cab67
cab67's JournalFirst time in trouble at school.
A random topic came up in discussion with some friends yesterday - when was the first time we got in trouble at school?
I was a pretty good kid, so I almost never got in trouble at school, but I do remember the first time my parents got a call from the principal.
I was in second grade. On the bus to school, we talked about what our mommies and daddies did. And I said, with all sincerity and candor, that my dad sold drugs.
A call to my parents added some needed context - my dad was a pharmaceutical sales rep. He mostly sold medicines for GI problems (e.g. gaviscon, which might have been a prescription medication at the time - I don’t recall for sure).
But it struck me how much things have changed since that time. Back then in 1974, it was possible for a kid to make it up to second grade without knowing that ‘selling drugs’ could be a bad thing, or that there were even such things as illegal drugs. I was a white kid growing up in a suburb; I’m sure there was addiction in our neighborhood, but we were kept pretty-well sheltered from it - though kids living with it their homes would have been aware, I suppose. We didn’t have cable channels dedicated to Dick Wolf series, and children’s programming never touched the topic. It just wasn’t something a kid would encounter, at least where I lived.
Hence, I was able to describe my dad as a drug dealer and mean nothing scandalous by it.
Just some memories, I suppose.
when professors know compassion, and when they can act on it.
I’ve posted a couple of commentaries from my perspective as a university professor in the past few days. The first one (https://democraticunderground.com/100216144241) was written following the final exam in my class and discussed situations under which I’ll allow (or not) makeup exams. The second (https://democraticunderground.com/100216155485) was written after I turned grades in and as the deluge of requests to change them began to arrive.
Both of them touched on the issue of accommodation and understanding, especially (though not exclusively) in the context of emotional or mental issues that might get in the way of a student’s success. These were mostly raised on the second of my two commentaries, in which I pointed out (honestly) that it’s pretty much impossible to change a grade for any particular health-based reason after grades have been turned in. (The first commentary actually addressed this issue, pointing out that emotional crises are perfectly legitimate reasons to reschedule an exam.)
I’d like to address this point in some detail, partly because I think some commentors were addressing a much larger point than I was actually making, but also because I want to give some level of guidance to those who, as students or parents, may actually encounter these sorts of things.
The overwhelming majority of college-level instructors are very sympathetic to mental issues. Life has happened to us no differently than has for anyone else. The first year of college can be a serious challenge to anyone. Students are usually away from home for the first time in their lives. They may be under pressure from family to excel. A lot of them have to work while taking classes. Some of them are young single parents. Some may have come from excellent schools and lots of support at home, but not all of them.
I see a lot of young adults in crisis. Their parents were paying their way through college, but they just lost their jobs. Or the student herself or himself has just lost a job. A close loved one has just died unexpectedly, or the student is playing a role as caretaker for someone suffering from a prolonged and possibly terminal illness. The students themselves may have serious physical health issues, and they sometimes arise unexpectedly in the middle of a term. Their parents may have just gotten divorced. The student him or herself might have just gotten divorced, too, or might have been the victim of a serious violent crime (sexual or otherwise) or a bad traffic accident. I encounter veterans who came home with PTSD.
I’ve even seen the products of our public school systems – the good and the bad. Many of my students come from the wealthier suburbs of Chicago, where high schools tend to be well-funded and well-staffed. But I also get students from rural counties in the western part of my state, where the graduating class may have had fewer than 25 students and some subjects just weren’t taught, either because they didn’t have the staff or local parents found them too subversive. (We’re seeing an increasing number of students from inner city schools enrolling here; this is good, but they’re often no better prepared.) I had a colleague say she assumed they all knew the basic structure of the atom (by which she meant “nucleus of protons and neutrons orbited by electrons), only to see a student collapse in despair; this particular student had never encountered the subject in school. I, myself, have encountered college students who’ve never seen a square root symbol before.
In other words, life happens. We can’t always control the circumstances of our youth, and any one of us can fall prey to economic insecurity, illness, family emergency, or some other force of devastation. And, yes – it can do a real number on a person’s mental health.
