Stuff

Just some stuff here:

• Gave my Comp I students yesterday, as an exercise, an essay that argued that spanking and poverty are linked -- that is, that children who are spanked tend to grow up to earn less money. The more a kid is spanked, the lower his or her income will tend to be; and the greater chance he or she will have of being in a lower income range. The purpose of the exercise was just for them to (a) list the thesis of the essay and (b) say whether the essay gave support for the thesis (that is, did it list its sources). But I like to use this particular essay because of the outrage it always generates among my students, who have, as you can probably guess, all been spanked a great deal as children and who are, hey, get this, mostly from poor families. And -- you can guess the rest! -- will all insist, to a student! -- that no correlation could possibly exist there! I don't get involved in the debate. I put them in their groups and hand out the essay and give the assignment and watch it happen. It's always lots of fun. One or two came up to me afterwards to ask what I thought. I told them, and they looked surprised.
• Took the Kid to the fair -- Yes! The Arkansas-Oklahoma State fair has arrived yet again! The Other Liberal Professor and I and our families go together each year. Miles and the kid go on rides together. Mick, who is two now, was old enough to go with them this year. I bought a bag of cotton candy for the Kid and turned Mick onto it. The Other Liberal Professor was appalled, but I told her it was my job to corrupt her children. She said she would pay me back when the Kid get a bit older. Eeek. The Kid and Miles won stuffed dragons at the dart toss, breaking balloons very professionally, I must say, and gyros and corn dogs were eaten, and we saw chickens and cattle and canned okra and quilts and science fair exhibits and many of the school mates of both our children and us. Everyone goes to the Arkansas-Oklahoma State Fair, apparently.
• The weather was viciously hot yesterday, but it is cool again today. My power bill came -- a hundred dollars less than last month, but still shockingly high. Yikes.
• We're doing Middlemarch in Vic Lit. It is a deal more racist than I remembered. How did that happen?