Falling Like Dominoes...Matt Lauer

Off Topic Politics and World Issues
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I don’t know if it was controlled for or not, but that’s a good point…I know for a fact my evaluations were way more ruthless for courses I thought were dumb or unnecessary in the first place. Was it fair? Probably not, but then at the time I wasn’t interested in being fair, I was just pissed that I was in an irrelevant course.

For instance, I recall a a sociology class I had to attend because of “general Ed” requirements. Now, I enjoy reading about sociology and talking about it to some degree, but I would never have picked that course to round out my general ed credits…but of course none of the more advanced courses qualifies as “general ed” and I’m required to have this for a degree in molecular biophysics for some godforsaken reason.

This teacher spends 25 BLEEDING MINUTES on the difference between mean, median, and mode. I got up and walked out, didnt come back except for the exams, didn’t read the text either, and took a B in the class despite acing the work and exams because we were graded in part on attendance. I was absolutely cruel in my evaluation.

Did it help? No. Probably wasn’t fair either, but I wasn’t interested in whether or not my voice would change anything, I was giving voice to my opinion.

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62

Ditto. Fairly or not, in retrospect I know that I was harsher in my student evaluations on courses that I thought were bad courses, even if that wasn’t entirely in the hands of the instructor.

With all due respect, judging by what I see on a daily basis, this was not nearly enough time, lol.

I have to explain what a percentage is on a semi-regular basis to people that graduated from medical school and currently operate on patients.

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63

Aaaaaaand that’s officially the scariest thing I’ve heard all day. That just makes me sad, it should take 2 minutes at most to describe the general definition of all of them. Mean = average. Median = middle number (or avg of 2 middle numbers) separating the bottom and top halves. Mode = the one that shows up the most times. How hard is that??

Most definitely. I believe that a teacher can make most courses (even some of the irrelevant ones) better and more applicable for students by simply trying, but I agree. Bearing in mind professors are very busy (I definitely did not appreciate that as an undergraduate). It’s not always in their hands but most students probably view it the same as we did.

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64

LOL, wait til you hear the stories about trying to explain the difference between absolute risk versus relative risk…

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65

Nope. No no no no. Seriously, I feel bad for you haha

66

I can top that.

We (ophthalmologists) routinely screen pts taking the medicine Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine) for a rare-but-serious, sight-threatening side effect. Part of the screening process involves determining the pt’s dose in mgs/kg/d. (The upper safe limit is 5).

So my resident–last year of training, 9 months from being practice-eligible–saw a Plaquenil pt. Little old lady; weighed 50 kgs on the nose. Was taking 400 mg of Plaquenil per day.

Me: OK, what is her current daily dose in mg/kg?
Resident: [blank look]
Me: OK, what is 400 divided by 50?
Resident: 20?
Me: Not even close. Try again.
Resident: 5?
Me: OK, now you’re just guessing, which is something good doctors NEVER do. Let’s simplify the problem. Drop a zero from each number. What’s 40 divided by 5?
Resident: [blank look, again]
Me, exasperated: OK, WHAT NUMBER TIMES 5 MAKES 40??!!
Resident: 8?
Me: Yes. And what should we do about it?
Resident: Recommend to her primary physician that her dose be lowered?
Me: Bingo. And as an aside, I recommend you keep a good malpractice attorney on retainer.

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67

“Siri, what’s 400 divided by 50?”

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68

That’s tremendous. We’re well off topic now, but this brings up something that I’ve been seeing more and more - decline of basic computational skills as we become more and more dependent on computers to do things for us. I understand that we will often have access to computers that can make our life easier, but still, it doesn’t seem too much to ask for a student to know how to divide 400 by 50. Or at least to not be so clueless that they guess “5” lol.

I tutored an undergraduate student that would use a calculator for EVERY SINGLE computation, including things like 2x10 (seriously, what sort of college student is unaware of how to multiply by ten?!)

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69

Good lord. You’re going to make me start manually checking my dose for everything i take from here to eternity. Ridiculous, although that last line was absolutely hilarious.

