A really interesting article on "elite" education. I saw this difference even between Georgia Tech and Rice (one public and large, the other small and private and attempting to be "elite"). The quality of education at both schools was the same overall, but the expectations and treatment of the students was very different. Georgia Tech has a huge drop out rate first year as students with poor high school prep struggle with calculus and physics. MIT, on the other hand, has "pass/no record" for freshmen. That is, they aren't graded freshman year, and if they fail a class there transcript reflects no record of them actually taking it. Hard to drop out after a year like that. Of course, I am probably also guiilty of the attitude problem when comparing a school like Georgia Tech to a lower tier school, so its hard for me to criticize.

This particularly sums up some of my observations on grade inflation:

The political implications don’t stop there. An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks. There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department...

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out...

On the other hand, my one great disappointment about college was it was very practical, and I didn't get the "breadth" of education I thought I would. Of course, when I left my elite liberal arts high school, the last thing I wanted was more English classes, so when I started college I didn't really consider this a problem. I always expected college would be mind opening and filled with late night intellectual conversations and random classes like 19th century political thought. Those turned out to be few and far between. I guess "elite" universities have the same problem.

When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

I am boring. Today all I have to report is that I got my delivery from the CSA this morning and it was awesome. Contents included: 4 banana peppers, two big tomatos, a basket of cherry tomatos, 4 plum tomatos, two zucchini, scallions, two peaches, a cantelope, 4 plums, an eggplant, a bag of some unidentifable green vegetables that look like mini zuchinis, a green pepper... I think that's it. A pretty good load, all things considering. No squash, suprisingly, guess I'll have to cut back on all the squash soup I'm intending on making.

So, realizing I never really did a trip report from my 6 weeks in Australia and New Zealand, leaving you instead to puruse pictures, I thought I'd tell a story that came to mind as my screen saver cycled through pictures.

We spent several days on the southern most part of the southern island - a region called the Caitlins. Its a litte bit off the beaten tourist track of New Zealand. The "tourist road" usually involves Mount Cook, then Queenstown, then onto Mitre Sound without ever going to the south end of the island.

I wouldn't have missed this three day road trip through the Caitlins for the world. We spent each day stopping at random coastal sites - caves, lighthouses, sea birds, dolphins and sea lions dominated the trip....

Which brings us to the sea lions.

We stayed at an incredible little backpackers lodge in a little town called Surat Bay, right on the beach. New Zealand hostels might have been a little pricey ($30 pp for a night), but they can barely be called backpackers, as they are cozy, well-kept, privately owned and we almost always had our own room.

Yes, this was outside our back door.

Karen and Emily were getting along fine... We made Emily an unofficial member of the AE Female Mafia in Sarah's absense. Emily is so nice. So this makes Karen mean. Take note future students of Prof. Karen:

This particular backpackers had its own hoard of Hooker Sea Lions.

So we set off down the beach to go to a place called "Cannibal Cove". The beach was lovely. And there were sea lions a playing.

Then we got to the cove, where there was one really large, really lazy bull. Looks harmless, right?

We got close - still following the rule of never get between a sea lion and the water.

The bull still was pretty darn angry at me for taking its picture (yes, I got closer to it than I should have)

It started barking at me and looked like it was about to charge.

I scrambled up a rock, when little Emily used all her vet-in-training skills to make herself real big and barked back at the sea lion, yelling "Hey Hey Hey!!".

Thus I was saved from being mauled by a sea lion.

More pictures of beautiful cliffs, windswept beaches, rocks and lighthouses here

I have a late sim tonight. Yet this morning was the first morning all week that my body wanted to get itself out of bed bright and early at 7 a.m. even though I had all the time in the world to sleep in. C'est la vie. So I've been poking around the house dragging my feet about going to work. Guess I'll head in soon. I was kind of holding off to go in so I could pick up some yummy takeout lunch on the way in, so that involves me staying home at least for another 30 minutes or so.

Yesterday, I finally just picked dates and purchased to go to the cottage rather than continuing to attempt to ring out various schedules from family and friends. Serendipitously, Byron got his schedule for August right after I bought my tickets and it looks like he'll actually be able to come with me for most of the time. Sadly, none of my aunts seem to have enough time in their schedules to come up, so I guess that will mean a few days in Philadelphia on the leading or trailing edge of the trip to visit family. I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that the twins will make it up for a few days too.

