School honor systems, as I have lamented, really aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Now that I am in a school with a much-touted honor system, I now have an even better perspective on this. The underlying premise of an honor system is simple: If all students affirm at the time of matriculation that …
Category Archives: School
Surprise fireworks.
Earlier this evening, I looked out of my window to find a fireworks display. Much to my surprise. The occasion, pathetically, turns out to be Virginia Tech trying to sell some class rings, but it was an Independence Day-worthy display nonetheless.
Bitterness coeffecient.
I have noticed that there is a direct correlation between the age of a professor and the contempt that they appear to hold for their students. My two favorite courses — in one of which I have been exposed to virtually no new concepts and in the other of which I have learned a great …
Both Abercrombie and Fitch.
It’s strange living in a monoculture here at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. It’s homogonized in a number of ways. In terms of age, of course—nearly everybody that I encounter is between the ages of 18-21, save for a few teachers each day. Nearly all of them appear to be from a middle- to upper-middle-class class …
Bokononist period.
I have mid-terms this week. Study, study study, write, write, write.
Surrendering to the majority will.
I just aced my first exam, having written four brief essays for my political theory class. Granted, it’s not a particularly difficult class, but I take my victories where I can. I grossly overstudied, it turns out. The four pages outlining Rousseau and Locke’s beliefs and the one-page comparison chart may have been overkill, I …
One size fits all.
The desks in my classes are comically undersized for my 6’4″ frame. It’s ridiculous.
The annals of VT history.
Popular Science’s “The Worst Jobs in Science” (Oct. 2003) lists, at #2: “In the early ’80s, Virginia Tech profs Tracy Wilkins and David Lyerly studied the diarrhea-causing microbe Clostridium difficile in sample after sample after sample of loose stool from the disease’s victims. They became such crack dysentery docs that they launched a company, Techlab, …
VT’s Mac OS X cluster.
I just left the forum for the presentation of Virginia Tech’s supercomputing cluster. The big news is that the system is going to run Mac OS X, and not Linux, as some had speculated. The presenter explained that this was a function of processor optimization — Linux has not yet been created expressly for the …
Good campus eats.
I read in the Roanoke Times that Tech has some great restaurant on campus, as a part of the dining facilities. Lobster, steak, calzones cooked in wood-fired ovens…the whole nine yards. It’s in some mysterious place on campus (Cochrane Hall, between Amber-Johnston and Harper Halls — this means as little to me as it likely …