At the end of the exam, the professor saw the student as he got up from his desk, with his notes in hand. The situation was escalated to some sort of academic hearing, and he received a zero on his exam. He was found guilty of possessing an unauthorized aid or something.

He came to me to chat about the situation. Of course there was nothing I could do, but I was an ear who would listen and commiserate.

I sympathized with him, and coached him on how we have to take an active role in appearing innocent. When we come to an exam, bring a pencil, but don’t bring the pencil case. Bring a calculator, but don’t bring the calculator cover. I explained that we have to work to ensure that we don’t give the authorities any reason to suspect us. Then I realized, all those strategies I learned were useless now. Nobody cares any more. Exams are such artificial measures of knowledge and understanding. In the real world, you do the work, or you don’t. You use the resources that are available to you, or you don’t.

Yet another useless thing I learned in undergrad.

In the years that I’ve run the tutorials, frankly, not much has changed. I tweak things here and there, but most of the time, I solve the same problems that I solved 4 years ago. One aspect in particular are my pop quizzes.

The professor for whom I teach mandated me to give pop quizzes, whose marks add up to 10% of students’ final marks. She gave me free reign to choose the content, the difficulty, and even the number of quizzes that are given. When I first started as a TA for course X, I decided that I didn’t want to punish students for not understanding everything all the time, and that I wanted to reward students for attending the tutorials. As a result, the quizzes were easy: they were open-book, and they were on the content that was taught during that tutorial. What better way to reward students for coming to tutorial than to give them nearly-free marks?

But recently, I’m no longer certain about the motivation behind my pop quizzes. If you don’t need to attend tutorial, then is it really my place to force you to come so as not to lose 10%? Many students can benefit from seeing problems solved on the board, but it certainly isn’t going to reach all students. Why force them to stay? Okay, so now I need a new purpose for the pop quizzes…but by the very “pop” nature of them, really, it’s just a punitive device for not attending tutorials.

The only learning benefit I see is to get the students practicing the methods. I think it would make more sense to have un-weighted pop quizzes. Then they would get the benefit of practice, without forcing them to attend.

Alas, I’m not the instructor for this course, so I chug along…pop quizzing my students.

As a University of Waterloo graduate, I lived the life of a co-op student for five years, which meant being able to pack up my life and move to another city every 4 months (8 months for me, but same idea). This meant sleeping on mattresses without frames, folding chairs, plastic Rubbermaid tables doubling for desks. Your stuff needed to be portable, functional, easy to move, or easy to leave behind/sell.

Now the time has come to truly invest in my home, but I am being haunted by my past. There’s only two years left in my PhD program, and who knows what will happen then? Will I have to sell and move? Will I need to rent my condo out and rent elsewhere? If I do, do I really want to move my nice furniture? Or wouldn’t I prefer to leave behind cheaper furniture for my tenant?

I also have this fear of stuff accumulating and becoming a burden. You know that mouse option in Windows when you can have a trail of pointers? That’s what I feel about stuff. A laggy draggy thing that follows you around that you can’t get rid of. I don’t even know how to dispose of an old computer. How on earth do I offload a couch?

That, and everything I own eventually becomes garbage. Whether it’s a consumable or a capital good, doesn’t the book value of everything eventually reach zero (except land)?

So with 10 sleeps until moving day, I wander Corningware and Ikea, picking things up, and putting them down; picking things up, and putting them down. Even the fact that my mom is giving me so much of her brand new, unused housewares is making me nervous.

We all have too much crap.

This post is based on just one day of casual research. None of it should be taken as legal advice! Think of it more as a motivator to stand up for yourself.

I always thought that copyrights were something for people who were writing books, or recording music. Never did I think that it was something that would affect me, unless it was from the perspective of potentially violating a copyright.

In fact, it’s something that’s quite important for students. Did you know that all of the original content that you produce is automatically copyrighted? When you write a paper for a class, or freelance as a blogger, your content belongs to you. Regardless of whether you remember to put that little © on your work, it’s yours to do with as you wish. But not everyone will let you believe it.

Have you heard of TurnItIn? When I was an undergraduate student, I was required to submit my work to turnitin.com. In my naïveté, I was eager to prove that my work was original, and didn’t consider that I lost rights to my intellectual property when I submitted my work. As I started grad school, I realized that I wanted to get my papers back. Turnitin made it impossible for me to get my work back, and I had to give up on my quest. What if I had written something novel that I wanted to use in my graduate research? Instructors may have you believe that such a submission is mandatory, but it may be worth asking them if you might retain the rights to your work, and they might do their due diligence in checking for originality.

An interesting concept is being paid to write, i.e. freelancing. If you’re paid, does that mean you don’t own your work? Nowadays with the prevalence of blogs and e-zines, everyone and their uncles are freelancing. A reputable organization ought to have clear policies on how they will treat your intellectual property. If they don’t, remember: unless you’ve signed away your copyright, your content is automatically copyrighted to you. Can the executive editor change your work without telling you? Yes and no. This part of the act is a grey area. Has your work been distorted, mutilated or modified to the prejudice of your honour or reputation? Have they introduced errors to your writing? Check out the moral rights section of the act to decide for yourself.

It is definitely not a clear cut law, and it has lots of grey areas! Not to mention, most of the layman versions are American, so they’re all based on US law, not the Canadian one. Just ask a lot of questions, remember that your work is more valuable than you think, and protect it like it is!

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Within the next few months, I blogged as I normally would, but tried to put a student-oriented spin to my content. It was nice to have a larger platform on which to say what I always said, so I put a lot of effort into my posts in hopes that people would be drawn to read my posts out of the many other student bloggers on the blog.

