People talk about pumpkin beer, but the concept offends me so I haven't tried it.
The stuff they sell every October? It's very sweet. I like the first half of one.
Listen you motherfuckers, motherfucking decorative gourd season does not begin until Oct. 1.
I bet you assholes put up your Christmas decorations before thanksgiving, too.
What if I don't want to fuck pumpkin eaters?
2, 3: They sell it in September now.
I had some pumpkin soup a couple of days ago. Pretty good, but maybe not worth incurring the wrath of helpy-chalk. Or are non-decorative gourds okay?
Earlier this week, I did a day of volunteering in a food pantry/soup kitchen and was sorting donated produce when I encountered a few gourds. I had to ask if they were food or not. (Answer: No.)
Also not food: very ripe tomatoes after they had been transported in a box with apples and onions.
I walked by some pretty elaborate outdoor Halloween decorations over a week ago. I don't remember things starting so early, but I don't mind, since Halloween has always been my favorite holiday.
I might have to draw the line at pumpkin beer though.
I like pumpkin pie well enough, roasted pumpkin seeds are yummy because salt, and pumpkin is okay as part of a bunch of different roasted vegetables mixed together, but otherwise I'd just as soon leave it out of all my normal consumables. Pumpkin beer? Pumpkin whatever-the-hell at Starbucks? Gross.
I've had good pumpkin muffins, but not at a Starbucks.
The overreaction to pumpkin stuff every fall makes me think that people don't remember to use cinnamon and nutmeg without the seasonal reminder.
Pumpkin chum! Yum! Pumpchum! Um, yum!
It's decorative cinnamon and nutmeg season!
It's crunch the acorns while walking down the sidewalk season.
I like to imagine the squirrels looking on and raging impotently at the destruction of their food.
crunch the acorns
Kwanzaa cake season isn't until the end of December.
at the destruction preparation of their food.
How could they? They have no idea where my shoes have been.
The problem with pumpkin pie is not that it's terrible but that it's inferior to every other kind of pie. If I'm going off my diet for pie I'm going to do it with something more gratifying than pumpkin.
The problem with pie is that, at times, it is served without ice cream. There is no reason ever to consume pie without ice cream.
I thought for a moment gswift was on a pie diet, which seems like a fad diet that could work for me.
20 is wrong.
21 is wrong in that some types of pie are fine with the stuff from the whippet can on top instead of ice cream.
To tie the threads together, eating pumpkin pie is like cheating on your spouse with someone who you're only like "eh, I guess I could talked into fucking you if I have a few more drinks".
Who was it that was asking if cranberries were mandatory at Thanksgiving? Mary Catherine? Pie without ice cream is like Thanksgiving without cranberry sauce. Abominations against nature.
Actually, I sort of am on a pie diet, and though I'm not losing weight, it does indeed work for me.
What 27 said. Pumpkin pie is awesome. It's extra-awesome if you use other slightly more flavorful winter squash, like butternut.
I like the flavor of pumpkin pie but hate the texture.
Last year's thread about the flavor of pumpkin pie wasn't until mid-November.
But I will once again reveal the secret to pumpkin pie, which is bourbon.
My gun and my powers of shooting your inferior gourd pie in the face will fall like the hammer of deliciousness across the land. The pumpkin agitators usually have to pull some bullshit move to get their pie eaten like only fixing pumpkin "because that's what we have on Thanksgiving" or some nonsense.
We would have also accepted "economic growth in Scotland."
To the OP, cheating in your class pisses you off extra especially because it implies you are too stupid to catch them. Suggesting you colleagues are too stupid to figure it out is one thing. Calling you stupid? Un-fucking-forgivable.
But of course, 90% of the time, I surely am too stupid to catch them.
I was always amazed at how much time mine invested in cheating. One wrote tiny notes onto his Starbuck's cup sleeve. One wrote eight pages of notes and stapled it to look like he had an extra copy of the exam (thanks, shithead, now I have to get color copies). If they'd just studied for the length of time it took to engineer cheating, they would have passed. Also, students who copy should find a smart friend, not a dumb friend, to copy.
But yeah, it was always the thinking I would be too dumb to notice that got me. When two of fifteen lab reports are identical, it is easy to notice.
It was one thing when they were plaguing SEK, but THIS?! And they left slimy seeds all over my desk!
But of course, 90% of the time, I surely am too stupid to catch them.
Foolproof personally tested method for catching cheating students: Convincingly pretend you don't speak their language at all. Actually be completely fluent in their language. They'll tell you all about it and then express frustrated incredulity at how you manage to know where all the cheat sheets are. Of course they may get a bit pissed off when they find out you've been lying to them all year.
Pretend you're blind. During finals, bring your sword cane to class.
Of course they may get a bit pissed off when they find out you've been lying to them all year.
"I haven't been honest with you all year, so there are two things you should know. First, I speak perfect English and have understood everything you said near me. Second, there was no President Scrotum. Good luck on your American History final. You have one hour starting.... Now."