We instructors know how much of an impact this can have. Severe depression can be just as paralyzing as a big dose of Anectine. It can keep a student from attending class, or it can prevent a student from doing anything productive in a classroom. And it’s not as though students are used to talking about their own mental health; there’s still a stigma attached to depression, and it can take a bloody long time for a student to recognize that the problem goes way beyond just being a little bit less than happy.
We also know that rates of mental illness can wax and wane depending on overall conditions. Normally, I would get two or three students (or their advisors) out of 200 every fall reach out to me, often late in the semester, to ask for accommodation because of a mental health issue. In the fall of 2020, it was more like 10 or 15. And we all expected this – we were facing a pandemic, racial unrest, and a presidential election that could have been won by a functionally illiterate bigot. This past fall wasn’t quite as bad, but I still had more accommodation requests than would normally be the case.
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So how can we, as instructors, help such students?
We’re not trained mental health professionals or therapists. Other than showing some compassion, we can’t directly treat the problem. But we’re all told before classes begin where students can get help. There are counseling centers on campus, and others in the broader community. All of them are staffed by real professionals who know what they’re doing. If they can’t provide the help a student needs, they’ll find someone who can.
We can also make reasonable accommodations in the class itself. If a crisis erupts right before an exam, we can schedule a makeup, or we can excuse the student. We can accept homework late. We can spend time in office hours, and sometimes beyond, helping a student understand the material.
My own accommodation is to promise a struggling student that he or she will not fail the class. I can’t promise a good grade – it might be a D or D- - but I can at least promise a passing grade, provided the student actually puts in some level of effort.
We can also work with administrators in deciding whether you should be allowed to drop or withdraw from your classes late in a semester. We’re often reluctant to do that, but neither are we completely averse to it.
But here’s the thing – unless it’s a small class and I’ve gotten to know the students very well as individuals, there isn’t much I can do unless I’m told about it. I may not notice a sudden increase or decrease in a student’s weight, for example. I’m not qualified to read someone’s mannerisms to uncover hidden depression. I may notice that a student has stopped turning in assignments or has missed an exam without contacting me; this could follow from a sudden depressive episode, or it could follow from hanging back in one’s room with an X-Box, a dime bag of euphoriants, and no parental supervision for the very first time. I’m not able to make that distinction based only on the absence of a student from class.
That’s why I included “I had mental health issues throughout the semester” among the list of reasons I won’t change a grade after classes are finished. By then, it’s too late. The administration might decide to wipe some grades from a student’s record, and I generally go along with such decisions, but there’s no practical, objective way to retroactively add points or figure out how far a grade should be changed. It’s not a lack of compassion; it’s reality.
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IF YOU’RE A STUDENT FACING MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS:
You owe it to yourself to find help. That’s why counseling centers exist. There are people who have devoted their careers to helping people just like you. It’s their job, and in most cases, they’re passionate about it. There’s no dishonor whatsoever in seeking treatment for a real mental health emergency, just as there’s no dishonor whatsoever in going to the ER if you’ve been impaled by a fencepost.
You can (and probably should) also reach out to whatever student disability services office your university might have. These deal with physical access issues as well as mental health, but they’re the people who can help arrange special exam setups.
If you want to reach out your instructor personally about the problem, that’s fine. We’re obliged, both by institutional policy and (in most cases) our personal senses of morality, to keep it confidential unless you’re a danger to yourself or others; and if that’s the case, we would be required to contact people who would also keep it confidential. (Thankfully, I’ve never faced that situation.)
Or you can have your academic advisor, or someone from the student disability or counseling centers, contact me. That’s just as good to me, and might be easier for you.
Sending me a letter from a therapist might help, but not as much as you think. I’m not a clinical psychologist, but my wife is. She’s taught me just how easy it is to fake the stationery of a fictional “therapist” or shop around for someone claiming to be a therapist who’ll sign off on whatever you claim. You’re far, FAR better off working through an office on campus that I’ll recognize.
Getting documentation is never a bad idea, whether it be from a doctor, a therapist (though see above), or someone on campus trained to work with students in your situation. It sounds ghoulish at first (“Don’t you trust me?”), but I’ve been burned in the past by students whose claims of debilitating mental health issues proved fallacious. I want to help those who really need it.