Being a rather controversial person, I fully expected to experience censorship, and several times, my posts came back to me. I happily complied, realizing that it was a blog that was inextricably tied to a university…until one day, as I was reading one of my posts online, I noticed that my writing had been…DEFILED.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. There had been major edits to my work without my knowledge or permission, prior to publishing it under my name. I noticed that they had made a few grammatical corrections, but they had also introduced grammatical errors, and changed the meanings of the things that I had written.

I contacted the editor immediately, asking what had happened, and she responded tersely that as a paid contributor (To be clear, I’m a freelancer, I don’t work for hire.), my writing was subject to edits without notice.

I spent the day trying to figure out the difference between editing and a violation of my rights. Even if my work can be edited, do I get to sign off on the final version of it? I actually couldn’t find most of the information, and I realized that one of the problems was that Hart House Blog hadn’t provided a policy for our work. Ironically, I had put in my to-do list an item to find out who retained the copyright to my posts, but had put it on the back burner, considering it a low-priority task.

I took a good look at the moral rights section of Canada’s copyright act, and I couldn’t quite resolve the issue. After all, it was clear that the editor had intended to “clean up” my writing. It was just unfortunate that the editing staff seemed to lack a strong grasp of grammar, and just omitted terms they were unfamiliar with, rather than doing their job and finding out what it meant. I felt that publishing my post riddled with typos, sentence fragments and incomplete thoughts that were not originally there, did indeed fall under distorting, mutilating or modifying my work to the prejudice of my honour or reputation (Copyright Act section 28), but of course I wasn’t going to pursue a lawsuit.

I decided to take the path of least resistance, and I asked the editor to revert some of the changes that they had made to my latest post, and explained each error that they had made. And since I didn’t want to just lie down and take it, I wrote a snappy piece on copyright, and how it’s relevant to post secondary students. The editor (understandably) refused to publish it, and suggested that I stop writing for them if I was uncomfortable with the editing.

Honestly, I’m not uncomfortable with my work being edited to genuinely clean up my writing. It’s just when the changes are so heavy-handed that it takes away from the true intention of my post, and when they add errors that I get upset.

Anyway, that’s the very long story of why I’ve stopped blogging for Hart House. Thanks for reading.

Well, we’re squeezing, and here’s what I’ve noticed: we barely have time for each other.

I’m the one that can never commit to a date. He’s the one that’s always on the way out. Every time we’re together, I feel the time pressure. ‘This is nice, but…I should really be working on that paper.’ ‘I really want to talk to him about this, but he needs to get started on that assignment.’

We both live lives so full that things have got to give, and as we start to take each other for granted, it’s time together that we’re giving up. Okay, I’m being unfair. I’m the proponent of giving time up, while he tries to over extend himself. Not a sustainable situation, in any way, shape, or form.

How do people do it? Does it survive in the long run? Can two type-As really be together, or are we destined to settle for a supporter-type who is not half as ambitious?

An old friend of mine and I went to see Alex Pangman and her Alleycats on an impromptu dinner date. I decided to bring my boyfriend’s camera with me to see what I could do. It turns out you have to take about a hundred pictures to get one good one.

I wish I had gotten more of her face, but I love this picture anyway. She’s singing with the doorman. He had an awesome voice, but I can’t remember his name!

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Okay, so I like to pretend that I don’t do it, but I know that it’s a lie.  Let’s face the music and try to enlighten our men, just a little bit.

Sometimes, when expectations aren’t met, you doubt yourself for having them.  Then you feel like the reason you’re upset is unjustified, and you feel embarassed for feeling upset.  I also fear that if I did share my reasons, that I would appear petty, and seem more work than I’m worth.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be appeased.  I’m still upset, and I do want to be consoled.  I just don’t want to be judged for feeling bad.  Like it says in that book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, women need to have their feelings validated.  But hey, I know what world we live in, so sometimes I just keep it in, to minimize the risk of invalidation.

Hey, optimality again: minimization!

Sadly, I’m not sure that I can give advice beyond insight.  I don’t think there’s anything you can actually do to make it better, boys.  Just keep trying until she decides to give in.

EVERY WEEK, “Janet, you look great these days!” “Janet, you look so pretty, I hardly recognize you!” “Janet, why are you getting so beautiful?”

It actually got to the point where they stopped being compliments and started being veiled insults.  Really?  Just how ugly was I?

Then finally, this Sunday someone REALLY went too far.  She said “Janet, you’re looking more beautiful every week.  Did you have plastic surgery?”

What?  In what world is that an appropriate thing to ask?  Okay, the thing is, it’s actually a compliment when it comes from Koreans.  Yes, we are cosmetic surgery crazy.  All we care about is the finished product, and not how we got there.  I guess that explains a lot of other things about the culture, like the rampant cheating in my tutorials.

However, I haven’t been able to find the fundamental difference between expert application of makeup, and surgery.  It’s just different degrees of artificial beauty.  So why is it that I find joy in wearing beautiful makeup, and consider myself too good for surgery?

Though I can’t say from experience, I’m betting that this is unsustainable behaviour.  On the one hand, I feel like I should just enjoy the ride and talk to each other all the time, see each other every day, share every (or at least inordinately many) thoughts.  On the other hand, every friend that I know who has sustained a long and healthy relationship has told me that the most important part of a relationship is space.

How long can two people simply be happy with each other before they need space?  I can only imagine that two people would come to need space at different times, probably making things difficult.

I can certainly say that my academic and teaching productivity has taken a noticeable hit.  Unfortunately, with graduate studies, a decrease in productivity isn’t really noticeable until it’s way too late to do anything about it.

How do you make sure that in the long run, you have two complete individuals, and not some composite of 19 tenths of a person?  Do other people even think about this stuff?!?