Meta-Wednesday

This Meta-Wednesday requires reader participation, in part because I want to see what you come up with, and in part because I'm meta-exhausted.

Here's the game: It's Find a Comic Loosely Related to your Research Interests Day! Post links in the comments and I'll incorporate them into the post after I get some meta-sleep.

Here's mine, matey! Blow me down!

Meta-Wednesday

Clue #1 that a comic is suitable for Meta-Wednesday: having "complexity", "nuance", and "atomic level" less than a breath apart. Like this!










Don't forget about the subatomic today.

Meta-Wednesday

This week's Meta-Wednesday is a fun little exercise in two of our favorite things: academics and ethics. We have ethics to thank for all those "I have not injured any invertebrates in the course of my research" forms, and ethics is also involved in a new study about cash incentives for learning.

You decide: Should kids be bribed to do well in school?

Were any of you overtly bribed, or is the scope of this a new thing? I remember being bribed a few times when bombing the test would have been catastrophic (like the CRT you had to take every year to keep moving up a grade), but the idea of being paid per book read is foreign to me. If only I could get that deal now!
Another question: is rewarding for attendance and behavior substantially different from gold stars? Obviously a gold star doesn't cost a dollar, but it always seemed odd to me that gold stars could motivate even the worst kid in class to stop pushing other kids' faces into the water fountain or hitting them with a clarinet. At least addiction to money is a national problem; addiction to stickers beyond a certain age is just bizarre.
Finally, what does this mean for higher education instructors? I expect that bribing is actually fairly widespread, but not consistent like Fryer's programs. I expect that a couple of weeks before the semester ends there is a lot of haggling and begging and promises of stuff if there are no C's. Here the most important part of the article might be on page 3, regarding the kids' inability to figure out how to simultaneously earn more money and achieve success.
Part of the conclusion is that younger kids tend to respond better to the incentive programs. I'd be interested to see how many of these kids maintain their higher books-per-annum numbers several years after leaving an incentive program. This could go one of two ways. The first is that the lack of cash is felt immediately, and reverses the trend. Or it could go like clicker-training, where the reward eventually switches from the food reward (in this case, money) to the clicker (or, a love of reading) being the only reward. For the love of textbooks and the future of our profession I hope it is the latter.

Meta-Wednesday

This week we are learning about Freud. Unfortunately this post about Freud has turned into a dumping ground for all things weird. I think Freud would appreciate this little doozy, which came to me courtesy of Grad Student Extraordinaire Milly:

Women Try to Take Body on Plane

But it gets even weirder once you play the 1-minute clip interview with the women, who swear that a) the man was alive, b) he'd "been acting like that [dead]" for over a month, and c) they somehow know of eight people who can attest to the man being alive.

Perhaps a better strategy would have been to claim the man was never alive at all. This just in from a local police blotter:

April 2

• 3:09 p.m. — Checked on a caller's report of three unattended infants in a parked car near Market Basket on Woodbury Avenue and found three "very realistic dolls in the back with notes on them."

Freud would have a field day with this!!!

And while we're speaking of things that can kill you:













This is a little something called the psychology of history. It invades your dreams, causes transference of affection from people to books, has you trapped in the Dissertation Stage, and it's all your mom's fault.

Meta-Wednesday

This week's topic: Women's History.

Please see below a potential example of "herstory".


















Equal rights: A victim of pen fail.

Meta-Wednesday

If Meta-Wednesday has taught us anything, it is that things need definitions, that those definitions are fluid, and that definitions will likely be the end of us. To try and prevent this, I have turned to one of the supreme authorities around to try to find a suitable definition of history. So begins the Epic Battle of Urban Dictionary Versus Sonic.

Let the games begin!

1) The tale of how many different nations, from all across the world, gained their independence from Great Britain.

Sonic Says: Close. No cigar.

2) A helpful course, usually taught in school, where students learn that Hitler was bad and jackshit else.

Sonic Says: Partial credit for being partially true.

3) Events that occured in the past.

Sonic Says: OR DID THEY??? See number 4.

4) What repeats itself over and over and over again.

Sonic Says: OH REALLY? See number 5.

5) Postmodernists say we don't really know what happened in the past, therefore we can't know if a) it really occurred in the past or b) if it is repeating itself over and over.

Sonic Says: This is why we can't wait for post-postmodernism. And post-post-postmodernism.

6) A pretty decent class where you can learn about anything ranging from the Egyptians to the Rennaissance to World War II, and much more.

Sonic Says: The "much more" really saved this one from the intellectual latrine.

7) Something the British created.

Sonic Says: What's with the freaking British???

8) A tale made up to explain to the wife why you came home drunk.

Sonic Says: No.

9) The way the dead torture the living.

Sonic Says: Yes.

10) [a list with examples!]

1 everything that happened in the past, more specially since humans learned to write.
2 everything that got written down and was accepted as "the history" by some elite or another.
3 the field of study of 1 and 2. Discusses all kinds of explanations of what happened.
4 a school subject devoted almost exclusively to 2.

1 Johnny Cash is history.
2 The history of the colonization of America has little to do with what actually happened.
3 An interesting question in history is whether guns, diseases or beliefs were more important factors in eliminating the Native Americans.
4 History is quite boring, especially if it's about your own country.

Sonic Says: This was looking good until the examples. Show me the historian that thinks beliefs 'eliminated' the Native Americans. Also, if the author things that question 3 is interesting, I really hope that they are not from America, as opposed to believing that Native American history is not, in fact, American history. Please also note Johnny Cash's appearance as an example of history.

11) What most people have a toally distorted view of due to being brainwashed by the government and indoctrinated in the government ran public school system.

Sonic Says: Caused by the British, no doubt.

12) A series of lies agreed upon by people who call them selves "historians".

Sonic Says: Oh dear.

Meta-Wednesday

Here's a little something on historical approach, courtesy of The Onion.

Civil War Historians Posit 'You Had To Be There' Theory

October 23, 2002 | Issue 38•39

ATLANTA—After years of conflicting approaches to interpreting the Civil War, a coalition of historians on Tuesday posited the non-specific theory that "you had to be there" to fully understand the complexities of the war. "It's not just a matter of 'Were the Southern forces as confident and dedicated as their Northern counterparts?' or 'Was Gettysburg the turning point?'" said conference chairman Shelby Foote. "The whole gist of the war is just hard to really get unless, you know, you were there and saw it happen." The coalition also advanced a theory that the Great Migration, wherein one million African-Americans moved to northern cities between 1915 and 1920, was "a black thing."

Meta-Wednesday

Here's your midweek justice.

Meta-Wednesday

Meta-Wednesday is once again brought to you by T-Rex! And I guess also by Aristotle. And a little help from Utahraptor.

Thanks to Aristotle for being so fun. I wonder, though, if he were sent back through time, what other theorist he might elect to brawl with. That would be fun...

Meta-Wednesday

Here's a new tradition at Chix Soup, going out to everyone who is buried in theory, hating metatextualism, and wondering what post-post-postmodernism is going to look like: Midweek Meta Madness.

Once weekly, on Wednesdays, I'll dig through my arsenal of madness to bring you the very best in brain-exploding, uselessly amusing theoretical commentary.

Here's a little sample of what you can expect (metaclick on it to expand).



Enjoy!