I do NOT need all of the details. If you survived a sexual assault, that’s none of my business. Neither is it my business to know whether you’ve actually tried to commit suicide. If you can reasonably claim that you’re dealing with mental health issues that are interfering with your ability to function as a student, that’s pretty much all I need to know.
And you know what? Many of us know these things from direct personal experience. It took my father a long time to stop asking me “You’re depressed? About what?!” I don’t remember most of my first year in graduate school, and that’s probably for the best. In a lot of cases, we’ve walked in your shoes. We get it.
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IF YOU’RE A PARENT OR FRIEND:
You’ll be better placed to notice the changes that could signal a mental crisis. You know your friend or child better than us. Take action if you think it’s needed.
And if you think being depressed isn’t a thing, or that it’s an embarrassment, get the fuck over that. Depression can kill.
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ALSO IF YOU’RE A PARENT:
Find out what resources are available before your child even steps into a classroom for the first time. Being proactive can save a LOT of trouble.
But don’t be offended if no one on campus can tell you exactly what’s happening unless your child has given us written permission to do so. Your child is now over 18 and, legally, an adult. We might be bound by HIPPA, FERPA, or both. We’re not trying to be pricks; we’re trying to protect the confidentiality of a student as required by law.
Also – recognize when it’s time to throw in the academic towel. Withdrawing late in a semester is sometimes the best thing that can be done for a student. Maybe it would be best to focus on your kid’s mental health for a little while and think about college later.
Yes, I know late withdrawal might mean losing the tuition you’ve spent, I know it can jeopardize financial aid eligibility. But from my standpoint as an instructor, how much good are you doing by not wasting tuition money, but having your child graduate with a low GPA? And possibly ending up in worse mental condition? Penny wise, pound foolish and all that.
You want your child to graduate on time, you say. You know when it's time? When they've finished up their classwork and are set to move on to bigger things. Pushing for one at the expense of the other is counterproductive.
I deal with this on both sides of graduation. I occasionally get applicants for my graduate program with GPA's below our minimum cutoff. "I had a rough couple of years," we're told. "I wasn't able to take part in research opportunities because of my lack of progress, and I didn't get to know my professors (the people who write letters of recommendation) because of that." Maybe so - but how do I justify admitting that student, but not one with a GPA of 3.95? And for what it's worth, the one student with a low GPA I admitted turned out to be a disaster. Your student is far better off in the long run setting up a record that opens more doors.
Withdrawing is NOT an admission that a student isn’t good enough, or intelligent enough, or hard-working enough for college. It’s a recognition that we have to think carefully about our priorities.
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Anyway, some thoughts.
Dear college student who's not happy with your grade in my class:
Reasons I would be willing to alter your grade:
1. An error has been found. A score was entered incorrectly, something that you completed wasn’t entered at all, you found some mistakes in the way your final exam was graded – something like that. And the points returned to you are enough to make a difference in your course standing.
That’s pretty much it.
Reasons I’m not willing to alter your grade:
1. It doesn’t reflect your own subjective assessment of the effort you put into the class.
2. You’re applying for a highly competitive job or for some form of post-graduate education (grad school, med school, etc.), or you plan to join the military as an officer.
3. Your parent(s) and or guardian(s) will be so very disappointed if your grade isn’t improved.
4. You suffered from physical or mental issues throughout the semester, or had some actual scheduling problems that kept you from attending class regularly, but are only bringing it up now, long after I (or anyone else) can do anything about it.
5. You just realized you didn’t turn in a homework assignment. It's now mid-December, but it was due in October. (And no, I won’t give you an incomplete so you can "continue the dialogue" over whether your TA or I might be willing to change our minds. I’ve had someone ask that.)
6. You found an error in the grading of your first midterm, which you took two months ago.
7. You had an exceptionally busy semester.
8. You might lose your scholarship if your grade isn’t changed.
9. Can’t I be merciful in the spirit of the holidays?
10. You think I’m being unfair in assessing your grade based on what you actually turned in, and not on what you would have turned in if you’d done better.
11. You're "just not a science person." (Do you know what my advisor would have done to me if I’d done poorly in a medieval lit class and tried “I’m just not a humanities person” as an excuse?)
There are other excuses I can add to this list, but these are the ones I've encountered in the past couple of years.
