There are many things which have annoyed me of late, and I’ve had this post as a draft, adding and removing things from it. Here are the top four:
- The Final Frontier: Everything these days is being referred to as the final frontier. We all remember Star Trek, of course, with its “Space, the final frontier”, but now everything is the final frontier. Sustainability is the final frontier; something related to the computer is the final frontier; etc, etc. When will these people learn, the final frontier means that it is the last barrier to the knowledge of humanity. Consequently, it is not the FINAL frontier. It might be a frontier, an important one at that, but it’s not the final one.
- Geosequestration: This is the idea of carbon capture from somewhere like a power plant, and pumping it into underground storage. I am all for reducing carbon emissions. I think things like biosequestration is a great idea. However, it is NOT going to work to pump the carbon dioxide under the ground for several reasons – there are insufficient areas in which to store the carbon dioxide, it needs to be monitored constantly and ground has a tendency to leak, plus it poisons the ground water and soil making them both highly acidic, which reduces plant life in the area and can cause acidification of large bodies of water on the surface. So stop talking about it and start using alternative fuels!!
- “Sir”: I have a very liberal classroom when I tutor, consequently, I find it more than slightly humorous when students call me Sir. However, it’s been irritating me recently. I’m 23, guys. Don’t make me feel so old.
- Plagiarists: Finally, I have managed to catch 26 students from the ~350 I had this semester with plagiarism. This annoys me for two reasons. First, the lecturer is pathetic, and doesn’t seem to care, leaving it to me to organise how to deal with it all. Second, because I keep calling meeting with the students, and they keep NOT COMING *angry face*. I’m taking my time to organise these things… the least you can do is humour me with your attendance!!
Totally agree with you on the carbon capture thing. There are lots of half baked ideas around. Hopefully they’ll research it all a bit more before actually doing something.
The plagiarism thing astounds me… if I was the lecturer I’d fail them all. You’d only need to do it for one class one year and the message would be sent to everyone. I bet there are huge tracts of rules and regulations on plagiarism – surely it’s not too hard to enforce them.
All very annoying things. I loath being called ’sir’. I also hate being introduced as ‘this is my boss’. It makes me feel like an old fart.
Plagiarism is a really bad thing. Has the Interweb made this more tempting for students as a result of copy / paste functionality? When I was at uni 15 years ago (shock-horror) there was barely an Internet around for there to be source material to steal.
Surprisingly, the majority of the plagiarism was from each other, not from the internet, but some were stupid enough to do things like copy Wikipedia. As a wise man (I think it was my PhD supervisor) once said, if they’re going to plagiarism, they’re not going to bother going to great lengths to do it.
Sounds like students are the same everywhere. Email to me usually start “Dear Respected Sir”, despite a request in lectures to call me Sebastian. But my bigger concern is from students who email me “Dear Respected Madam” – I am still not sure how to take that.