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70

You haven’t seen the new freshmen enrollees in a while have you?

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71

Ehhhh …

There are some Master’s holders on this site that use apostrophies when making nouns plural.

Cough cough @anon50325502
:smile:

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72

Well, he’s an accountant, lol.

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73

I had 4 professors in the same subject who were actually 2 married couples. The men were better professors than the women and part of it was how they communicated. I think if I made a list of all my professors almost every male would be ahead of all the women. It is possible that there is another factor in all of this. The female professors I had tended to be younger, as a group, than the males. A well-known person in academia has said that professors are less educated now than in the past. So maybe the male professors, who are older and better educated, are better communicators because they know more and are more confident. They may have also been held to a higher standard than professors are now.

74

I just chalk the results up to guys using less words. Some complex subjects can take some explaining, but there is such a thing as too much.

Or as I tell my wife “10 words or less honey, not 100 or more!”.

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I thought opthamology and opthomatry involved a great deal of math… with lense grinding using imaginary numbers and integrals etc…

Are you sure that resident calculated the patient’s kilograms correctly? “Let’s see 400lbs that’s 50 kilograms!”

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76

It does–I teach that subject (Optics) for the department.

In fairness, our average pt is closer to 400# than 50 kgs.

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77

Maybe @EyeDentist’s colleague was an accountant before his current career. In which case, he can make 400 / 50 be whatever you like.

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78

Well, for a real taste of the present, ask your average person between the ages of 18 and 30 a geography question. Don’t make it semi-difficult, like what countries border Iran, just something simple. Maybe ask them where the state of Delaware is located or where is Rome. Being serious, had a person ask me where Rome was yesterday and this is a highly paid IT analyst. Based on my personal experience, most US citizens are totally ignorant about the planet. They probably think Mt. Everest is a country.

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79

I’m trying to not read too much into The Economist article, without knowing more. I haven’t looked at the original study. Appreciated all of your thoughts, and @Despade, that was very, very funny.

Back to the topic.

This reminded me of the due process issues. When a company gets a complaint, or a series of complaints, HR is going to review with the company’s lawyers. It’s not a court of law situation. And we don’t always get to hear all the details, so people can get ruined in the court of public opinion. That is worrisome. The idea that needed corrections become over-corrections.

Some of what we’ve heard is pretty egregious, bizarre even. The Weinstein cases in particular look like intimidation, crazy behavior, even violence. Not so much, “I find you very attractive, and if the feeling is mutual, could we go out on a date?” You’d hope that people aren’t calling HR for that kind of thing.

A comment I read today - A bit of hyperbole, but you have to wonder if we’re going to see some hysteria here. Obviously a Garrison Keillor fan who wrote this! haha!

With the Garrison Keillor developments, I think we’ve now gone full-on into “Crucible” territory. People have gone completely hysterical, equating simple passes with assault, a pat on the back with assault – Within hours, all the websites connected with MPR, A Prairie Home Companion, etc. had deleted all archived recordings of Keillor, all webpages that described Keillor as former host, etc. It’s as if they think they must protect the public’s virtue by not allowing us to contaminate ourselves with the sound of his voice or any mention of his name. All this over (as usual) unproven allegations that aren’t even being fully spelled out – we aren’t even to be allowed to know why we aren’t permitted to access those recordings anymore. I increasingly feel that these people are actually assaulting us, the public, in the name of protecting us. People are deciding that we’re all going to be better off if we never again see Charlie Rose, if we can’t listen to archived copies of “News from Lake Wobegon”, if we don’t get season 6 of “House of Cards” – somehow this is going to make our society purer and more virtuous, or something. I think that at this point, the general public is being punished to appease hysteria…

80

I don’t think you are an outlier, Tyler. I think I said this in one of the other threads, but most of us have worked with many, many men who did not behave like that at work.

BTW, is it just me or do some people sound pretentious when they say harassment? It’s like hearing Americans who suddenly have a British accent when they say “aunt.” Most of us in the Western US say “ant,” like the bug, " not “ah-nt” rhymes with “gaunt.”

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