And you know what? "How far am I from the cutoff for the next highest grade?" will always be answered with “not close enough to justify a grade change.” It doesn’t matter how far off they are are – students will invariably try to nickel and dime points from every exam and assignment in the hope of crossing that threshold. It wastes a lot of time and never results an improved grade.
Seriously – a grade is a goal to be achieved. It isn’t a commodity to be negotiated. And begging makes you look really pathetic.
sincerely,
your humble instructor.
Thoughts from a professor that are going to make me look like a grumpy old man.
Man? yes. Grumpy? at the moment, sure. Old? I'm still a few years away from 60, so that's a matter of opinion.
Just a few thoughts from a college professor to students and, just as importantly, their parents, that have arisen since the final exam for my course this morning.
Want to take the exam at on a day or at a time other than scheduled? Maybe. But if you're told "no," there's usually a very good reason for that.
Here are some things we can accommodate: illness (with a medical note; this includes psychiatric/mental as well as physical problems); family emergencies (funerals or sudden very severe medical incidents or accidents); court date or jury duty; family event planned long in advance (e.g. wedding), provided we're notified well before the exam; job interview; conflicting institution-related event (e.g. related to sports, ROTC, or a required field trip for another class); computer problems (if the exam is online); work schedule conflict (though if it happens frequently, it might be good to take a different class or get a different job).
Here are some things we either can't or won't: oversleeping; routine as opposed to milestone family event (e.g. I'll accommodate you for your grandmother's 100th birthday party, but not your cousin's 8th); missed a bunch of class, but haven't made an effort to speak to me or borrow someone's notes until minutes before or some time after the exam; not feeling ready and wanting extra time; travel preference (e.g. wanting to take a test early because it's scheduled late in finals week or right before Thanksgiving/Spring break and you want to get out of town).
Bottom line - we accommodate need, not convenience.
I'm generally very forgiving on many things. I'm actually going to work with a student who missed this morning's final because he overslept; the exam was scheduled for 7:30, and this student was pretty diligent throughout the semester. Some of my colleagues wouldn't.
A former partner had to announce to her Friday 4:30 PM class session that they were having a quiz each week, that they could only make it up in an emergency situation, and that "but mom and/or dad already bought the plane ticket" would not qualify as an emergency for missing the quiz on the Friday before Thanksgiving break, which lasts all of the following week.
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I get a lot of rescheduling requests. I'm forced to reject many of them. I don't like being a jerk, but I have my reasons:
1. As a matter of fact, yes - it's an imposition.
At my institution, students may be allowed extra time on exams, and possibly a private distraction-free room, if they qualify through the student disability services office. Whether I think all of these students actually need these accommodations or not, many really do, and I'm happy to help. But in recent years, 5 percent or more of my students will have some sort of accommodation, and because our budget is in the toilet, it usually falls on instructors to schedule the separate times and spaces. And this is a serious burden if you're teaching a big lecture class; my fall large-enrollment class caps at 200, so I'm responsible for scheduling separate exam times for about ten students. Doesn't sound like much, but that means aligning the class and work schedules for each student with mine, which doesn't have a whole lot of wiggle-room. I'll only ask one of my teaching assistants to do this if there's no other option; my TA's have enough to do as it is.
Bear in mind, 200 is a big class, but there are classes far larger than that on my campus. But we manage.
Then, we have acceptable excuses. A loved one has died, or is dying. You have a fever. You're experiencing a major depressive episode. You're a bridesmaid or groomsman in a wedding. It's your brother's bar mitzvah, or it's your niece's baptism. Your prick of a boss changed your work schedule and won't budge.
We understand that life happens. It's happened to us. So we're generous to those who have real needs. As long as you can document anything that came up short-notice or let me know long enough in advance if it's already scheduled, I'll work with you.
But if your family wants to go skiing and the tickets are a lot cheaper if you leave before the exam, you're out of luck, at least if I'm the professor. The answer is the same if you have another exam later the same day or feel distracted because of an argument you had with someone. My hair always goes a shade grayer once I've finished the spaghetti scheduling involved with the accommodations for an exam, and that's for the legitimate ones.
