Whaleoil on why women make bad choices Chur is local slang. Mokopuna is Maori for children.

All the Chur-derellas out there in the heaving, pathetic underclass are thinking they are going to marry a Prince and have many mokopuna and live happily ever after. Sadly for them the fairytale of Chur-derella is a nightmare that ends in pain.

The good Captain has some excellent linkage today as well. Following around… it looks like at least one trial of distance learning has succeeded.

This past fall Thrun and Peter Norvig, research director at Google (where Thrun also works, designing cars that drive themselves), teamed up to teach online and free of charge one of their regular Stanford courses, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, not just to Stanford students but to anyone who wanted to take them. Not only would the online students sit through Thrun and Norvig’s lectures, but the two instructors would test them via quizzes and written assignments, grade their work, and assign them a class ranking. Only Stanford students would be eligible to receive Stanford credit for the course, but non-Stanfordians would receive a “statement of achievement” that, together with their grades and class rankings, could be used to demonstrate that they had mastered the Stanford-level material in the course.

Thrun and Norvig’s bricks-and-mortar course, designed for graduate students and advanced-level undergraduates, had always been one of Stanford’s largest and most popular, with nearly 200 students from a range of disciplines signing up every time the two instructors offered the course. But the enrollment in last fall’s online version was exponential: 160,000 students from 190 countries registered, with about 20,000 of them completing the coursework and receiving grades that were generally on a par with those of the 175 Stanford students who took the bricks-and-mortars version.

My issue with this is marking. It takes me about 90 minutes to mark 30 students essay questions each quarter… per question. When I have to (every second or so year) mark final written exams (where the class approaches 400) it takes me a few days. After around 90 minutes the quality of my marking decreases.  The only way I can see you can grade 20 000 people is by using computers… and multi-choice tests simply do not tell you if someone has mastered the task at hand. (It tells you that they can remember the book, which is another thing). Teaching might scale, but training and mentoring does not.  Stanford may have a bunch of graduate students they use as slave labour to mark things, but my workplace thinks that is (a) exploitative (b) decreases the quality of feedback (to the teacher and student: you know how well you taught by the answers you get).

The other limiting factor, in medicine (and nursing) — and I think also in apprenticeships — is access to hands on time doing the job. You have to make the students part of the clinical team who take histories “for real” and do procedures “for real” under supervision (initially, but they should be able to do this well without you checking everything before they sit finals). That is the true limit to class sizes — the number of services that can support students and use them to improve the quality of care for patients.

Another link is to Dr Helen, who talks about Nagging being toxic. Will S. used this to produce a word study on nagging, on which nothing good is said about the practice. Elspeth, who read the same article, expands on this.

My husband recently shared with me a conversation he had with a gentleman at work. This husband said that his Bose headphones are his best friend. That there is  no way he could live with his wife without them. She nags him all the time. He puts them on after dinner in his office and cranks them up even though he knows it’s bad for his auditory health. They are his refuge from her nagging.

Several other men joined in to share the sentiment. Since my husband works in a male-dominated field, the men often feel free to say what most every man is thinking but would never say in mixed company. Out of the 9 men present, only my husband and one other married man testified that they could not relate to having a nagging wife. They were both greatly envied for their good fortune. It goes without saying that this talk did nothing to make the 2 single guys look forward to married life.

Elspeth simply does not accept that this is appropriate wifely behaviour, and she has been consistent on this for a while. The commentariat (mainly women) noted that they did not like being nagged… and most of them had learned not to do it. Which is one of the reasons I enjoy TC.

[As a complete side note, WordPress spells American. I spell British. WordPress needs a plugin that spells the Queen's English correctly. And handles my deviations into pompous, indeed querulous, erudition]

Onto some hopeful things. In this time of economic difficulty, there are people who continue to have the human impulse of charity.

While all I’ve said above is the usual (of my experience), there have also been instances of amazing grace and Christlike giving that have blown us away. At our darkest, deepest time of need, when we had lost our home and were moving into our current two-bedroom house with five children, a dear Christian sister offered my college age daughter to live with her, rent free. Months later, a group of friends insisted we go out to dinner with them, and before we could make any excuse, they made clear the meal was “on them”. When we hesitated, they made our presence seem so desired, we couldn’t say no. That evening, I saw my husband more relaxed, and truly enjoying himself, than I had in months. Another dear brother gave us a very large sum of cash to help us get through. He and his wife said said they so loved us, and wanted to help, that it was an actual ‘relief’ for them to give to us. That was a while ago. When I recently mentioned the gift to this same friend, he looked confused, and then said, “Oh. I completely forgot about that.” He FORGOT?!?!?! Didn’t hold it over us, or didn’t judge us, didn’t shame us. Just helped, and then forgot about it. But not about us, as they are dear friends.

Bonald has just given me a warning about what to expect if the photo blog takes off. (This site uses WordPress but is hosted elsewhere, and costs me a multiple of $30 a year, but the photo blog is “free”, and there is a risk it will be hit by advts. as Bonald was).

“I’ve just paid WordPress 30 bucks to keep the porn off my site for a year.” So much for “If you don’t like it, don’t watch it”!

I’m glad he did do this, because his discussion of the rhetorical tactics in dealing with contraception is masterful.  Now, I disagree with him about contraception itself being a total evil: it is a relative one. Humanis Vitae argues, as Bonald did, that the use of artificial contraception is an offense against natural law and increases the moral hazard of young women and men engaging in immoral acts. As the limerick says.

There was a young lady named Wilde

Who kept herself quite undefiled

By thinking of Jesus

and social diseases

And the fear of having a child.

I see some uses for hormonal manipulation:(a)The control of symptms within the menstrual cycle, including pain, heavy bleeding, acne, and the symptoms of oestrogen withdrawal during menopause. (b)The spacing of children, so women recover properly from pregnancy (c) the prevention or amelioration of the consequences of sexual assault (the morning after pill) (d) At times the management of moods — although alternatives exist.

However, there is a risk. And that is that people will see sex (of any type) as safe.  It is not, for it is an intimate act in which any bacteria you have will travel to the other. It is designed to make children, which indeed is one of the reasons for Marriage in the first place, as the Bard said

The world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

Now, when the pill was released, it was given to married women only, and the Catholic Church advised against it (as it had other forms of contraception, such as condoms). It took the sexual and feminist revolution to open the floodgates, which lead (in part) to the current raunch culture. So there is some good in contraception, but a moral hazard.

(I guess I have to say this, but I am not Catholic, I’m reformed. But if you are Catholic, you cannot pick and choose. You have said you will follow the teaching, because you see the Roman church as the true church and believe they are guided by the Holy Spirit.  You cannot argue against clear teaching and say you are Catholic).

I’m going to finish this by quoting some very wise words from Ordo Amoris about the current meme that a man should court — ie. ask permission to see a woman for marriage without really having spent time with her.

I find it incredibly selfish that young girls expect these elaborate rituals and I wonder how many real men find that compelling.  As Anna said on Downton Abbey last night, “I’d rather have the right man than the right wedding,” and I would add the engagement to that.

Then perhaps the most controversial thing of all in the article is this:

“God has prepared one special person for you to marry. That’s right: Jesus is our heavenly matchmaker. You don’t need to actively search for a mate; simply pray and God will plop that perfect person down in front of you one day.”

I am a reformed Christian who believes in God’s sovereignty and yet I see that this attitude causes great mischief.  The worst thing is that it keeps young homeschooled girls from trying, from showing interest or even keeping up with themselves, even to think more highly of themselves than they ought.

This is not wise. In fact it sounds like a Christian version of Churl-rella.