Welcome and Help Me Save My Brain Cells

I love my new eReader. Not only does is it smart enough to automatically download my magazine subscriptions through the community Wi-Fi (thank you, Mayor Fernandez and city council) and put them in categories automatically, not only does it store every single one of the texts I use in lectures and the associated teacher’s guides, not only does is it light as a feather and has a display that actually look like real paper, it also comes standard with an interface to every piece of blogging software imaginable. Plus it has a spell check. And I really need a spell check. Sony/IBM hit a home run with this one.

So, I can hear you asking over the ether, if I can blog to anything, then why I am using WordPress? And, for that matter, why I aren’t I using a template to blog with like everyone else in the civilized world? I like the fact that Worpdress has managed to stay open source and independent through the last two decades while the other players have all been swallowed whole. I think that AOL, Google and Microsoft own enough of the internet, don’t you?

The odd choice of equipment is a function of practicality. My template is now showing the Worst Class Imaginable the third problem on their not-so-surprise quiz – which I am guessing 50% of the class will fail. This has to be the worst class it has ever been my misfortune to teach. I cannot confirm this, but I suspect the Dean put every single legacy and winner of the prestige “daddy bought a new lab” scholarship in this room. They whine constantly, don’t do the readings, fail to understand the most basic of concepts, and hardly ever do the work.

I hate these little rotters. I can say that; I have tenure. Though never let anyone tell you tenure is the ticket to the easy life on campus. Tick off the Dean, and she will give you an intro class filled with escapees from the set of a zombie vid. I think just being in this room is making me dumber.

Which, in a round about way, explains why I am blogging. I need something to keep my brain cells from dying when I am “teaching” this collection of cretins (Okay, tenure does have its advantages. As does psuedonymity). I have decided that my only hope of getting anything into their overly distracted skulls is to make them do the work. So there are lots of in-class assignments and short quizzes. If nothing else, I bet I can get the worst and the laziest among them to quit. And hey, maybe one or two of them will learn something. But while they are doing that, I get bored. And now I am going to generously allow you to share in that boredom.

So why a textblog? With sound dampening microphones, I could do a vid-aud blog without the students hearing anything I am saying. Aside from the nightmare that would be if just one student could read lips – or recorded me and showed the vid to a lip reader – textblogs are just better. If you look around, the most popular blogs and enduring blogs are text blogs. Places like Atrios have been around sine the dawn of blogtime, and are still going strong. Text gives you an intimacy that other forms don’t. it is easy to steal a moment when the kid are playing or the meeting has slipped into the twilight zone of corpspeak, or when a group of over privileged brats are failing a simple announced quiz (Their tablets are tied to the room’s network, which is feeding my reader. You should see these answers. Ugh.) . Text allows you to fill in the details of the blogger and text resonate in your mind when you read, staying with you on a deeper level than more ephemeral, flashy styles. We started out with words around fires built to keep the sabertooth away, and we return to words like we return to old friends and lovers.

And before that little love letter to type gives anyone the wrong idea, I am not a professor of English. I am a Professor of Bio-Engineering at a well know college in the Northeast, so there will be lots of shop talk. I will try to keep it in lay terms. These are fun times to be in my field; stem cells are finally starting to live up to their promise, gene engineering is coming into its own, and neurologists are making new discoveries about how the brain works almost every day it seems. We are helping people get better; we are helping people become faster, stronger, smarter; we are helping the biosphere recover from the last two decades of climate change; and we are helping to stay ahead of the bio-terrorists. Like I said, 2025 is a good year to be a bio-engineer.

So here is to a new blog, a new start, and enough readers to make me famous and influential enough to get Sony/IBM to comp me a top of the line eReader.

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