(A note to parents - it's a very, very good idea to ask your kid when his or her exams are early in a term. This way, exam schedules can be kept in mind when events are being scheduled. It annoys me when a student tells me that a big milestone party has been scheduled at the last minute and it conflicts with an exam.)
2. Taking an exam at a different time increases the chances that the exam will be misplaced before the score is entered. I say this not only from my own direct experience, but from the experiences of several colleagues.
We're human. We work hard to prevent mistakes, and they're fortunately rare, but they do happen. There are circumstances that make mistakes more likely. With exams, not taking it with everyone else is one such circumstance. And making tests electronic or on-line doesn't necessarily help.
(A note to both students and parents, and I've said this before on DU: keep everything handed back to you. It's your receipt. I once had a student contact me after the final exam to complain about her grade. She thought she was getting a B, but ended up with a C. I looked over her grades, and explained that, sure enough, one midterm and her final were in the 80's, but her other midterm was a 28. That's what killed her grade. "But I didn't get a 28," she replied, "I got an 82!" She showed me her exam, and sure enough, she was right. The shit-for-brains who entered the exam scores - almost certainly me - managed to type the numbers in backwards. It was easily corrected, especially because I was able to see the actual midterm in question.)
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Most professors and instructors whine about these things around final exam time. I'm no different, I suppose. But if my looking like a digital curmudgeon inspires someone to think twice about asking for an accommodation for the sake of convenience, maybe I don't mind.
They call me paranoid.
When I take research photos, I save them onto my hard drive. I copy them over to two external drives. I put copies on Dropbox. I burn copies onto a DVD. And I save the flash card.
When I started grad school, there were no such things as digital cameras - and when they first appeared on the market, they couldn't take research-grade pictures. So most of what I have from the first 10 or so years of my career are 35 mm slides. But these have all been scanned in, and these digital copies are backed up the same way my digital photos are. And I've been gradually making my way back to museum collections to replace the scanned slides with digital photos. (And I have the original slides kept in safe storage.)
Some of my colleagues have accused me of paranoia. The cloud is by far the safest storage medium, they say. Why don't I just delete them from the flash card - isn't it wasteful to keep buying flash cards? Don't you know how damage-prone those external drives are? Laptops have to be replaced from time to time, you know. And who the hell still uses DVD's? I mean, computers don't even come with CD/DVD drives anymore.
These photos are at the heart of my research program, I explain. As are the notes I take, which are still written out on engineering paper using drafting pens. (I have digital copies of my notebook pages in case something happens to the hardcopies.) The photos represent close to 30 years of work and tens of thousands of research grant dollars (plus quite a few dollars of my own). Replacing them would require visits to dozens of museum collections on six continents and, most likely, many months of time I could otherwise devote to other things. And some of the specimens I've photographed have since been damaged, lost, gone missing, or subjected to destructive sampling. So, yeah - I overdo it with backing them up.
But there's another reason I'm this way -
I kept on doing my work yesterday. Some of my friends dependent on cloud-based storage had to find other things to do when the Amazon outage struck.
Call me paranoid, but I'd like to think I've got decent reasons.
I remember, in 1996...
..when Bill Clinton heaped praise upon his opponent, Bob Dole, after being re-elected in the presidential election.
It wasn't the sort of fake "I thank my opponent for his grace in defeat" toilet water, either - Clinton noted Dole's extraordinary life of service to his country, both in the military and in the Senate. Clinton had defeated a decent man who was actually qualified to hold the office of President, even if he disagreed with Dole's policy opinions.
Clinton knew that a Dole victory, though not necessarily a good thing, would not have been a calamity. It would not have marked a decline in US prestige or credibility abroad. There would have been room for compromise - Dole, so far as I know, didn't have much use for Newt Gingrich. Had a Democrat defeated Dole in 2000, the incoming president wouldn't have to all but hit control-alt-delete on the federal government, and the mess left to clean up would have been manageable.
Dole, too, showed real decency and class at that moment.
Ah, those were the days - when our parties nominated statespeople who actually deserved to be in office, and Republicans didn't treat Democrats as though they were traitors from birth.
My undergrad seminar earlier today.
The lectures for my large-enrollment class are still online, but my seminar for first-year students (on dinosaur art and monsters of folklore - lotsa fun) is face to face, and today was our first meeting.