Second, there was no President Scrotum
Or even Santorum.
I just like taking one of the few desks configured for left-handed students because I like to see them twist in their desk to take notes.
We sinister have long memories, Moby.
If they'd just studied for the length of time it took to engineer cheating, they would have passed.
I once came up with a virtually impossible-to-catch method of cheating, but it would have involved much more effort and time than would be necessary to achieve the same results through study alone. But I'm still proud of myself for having thought of it.
Also, students who copy should find a smart friend, not a dumb friend, to copy.
Oh man, this x1000. Most of the cheating cases I've actually busted have been where the cheater failed, even with the cheating.
I was always amazed at how much time mine invested in cheating.
Whereas this is completely foreign to Heebie U students. They just don't seem to mind that much if they fail. If they're going to cheat, they're not going to work hard on it, dagnabit.
As long as they use "dagnabit" regularly in their speech, I don't see how you could stay mad.
Most of them don't. But I swear to got I've had students say "dagnabit" unironically.
Actually, most Heebie U students are generally unaware of much irony, and I say that to their credit.
52: Mine would follow a pattern for when to cheat. It was big classes, 300+ students. There were three exams, with low score or absence dropped from the average plus a final (and some graded homework). Usually, very few cheated on the first exam, because they would generally assume they'd do pretty well (and that if they didn't, the score would be their dropped grade). On the second, a few would look around at others' papers, but nothing that took real effort. The second exam was almost always the hardest - no review, most weeks of material covered, etc., but they still could drop the course if they did poorly. By the third exam, they'd know they were in real trouble. They had to do well, and it was too late to drop. By the final, the desperation would peak, and they'd have pages of notes hidden in the bathroom or written really small on their leg.
Interesting. I've never taught a class anywhere near that big.
Somebody should make an open notes/open relationship joke about cheating. But not me, because I'm tired.
Of course, when I say "mine," I mean I was a head TA for the course. The lecturer I worked for typically taught three sections with approx. 1200 students.
50: I have constructed a truly marvelous lookup table that contains an answer to any possible test question, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Jesus. I did TA many classes where the big lecture was ~120 students, broken up into three discussion sections for me. But that is not the same.
The biggest class I ever took was ~600 people. On my very first day of college, I looked across the ampitheatre and there, swear to god, was my brother, on the other side of the room.
Now, he also went to college at the same school, so the only oddness was "Why would he be taking organic chemistry?" not "Why is he in this state?" So I waived, but he didn't see me.
It turned out not to be him, but I ended up being friends with the guy, because I'd gone up to him and raved about how much he looked like my brother.
Amazingly enough, near the end of the semester, I was standing around with the doppelganger, when my actual brother wandered by. I flagged him down and triumphantly showed them to each other.
They saw no such resemblance, and in that way my life paralleled Nabakov's awesome book Despair only without the murder.
Did you even think to ask one of them to kill somebody?
I was so drearily conventional about failing to set my sibling up for the murder of my classmate.
I sat in on a class in grad school with my boyfriend's doppelgänger. I'd mistake him all the time - not so much if I saw the guy straight on, but if I was walking behind him or caught a glimpse of him. The boyfriend just didn't see it; neither did mutual friends (the doppelgänger was about three inches taller and had facial hair). I decided I was just crazy until a labmate saw them both together and told me she thought I'd spent the entire semester in a class with the boyfriend without speaking to him once. She'd thought it odd but very professional.
A fellow grad student had the exact same handwriting as mine, and so occasionally I'd walk into a room and see my handwriting all over the board and get extremely disoriented for a moment, as I scrambled to figure out when and why I'd done this.
Ha, made you read a really boring comment.
It's pretty hard to cheat on a philosophy exam. You can either understand the material and write the essays or you can't. I can't really think what kind of notes might help.
Mind-body problem:
Descartes: animal spirits, pineal gland, LOL
Malebranche: parallel shit, god intervenes to connect the parallel streams
Leibniz: parallel shit, clockwork-like coordination via holy programming
Berkeley: one of those parallel streams looks redundant
When I was teaching I did have a couple of students who were clearly discussing their essays together, as they had broadly similar misconceptions, but I didn't consider that cheating as they weren't formally assessed anyway.
The boyfriend just didn't see it; neither did mutual friends
Just like in that Nabokov novel.
I caught my first and only plagiarized-final-paper a few years ago. It was exciting! I'd get to deliver the cold dressing-down speech I'd composed in my head! I'd fill out the academic misconduct form! But it turned out that the student was on the last term of an international exchange, and that office doesn't deal with misconduct the same way, and the student went home and never contact me again. Oh well.
It's pretty hard to cheat on a philosophy exam. You can either understand the material and write the essays or you can't. I can't really think what kind of notes might help.
I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
Drat you, 68 -- I was going to post that.