However, now I do feel the stranglehold of a whole bunch of things I'd like to have done before I leave on vacation. Again, c'est la vie. Looks like Byron is coming home on Sunday (yay!) where he'll sit reserve at home until its time to leave for the cottage... that basically means that they can call him anytime and he'll have four hours to get to his flight to wherever they need him.

Before he gets home, one big project which is fixing the giant hole in the wall Bennet scratched. The dry wall guy was supposed to come last Thursday morning but canceled at the last minute. Now its the delicate balance of finding another time this week that Cari or I have a free moment in our schedules to stay home and wait for him. Then, of course, we're going to have to repaint the entire wall to make it match. My home to-do list seems to be growing too.

Here's an interesting perspective from a feminist on marriage, or lack thereof. I admit, I am guilty of asking people in long term relationships when the wedding bells will ring. I should stop that. I actually think I am probably the marrying kind. I think I'm mostly not the children kind. Certainly the Cutri women all seem to have a healthy fear of marriage, maybe I take after that. That said, though in my head I think that marriage would be nice, in reality, marriage scares the crap out of me. I often wonder - why bother, if you can get all the benefits of marriage without all the legal trappings.

Maybe my general happy feelings about the prospects of marriage come from me being spoiled after having two months of Byron making me breakfast in the morning means I am only remembering the nice parts about domestic bliss while forgetting the annoying parts while he's off flying to Timbuktu...

Since I'm linking to feministing stuff, I will say again that purity balls freak me out too.

Speaking of commitment, I finally stopped trying to balance schedules and bought myself plane tickets to the cottage while the prices to Philadelphia were good ($250). I really can't wait to escape this heat!

Well, thus begins another crazy week at work..

Its Sunday, so I feel I should talk about Church.

I started the morning by going flying. I was getting checked out in a Tampico. Just another single engine, slow, bug smashing airplane. It has some nice points - specifically the seats are so comfortable they feel like arm chairs and the whole cockpit seemed pretty ergonomically laid out. It was a little sluggish to climb and accelerate, but it made up for that by being quite sporty on turns. Most of all, its nice to have another airplane available to me to fly (especially another one with an IFR GPS, yay!)

While I was driving home though, I had lots of time to contemplate the state of Churches in the south. I'm usually such an anti-establishment person, but these so-called Churches that spring up around here really do scare me a little. Every public school becomes a Church on the weekend - many have no permanent home. Others are built like temporary buildings. None have any affiliation, except maybe loose-knit organizations, with any established denomination. Instead they just call themselves "Christian". They have ministers who I really can only call self-ordained. I know this because I have met people who have become "ministers" in these churches who have no formal theological education.

New churches spring up, and if they are good (or entertaining) their attendence blooms. Then when a new one (or more entertaining one) springs up down the street, their "loyal" congragation just moves on to the next new thing in town.

This is the city with Lakewood Church... remember.. its in the Compaq Center, where Houston's NBA team used to play.

Even scarier is the church down the street from me, Grace. It sprung up on the highway a few years ago with a massive facility and a huge billboard. Many of my coworkers immediately switched their loyalty and started attending there. Its latest plans to use its money... not to help the poor and downtrodden of Houston or the world... but to build a 150 ft cross to mark our city for God. Great, another eyesore on the I-45 feeder to go with the oversized flags that "mark our city" for used car lots and the flashing neon signs and strobe lights that "mark our city" for strip clubs.

The worst is when you talk to one of the really evangelical "Christians" that like to toss out the Bible as something you follow literally. They throw out their favorite passages that they've memorized, and try to forget the scarier ones, which demonstrates to me that most haven't even bothered to read the Bible that they are supposed to be following "literally" in its entirity. But as long as their minister says the earth is 6000 years old, its ok to follow like a blind lemming, because that's what God wants... By the way, I've recently taken people who follow the Bible literally to read this web page, which has a whole lot of evil Bible quotes that I hope people don't follow...

Love JibJab...