For the most part, this is an excellent group. They asked a lot of good questions. It's an honors group, so these are all among our best students.
One thing, though. We're not allowed to tell students to wear masks in public universities in my state. I thus couldn't require masks in the classroom. I did, however, indicate that I was recovering from a nasty chest cold (I'm still coughing from it), and that I'm a chronic asthmatic who had a severe attack on Tuesday. It's been extremely humid, and something is pollenating that I desperately want to see wiped out to extinction - so although the issue isn't acute now, I'm still wheezing. I also have a 5-year-old daughter who can't be vaccinated yet. For those reasons, I asked that the students strongly consider being masked in the room.
Masks are available at every door to the building. They were also available in my classroom, though I don't know if that's true of every classroom - but every student who wants a mask can very easily obtain one.
Out of a group of 21, 18 were masked.
What bothers me is that the three unmasked students gave me a look that basically said, "I don't give a fuck about your problems."
While we're not allowed to require masks, we're allowed to explain why we ourselves wear them. (The same is true for vaccines.) I really want to use "because I don't want to be ashamed of myself" and "because I'm not a moron" as reasons, but I suspect I'd get called out for it.
I never thought I'd see the day when asking for basic decency and consideration of the welfare of your fellow person would become a political litmus test.
Runaway selection is killing people.
Some of you might have seen one of my earlier essays comparing trends in Republican politics with runaway selection in evolution. If longer tail feathers attract peahens, tail feathers on peacocks will lengthen over generations to the point that the feathers might actually limit the bird's ability to move or hide. Likewise, during the late 1980's and 1990's, we saw talk radio and right-wing media pushing for increasingly conservative Republicans, to the point where being able to shout "USA, USA, USA!" louder than another candidate is more important than a demonstrated ability to read and write. Hence the madness we're dealing with.
I keep hoping that the next election cycle will break this trend - that the selection has now created political peacocks that can no longer walk or fly because of their outsized tail feathers, and a large enough number of Republicans will say "enough." They're stuck between two rocks - they can't win the primaries without the redhatter base, but are starting to find it more difficult to win the general election with it. The 2020 election burst any remaining bubbles of hope I had that we'd already gotten there - but clearly, we're not.
And now, it's starting to cost lives and throwing those of us still alive into a tailspin of confusion.
My home state does not allow school districts to issue mask mandates. Its legislature and governor don't seem too interested in promoting vaccinations, either.
State policy, technically speaking, applies to K-12 education. It doesn't actually include universities. But the state Board of Regents has decided to see things otherwise, and so we're now the only Big 10 institution without a mask mandate.
The city council has issued a mask mandate. It's supposed to cover all public buildings in town. But the local school district is saying it won't comply - and frankly, I understand that decision, even if i dislike it. The district went to court over an in-person teaching mandate last fall and lost. It cost them a lot of money. And the higher-ups at my university have announced we're taking our marching orders from the BoR. Indeed, for a short time, we were issued "guidelines" that all but forbade us from talking about vaccines or masks with only the narrowest of exceptions. (I have no idea how the Department of Epidemiology would have dealt with it.). It was reversed almost as soon as the rest of the country noticed it, but the fact that the people supervising the whole institution felt obliged to bow before bullshit, being given to them by people who know it's bullshit but feel either entitled or constrained to pretend it's not, is alarming.
I happen to know some of these administrators. Not one of them is anti-mask or anti-vaccine. I'm pretty sure they've all been vaccinated, and I always see them wearing a mask on campus. But they have to walk a fine line between what they know is right and what they think they can actually do. Meanwhile, the BoR is walking a tightrope between the state capitol and physical reality.
Some of the right-wingers in the legislature may believe the it's-not-that-bad-and-vaccines-are-unsafe-and-masks-don't-help-and-don't-impose-tyranny-on-me bologna, but most don't. The same is as true of Washington as it is Des Moines.
This is all because of the runaway selection that was left to run at liberty for the past 40 years. I suspect the governor of our state knows full well that vaccines and masks save lives, but she won't allow herself to see past the next election. Get past one rock, and hope the next one isn't that bad.