My favorite plagiarism was one which took a few paragraphs of relevant material from each of a couple of public sources, then used the Word thesaurus function to replace prominent nouns and verbs with synonyms ... without regard for whether the synonym carried the same meaning the word had in the original sentence or was synonymous only using a different definition. So great meaning powerful became massive instead, and branch before of government became limb, and so on for two to three pages. Like a Google retranslation, if the order of the rest of each sentence stayed the same.
That was fairly fun to catch, every step of the way: Excavating each paragraph for unchanged fractions that would let me find its source successfully, intuiting what word the nonsense replacements had once been, finding the subtle ones later ...
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The arbitration that would not die is now scheduled for its fifth day. Watch for me to be panicking again right before October 28.
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There is no pumpkin flavor involved, but I did a really nice job making this gin (by infusing vodka, not illegal distillation) and now I'm happy. Soon Nia will be asleep and I'll be even happier, but I'll take what I can get. (Soon cheerleading will be over for the season and then I'll be happier still. I really don't want to have to buy a straightening iron and curlers to get her hair into the mandatory competition style, and I'd never have given her the style she has now if I'd known we'd be getting a baby, because undoing the tiny braids takes forever. I am a pitiful whiner who likes pumpkin pie just fine.)
Jammies took the kids to yet another football game, and so I am enjoying the hell out of myself, with the baby and some quiet.
It's not plagiarism, but it sure is seven kinds of entitlement. What kind of school official thinks it's A-OK to exchange hundreds of horrifyingly racist texts with his superintendent, then ask his IT guy to replace his white BlackBerry because it's too 'girly'?!
(Be forewarned that if you go past the initial article and read the transcripts, it's really stupefyingly hateful towards just about any non-Anglo-straight-Christian-male group you can think of.)
Who was it that was asking if cranberries were mandatory at Thanksgiving? Mary Catherine?
Guilty as charged. As I recall, I was told in no uncertain terms that cranberries are mandatory. So I made a cranberry sauce (using basic recipe found in Joy of Cooking). I really don't want to make a pumpkin pie this year, but it's way too early to worry about Thanksgiving. Isn't it?!
Does the Joy of Cooking recipe for cranberry sauce tell you how to make the little rings like you get when you buy it in the can?
Apparently, Canada has Thanksgiving before Halloween.
There is no reason ever to consume pie without ice cream.
I agree that pie should be served with a cream. But must it be ice cream? I like pie with ice cream too. But I also like pie with a softly whipped heavy cream. Yes, "softly whipped," because cream can be over-whipped, and then it's too stiff and halfway to becoming butter.
Btw, why can't we have that over-the-top double cream that they have in the UK? "We" meaning people in the US, and also in Canada. Though I don't think we can blame Canada for this, or not exclusively.
Apparently, Canada has Thanksgiving before Halloween.
Second Monday of October. Same day as Columbus Day, in USian terms.
Chiming in to echo wish for smarter cheaters. I was a scut work TA once (here, do all the crap work!) and in amongst the endless boring exams were two so blatantly plagiarized that I couldn't pretend it wasn't there: cheater had written answers in pen, then gone back and copied off a friend in a different color.
Said student later asked for leniency because zie was going to fail the class - because of a zero on the exam zie'd cheated on.
*throws up hands in despair*
Also, pumpkin pie is delicious, and is properly served with whipped cream (real, hand-whipped).
Heathens.
||God I hate fundies. Here is the mandatory lesson plan for all students during 'Christian Culture Week ' in a public high school in Rzesow, a mid sized city in southeastern Poland, no opt outs allowed:
Computer Science: Create a presentation about Marian Sanctuaries.
Math: Problem sets, all on themes related to Marian Sanctuaries.
Polish Write a letter to Pope Francis thanking him for Marian Sanctuaries with an emphasis on the celebrations of Christian Culture Week
Religion: Studying the Marian Sanctuaries in our diocese.
History: The history of... I think you can guess.
English/French/German Translating Hail Mary
Music: Singing Marian hymns
Art: Painting pictures of the Holy Mother
Home Room: Watching films about...
>|
When the subject of student cheating comes up, I can never muster very much outrage at the students; I'm too busy wondering why there's any such thing as an exam that can be "cheated" on. In a 25-year tech career I've never once had a problem arise that needed to be solved without access to any kind of reference material or consultation with co-workers. It simply doesn't happen outside the artificial constraints of school, the DMV, and occasional job interviews for the sort of company I wouldn't want to work for anyway. For heavens sake, just give open-book exams and be done with it.
Plagiarism and falsification of data are mortal sins. Copying off your neighbor is a venial sin, mostly harming only yourself (I never did it, but I was also never angry if I suspected someone had copied me). But sneaking notes into a midterm on a coffee cup sleeve? Sorry, but as far as I'm concerned that's just sticking it to the man.
Nothing to lose but your faculty parking privileges, comrades: http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2013/09/25/things-are-different-when-a-university-is-owned-by-faculty-staff-and-worker-coops/