Arbitrary Marks

There’s an article in today’s Insider Higher Ed on a professional development program for adjunct instructors at Valencia Community College, Florida. The opening paragraph of the story asks,
“Professional development programs to share the latest teaching techniques tend to be designed in ways that effectively exclude part timers, who can’t be expected to be on campus at [...]

It’s the time of year that students are busy studying for and taking final exams. Professors are occupied creating them. During these days, instructors have to decide how to “wrap up” their course. In my Newberry Library class, I decided to give a brief ten to fifteen minute presentation of my views on the problems [...]

A few weeks ago, returning from the U of C campus on the bus, I was grading exams for my ethics course. After about ten minutes of marking up essays on Socrates and Kant, I put them away, preparing to get off and transfer to the subway. The bus, as usual, was packed, so I [...]

I like to think of myself as a geek. I’m still not quite thirty, live in a relatively hip section of the city, follow Lost and The Office, and, well, I’m not entirely ignorant about pop culture. But I will not text.

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There’s an–as usual–interesting discussion going on over at A Philosophy Job Market Blog. Someone there wants to know how much conference papers presented at graduate student conferences matter to faculty. The answers seem to fall into several broad categories:

They don’t. Publish something in a journal, you moron.
Well, you’re showing that you care. Caring counts.
Eh, it’s [...]

This entry is filed under “personal” because it isn’t my typical analytical approach to a topic. So, keep in mind I won’t be weighing the pros and cons of the Emerging movement or analyzing theology, in what follows.

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Longtime readers, especially those who come here through UUpdates, may notice that I haven’t been writing much on specifically Unitarian Universalist topics. There’s a reason for that which I’d like to explore. No, I haven’t decided to return to Christianity or to convert to Mahayana Buddhism. In fact, I’ve just found a church in Chicago [...]

Like many other would-be philosophers, I read the Philosophy Job Market Blog. It’s written by a few pseudonymous PhD students on the hunt for teaching jobs in academia, and the pain of thesis committees, APA smokers, and the cost of applications. You can think of it as a crueler version of PhDComics. Of course, these are real people, hoping to get real jobs and pay down very real credit card bills.

That’s what makes it simultaneously so disheartening and fascinating to read.

Even though I just applied a new design to Arbitrary Marks, I’m reconsidering it. I think it may be too text-heavy and cumbersome for easy browsing. I want people to scroll through, find posts to comment on, and join in conversation.

So I’ve started work on a new design, from scratch (I found a blank CSS template), and here’s what I’ve come up with: http://www.arbitrarymarks.com/sandbox. Take a look and let me know what you think. Still in the works: excerpts of comments below each post, and showing the latest 10 posts (5 as excerpts, 5 as titles).

Mad Melancholic Feminista has written a post called “Heidegger isn’t helping anymore“, about the limitations of Martin Heidegger’s thoughts on death when it comes to grappling with her own. Now that she’s a mother, she finds a perspective missing in his writing:

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