Everyone on campus knows masks and vaccines are necessary if we want this thing to end, but there's always someone higher up the food chain who thinks they have to pretend otherwise. And it eventually loops back on itself to the knobs don't seem to actually care that what they see with their own eyes, and hear with their own ears, is inconsistent with what they're told to believe.
This all has to stop, and I believe it will - but when? In my lifetime? I used to think so, but I'm not so sure. When politicians can't be made to put the real world ahead of the warped view of a handful of outspoken but ill-informed voters who think they're the majority, we're hosed.
Refuse the vaccine, but go to the hospital when sick? This is how Americans treat science.
They treat science like they treat religion.
Note how I phrased that. I didn't say they treat science as a religion. Rather, they treat science the way they treat their religious denomination - like a buffet.
If you were to poll American Catholics, you'd find a wide range of opinions regarding divorce, birth control, priestly celibacy, the role of women in the church, Papal infallibility, and even core doctrines like transubstantiation. In some cases, it might even be a majority who disagree with the official church position. And these are people who attend Mass and take part in the sacraments.
It's like a buffet meal - I'll take some of the roast beef and green bean casserole, but not the beets.
(I chose Catholicism not because it's the best example, but because it's the example I know best. I was raised Catholic. My wife doesn't eat bacon, but not because she's Jewish. It's because she's a vegetarian. The rest of her family is perfectly happy to eat it.)
I understood this after listening to a friend of mine in grad school discuss a conversation he'd had with a young-earth creationist. The creationist claimed that radiometric dating can't be trusted because we don't know if rates of radioactive decay are constant over time. "OK," my friend said, "then why do nuclear power plants work?" Because it turns out every nuclear plant, whether generating power for neighborhoods or a submarine, relies on the constant output of energy from a supply of nuclear material - and that output is constant because the nuclear material is decaying at a constant rate. It's the same physics. If one doesn't work, neither should the other.
This left the creationist baffled.
People don't realize that scientific concepts don't exist in a vacuum. I've heard people say that the fossil record can't be used to support the theory of evolution, even though the petroleum companies that fueled their cars spent millions on its use to find oil and gas reserves. And they used it for the same reason evolutionary biologists do - it's a predictive tool.
It's one thing to draw a line with religious belief to accommodate other values, experiences, or modernity. It's another to do that with physical reality.
Hence, we have people who will go to the hospital if they need medical care, but who will also follow crackpot politicians into thinking COVID is a hoax or that the vaccine is deadly.
We've seen this before. Denial of climate science? Evolutionary biology? Modern geology? I'm not talking about flat-earth or ancient alien believers, either - I'm talking about ordinary people who might claim to be scientifically literate, but who pick and choose those parts of science that conform to their political or religious ideologies. It's been typical of the average American's approach to science since before the modern era.
It's getting worse, and given my efforts in the classroom, I don't know if it's ever going to get better. But the idiocy we're seeing is not new.
thoughts on today's Google doodle and the line between human and nonhuman
The Google Doodle up for today (Aug. 1) refers to Turkana Boy, the remains of an adolescent male Homo erectus (or Homo ergaster*) found east of Lake Turkana. The specimen is about 1.6 million years in age.
I had the privilege of seeing this specimen about 6 years ago, and I'd like to describe my reaction to the opportunity, which went way beyond what I expected.
My work these days is mostly on the crocodiles that have lived in East Africa over the past 25 million years. This includes both the living forms and the extinct.
Today, if you see a crocodile in East Africa, it's nearly always one of two species of Crocodylus - C. niloticus or C. suchus. Both were considered the same species (the Nile crocodile) until about 10 years ago, when molecular evidence clearly showed that they're different. Crocodylus suchus is mostly in western and central Africa, though its range does pass through Sudan and (we think) into Ethiopia. One of the dwarf crocodile species (either Osteolaemus tetraspis or O. osborni) formerly occurred in western Uganda, and the central African sharp-nosed crocodile (Mecistops cataphractus) reaches Lake Tanganyika, but otherwise, anywhere you go in East Africa now, you'll just see the one species.
But until comparatively recently, there could be as many as five crocodile species living in the same area. Some were gigantic - one species of Crocodylus could have exceeded 27 feet in length. And for the most part, they are unrelated to C. niloticus or C. suchus. (Many are closely related to Osteolaemus, but were normal-sized for a crocodile, making them giant dwarf crocodiles.)
