a solid purchase. She scrabbled frantically at the cables, disconnecting most of them, and hurled herself at the wall, then bounced into the back of the monitor.

I don’t know what she did next because all I saw was that my computer shut down and the monitor was toppling forward into my face.

Anyway, if anyone needs a demolition cat I’m willing to throw her into a box and pay for the postage.