Anti-Vaxxers

One of the two people that died of measles in Pennsylvania was an infant.

All the anti-vaxxers who inquire (in bad faith) that if we have our measles vaccine, why do we care if others don't get it? Since we'll be protected by our magic shot, right?

This is why. Infants who are too young* for the vaccine can get the measles, and they are more likely to die of it than those of a more robust age. (Like six, which was when I got the measles. Not the shot. The actual disease. I lived before the vaccine was available, when children were still dying from the disease. About 200 kids died of it that year in America.)

“The real vulnerability is in infants between 6 and 11 months of age, as maternal antibody is waning and they haven’t gotten their first dose of the MMR vaccine,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Dallas.

In places where infants have a high risk of measles exposure, health authorities sometimes recommend an early dose of the vaccine for babies starting at 6 months old. That was the case during an outbreak in Texas last year, when two unvaccinated girls died of the disease.

Other people have immunological issues. They too can catch the measles. Some people, like me, lived before the measles vaccine was available and may never have caught the disease. Sure, they're likely to be old, so maybe anti-vaxxers don't care if they die. They didn't care during COVID, when "only" old people and people with immunological problems were likely to die of the virus. (Like my father, who was in his 80s, and had dementia. Who cares if he dies, right?)

These people have shrugged off the bonds of community. They aren't part of the community, they are declaring. Often they have their own insular (and whackaloon) community they have decided to belong to instead. That's their right, here in America.

But they're despicable all the same.

*12-15 months for the first shot, and a booster at ages 4-6

Dreaming

I've been having a lot of terrible dreams lately. Last night was an anxiety dream about working at the library, which was, God, forty years ago? Fifty?

I was late for work and I couldn't get my phone to let me call in (I had my iPhone even though I worked at the library so long ago no one had a portable phone and very few people even had those huge phones in their cars) and my mother was downstairs watching the television with the sound turned up really loud (this was something she actually did, which drove me crazy when I lived at home). Also I had some kind of medical appointment that I had missed and they kept calling me only the phone wasn't ringing and didn't let me take the calls.

Yesterday night I had a moving dream -- we were moving, but nothing was packed and the movers were arriving any moment and I didn't know where the new house was.

The night before last, the house was full of mice and bugs and the kid was an infant but we didn't have anywhere safe for him to sleep, because of the mice and bugs.

These are all clearly anxiety dreams, but what am I anxious about? Everything is fine.

Trump, maybe. The MAGA movement in general. The house being filled with mice and bugs and not being able to keep the kid safe really fits that one.

Anyway, ugh.

AI and University Teaching

People I know at universities are going back to paper tests written by hand, and what they are finding is the students are doing markedly worse under that system. Previous "good" grades were actually students using AI to write their exams and papers. Without AI, those students are helpless.

It's probably partly that these are COVID students, who got passed during the pandemic even if they did no work at all -- so they did no work. (One of my students told me they took a job during school hours, and just left Zoom open on their laptop.) And when students can pass without doing the work in classes they don't care about (for many, many students, that is every single class) then they don't do the work.

Why would that be? They're paying for these classes, why would they not make at least some effort to learn what's being taught? 

Possibly it's because these students come from Red States, where for the past two decades their parents and their governments have been saying that teachers are mindless liberals, that everything they're teaching is woke propaganda, and that education is worthless. 

Education is a meaningless credential, their parents and their pastors and their governments say. Education is hoops to jump through so that you can get a job. Education is a scam, a Ponzi scheme. That so many of these students then treat university classes like something they can cheat their way through is no real surprise. 

This is despite, or I guess maybe because of, their massive ignorance. (I could tell you stories....)

I'm glad I'm retired for two reasons: having to fail most of my students would be too depressing; and going back to paper exams and writing essays in class means I would have to read their appalling handwriting. 

Ugh. No thanks.

The Real Bubble...

...is the bubble of militant ignorance.

I've lived in Red States very nearly all my life. I was born just outside Seattle, in a trailer park, but we left there when I was three to move to New Orleans, to another trailer park.

Graduate school in Arkansas. First job in Idaho. Second job in North Carolina. Third job -- this job -- back in Arkansas.

Raising a Genderqueer Kid in Arkansas

I didn’t intend to give my kid – a brilliant Jewish atheist with anxiety and depression issues – a childhood in a small hyper-conservative city in Arkansas, where most of the people she went to school with would be Evangelical Christians, not to mention Far-Right (read: Trump-flavored) Conservatives.