But I digress.
My work has taken me to museums throughout East Africa. My animals were the largest predators faced by our ancestors, and one of them is known to have consumed such primates, as shown by the presence of crocodile bite marks on the remains of at least one early human at Olduvai Gorge. (We named that crocodile Crocodylus anthropophagus. But I again digress.).
I thus wanted to look at some of these early humans to get good impression of their size. Pictures and reported dimensions are OK, but I wanted to visualize it. And frankly, some of these fossils are famous, and I kinda wanted to see them for that reason as well - but mostly, it was to get a visual sense of them.
These countries treat early human remains as national treasures. They're kept under very tight security. The US Constitution is given less security than some of these fossils.
So one day, a couple of us were taken to see the early humans in Nairobi. A couple of boxes were taken out with the skulls of "australopithecines." These are (depending on what one counts as a close human relative) the closest relatives of humans that aren't referred to our genus, Homo. I picked them up and looked them over. Very impressive.
Next, they took out the drawer holding the skull of Turkana Boy. And right away, I felt what can only be described as an emotional experience. I felt something I couldn't put into words. Was it because this was such a famous fossil? Maybe, but so were the others. Was it because it was such well-preserved fossil that had been restored by some of the best preparators in the profession? Maybe. But there was something more than that.
It took me a while to put my finger on it, but I eventually did.
Assemble a room full of philosophers and anthropologists, lock the door and tell them they can't leave until they agree on the demarcation between human and non-human, and you'll get a room full of dead philosophers and anthropologists. There's no one set of standards. Is it our large brain? Our ability to make tools? Self-recognition? The ability to consciously plan for the future? Knowledge of our own mortality and burial or our dead? Art? Language? Alteration of the landscape for our own purposes? A soul? Some of these came about gradually and can be found in other animals. Other primates make tools, and some can be taught to communicate with sign language, for example.
I have know idea where the dividing line is, but the australopithecines I'd seen were on one side of it, and Turkana Boy was on the other side. And I was on the same side as Turkana Boy.
The australopithecines were cool to look at, but however many similarities I could see between them and me, they weren't me. Their skulls, to me anyway, still kinda look like the skulls of gorillas and chimpanzees. Not identical, mind you - they're not as prognathous, and the teeth aren't quite the same - but even though I knew they walked on two legs, the overall gestalt of the skull was that of an ape.
But Turkana Boy? I wasn't just holding the skull of an immature male primate. I was holding the skull of someone's kid. This individual was never merely a juvenile - he was a child. He would have grown not to be a mature individual or adult, but a man.
This was someone who probably saw some of the crocodiles I'm working on, but alive. How did he react? Was he fearful? Did he and his friends play in the water, like most children would? Did they somehow know which parts of a river were safe? Did he or his parents perform some sort of ritual to ward the crocodiles away? No idea - but I can visualize them.
(Some of these crocodiles were large enough to have slurped him down as easily as we might slurp down an oyster or Jell-O shooter. That's probably why we don't see crocodile bite marks on hominins from that site - the crocs were bigger, the hominins were smaller, and there probably wasn't much biting involved. Another of the crocs looked like it crawled right out of Dr Seuss or Hieronymus Bosch. Imagine a gharial crossed with a sawfish. Or a crocodile with a musical instrument instead of a snout. Another digression. I apologize.)
Some part of my forebrain registered the australopithecines as "ape" and Turkana Boy as "human." I can't point to a single morphological feature that did this for me. Turkana Boy's brow ridges aren't as prominent, his teeth look more like mine, his brain cavity is somewhat larger. Maybe that played a role? I don't know. But the overall bearing of this specimen crossed a line I still haven't located, and my subconscious reacted to it.
Anyway - I've worked with modern and fossil bones throughout my career. I've had all kinds of reactions. Some are just gorgeously preserved. Others were handled Georges Cuvier, Charles Darwin, Mary Anning, and other founders of my field. Or I came to realize they represented a new species. There's a thrill with these. But Turkana Boy was different, and the Google Doodle reminded me of that.
*In my opinion, early humans have been way oversplit.
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