Rhett and Link and Lillington and Bunnlevel

OK, so it turns out the wondrous knuckleheads who made the Red House commercial are not just from NC, they’re from Lillington, which for a county seat is pretty close to the middle of nowhere and which I drive through every day on my way to work! Lillington is what I call a ‘twenty town’, on account of the speed limit being 20 – for no apparent reason but for speed-trapping and that the only people who will be bothered to sit on the town council are probably business owners along the main drag who hope the slower speeds will encourage some drive-in trade. But I also have a theory that you can index exactly how too-seriously a town takes itself by how slow it thinks you need to go on the way through. Thirty-five seems to work just fine for large cities that don’t feel the need to play these games.

Anyhoo, Lillington is just north of Bunnlevel, which I also drive through. I live above Bunnlevel, but work below Bunnlevel. Bunnlevel is that much closer to the middle of nowhere and as a forty-five town does not take itself nearly as too-seriously as Lillington. Out of gratitude I make sure to stop at the Bunnlevel post office any time I have important mail to send out, tax payments and applications and such, so that the postmark can properly reflect my respectful reverence for the communities in which my sendings (seek to) involve me. It doesn’t always work, but what does?

So in honor of my commute through this awesome part of the world here’s some more inspirational Rhett and Link (they have their own channel on youtube), first another ad, then a drivethrough song at a drivethrough I may even have personally driven through:

Rachel and I want these guys to be our new best friends and we’re totally on the lookout now at local furniture stores and sleazy used car lots and such, so we can run up to them and say Hey! Aren’t you Rhett and Link (of course they are inseparable), won’t you be our pals? And they will say, Well of course! We’re really quite lonely, what with the fame and all. And we’ll play it off real smooth, like Yeah, we knew it, but you’re cool with us, and the rest will be History.

Why I’m proud to live in North Carolina

Can’t talk – choked up a little bit -

I want to be friends with “Big Head” and “Ten Gauge!” Oh, and Hispanic people too!

Here, the pretty boy explains. Please distinguish between ‘racial’ and ‘racist’! Someone’s been to college!

I love popular culture.

[Update:] Wait a minute, something’s wrong! Jimi’s key won’t unlock that door! No worries, maybe Ten Gauge has a sister.

No, it’s not plagiarism…

Turned my grades in yesterday (vegging out today, tomorrow all-day workshop on Gen Ed reform). The Registrar changed the submission cut-off from 9am to 1pm. She’s German (and not Bavarian), so this was a significant concession. It helped me a lot. It’s much different to stay up all night leisurely rather than frantically.

In my World History sections I asked the students to do something pretty hard for their final papers, as usual – synthesis. We spent the semester working our way through a series of documents ranging from Assia Djebar’s fictional account of growing up in colonial Algeria to Adam Smith and the Communist Manifesto, using ’structure’ and ‘agency’ as our rubrics. The students wrote papers on both, and their task for the final paper was to use specific examples to analyze how structure and agency relate to ‘freedom’, using both readings from the course texts and some outside research as sources. We did brainstorm this quite a bit in class.

I did not have a dogmatic answer in mind, so a variety of answers did well based on how thoughtfully conceived and well supported they were. Most of the students figured out that agency isn’t quite the same thing as freedom, in part because we discussed at length how structures can be either/both constraining and enabling. In a familiar way, the worser papers asserted that freedom is complicated and a matter of perspective (you’ll get a D or maybe a low C for stating what should be the obvious after a whole semester of focused investigation), while the better papers dug down into cases to show how agency was constrained and enabled in particular historical contexts and/or theoretical concepts. And the best demonstrated that what counted as freedom had to be specified depending on contexts and concepts.

We also talked quite a bit about establishing rhetorical credibility and about the authority of sources, so even the marginal students were pretty well inoculated against plagiarism. But I did get two papers that properly cited essays found at commercial plagiarism websites as outside sources. I laughed and laughed.

It’s grading again

I quite like my old post likening paper writing and grading to the tv talent competitions, and since it’s the time of year again for final papers, I thought I’d bring forward from it this fine piece of student satire:

Nothing like leveraging one set of bad behaviors against another, as Susurro also remarks about this one:

Happy grading!