Category Archives: makes me stabby

makes me stabby

on the non-unequivocal goodness of questioning authority

Look, friends. I’m far from a fan of author­ity, per se. On any given day there’s like a 30% chance that I will assent to full-on anar­chism. But I need to dis­cuss how annoy­ing (and pos­si­bly per­ni­cious) this “ques­tion author­ity” catch­phrase truly is. The con­cept of author­ity is pretty closely tied up with that of exper­tise. …

June 29, 2011 – 9:41 am | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in critical thinking, education, makes me stabby | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

I don't care about the original intent of value-added models

I’m tak­ing a break from end-of-semester mad­ness to offer this mini-rant, inspired by a pas­sage in this WP arti­cle, “Lead­ing math­e­mati­cian debunks value-added”: When value-added mod­els were first con­ceived, even their most ardent sup­port­ers cau­tioned about their use [Sanders 1995, abstract]. They were a new tool that allowed us to make sense of moun­tains of …

May 9, 2011 – 10:21 am | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in applied ethics, education, education policy, makes me stabby | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2)

prizes, payments, and donating blood

This old post, on the moral sta­tus of donat­ing blood, still attracts a trickle of Google searches to this blog. I won­der who the searchers are — per­haps peo­ple try­ing to get moti­vated to donate, peo­ple try­ing to ratio­nal­ize not donat­ing, or bio­med­ical ethics paper writ­ers? Any­way, I hadn’t donated blood in over six months …

May 20, 2010 – 6:00 am | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in applied ethics, biomedical ethics, ethics, makes me stabby | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3)

“appreciating” secretaries, “appreciating” teachers

Last week was Admin­is­tra­tive Pro­fes­sion­als’ Day. On this day, you are sup­posed to take some time to thank your sec­re­tary and/or other sup­port staff, usu­ally with a gift or lunch or what­ever. A Face­book friend who shall remain name­less expressed baf­fle­ment at the exis­tence of said hol­i­day, claim­ing that admin­is­tra­tive pro­fes­sion­als should not get extra …

April 26, 2010 – 10:54 am | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in current events, education, makes me stabby, teaching | Tagged , , , , | Comments (11)

so be good for goodness sake

I’m tak­ing a break from seri­ous con­tent to bring you friv­o­lous xmas post, 2009. You know that song “Santa Clause is Com­ing to Town?” It con­tains the lyric: “so be good for good­ness sake.” But this is clearly incon­sis­tent with the con­tent of the song, and it dri­ves me crazy. Being good for good­ness’ sake means that …

December 24, 2009 – 4:13 pm | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in ethics, makes me stabby, value | Tagged , , , | Comments (9)

makes me stabby: soda thieves

Wel­come to the first instan­ti­a­tion of ‘makes me stabby,’ a run­ning series of posts on things that upset me & which might upset you, too. Peo­ple who steal soda from din­ing estab­lish­ments where you dis­pense your own MAKE ME STABBY. Every week I sit in Chipo­tle and mon­i­tor whether peo­ple are doing that, and I give …

November 5, 2009 – 9:02 am | By pamela j. stubbart | Posted in makes me stabby | Comments (0)