Here's your diploma!

This one is for the Captain.

 

University offers female students extra credit for hairy pits

The Captain's favorite major - Women and Gender Studies - has once again proven how useful it is to society! Arizona State University offers female students extra credit for not shaving their armpits:

Women and Gender Studies Professor Breanne Fahs, encourages her female students to cease shaving their underarms and legs during the semester and document their experiences in a journal. 

"One guy did his shaving with a buck knife."    

Student Stephanie Robinson said it was a “life changing experience.”

“Many of my friends didn’t want to work out next to me or hear about the assignment, and my mother was distraught at the idea that I would be getting married in a white dress with armpit hair,” Robinson told ASU news.

Men are also allowed to receive extra credit, as long as they shave their bodies from the neck down.

As the Director of the Center for Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group at ASU, Fahs has been very active in women’s issues. Her academic journals have been published in outlets such as Feminism & Psychology, Psychology of Women Quarterly and Gender and Society. She has also authored books including Performing Sex, Moral Panics of Sexuality and her newest biography on the life of radical feminist and attempted assassin, Valerie Solonas. Participant and student Jaqueline Gonzalez said the experience allowed her to start on a path of activism.

It's so nice that kids can go to university today, even one funded by taxpayers, in order to learn how to have hairy pits and become community activists.  They should change the school name to occupy armpits university.

Fucking hell.  If I had a say in how my tax dollars were spent they would only go to engineering scholarships.

Oh boy, it get's better.  What are Professor Breanne Fahs' qualifications? She's a specialist in radical feminism and political activism, and the author of a book on Valerie Solanas, another radical feminist who is best known for her assassination attempt on Andy Warhol.

Breanne Fahs is an associate professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, where she specializes in studying women's sexuality, critical embodiment studies, radical feminism, and political activism.  She has a B.A. in women's studies/gender studies and psychology from Occidental College and a Ph.D. in women's studies and clinical psychology from the University of Michigan.  She has published widely in feminist, social science, and humanities journals and has authored three books: Performing Sex (SUNY Press, 2011), an analysis of the paradoxes of women's "sexual liberation," The Moral Panics of Sexuality (Palgrave, 2013), an edited collection that examines cultural anxieties of "scary sex," and Valerie Solanas (Feminist Press, 2014), a biography about the controversial and politically significant life of author/would-be assassin Valerie Solanas. She is the director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group at Arizona State University, a group that engages students and faculty to fuse activism and rabble-rousing scholarship, and she also works as a private practice clinical psychologist specializing in sexuality, couples work, and trauma recovery.

California Teacher Tenure Found to Violate Student Rights

First shall issue, and now this.  Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu sided with students in finding that tenure is unconstitutional.

California's teacher tenure statutes are unconstitutional and shouldn't be enforced, a judge said in handing a victory to a group of students in the broadest legal challenge to date against laws that guarantee public school teachers' jobs.  

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu, who heard two months of evidence, agreed in a tentative ruling today with the nine students who brought the lawsuit that the statutes violate their right to equal educational opportunity under the California constitution.

The ruling, when final, will prohibit the state from enforcing a law that gives teachers permanent employment after less than two years on the job, as well as laws that the students say make it too expensive and too time-consuming to dismiss ineffective teachers. Treu put the order on hold until any possible appeals are resolved.  

"Both students and teachers are unfairly, unnecessarily, and for no legally cognizable reason, let alone a compelling one, disadvantaged by the current permanent employment statute," the judge said.  

Perhaps this will open the door to some serious reform, such as I discussed two years ago in my San Diego school post. Lord knows California needs it! If we ever want a good and efficient school system, free market ideas, such as performance based hiring and advancement, must be allowed to permeate through them.

Here is how I would change the school system in order to evaluate instructors' abilities:

1. K-12 changes to year round quarter system with no elevator (Students must take a comprehensive test to pass each grade).
2. Test the students at the start of the quarter. No curves.
3. Test the students at the end of the quarter. No curves.
4. Evaluate their degree of improvement.
5. Rank instructors from A to F.
6. Send D instructors to retrain for a weekend every month of the quarter.
7. Send F instructors to retrain for an entire quarter.
8. Fire FF (2 Fs in a row) instructors. (No more tenure.)
9. Send DF (D followed by F) instructors to retrain for an entire quarter.
10. Rotate classes so all instructors are tested with all students.
11. Repeat.

1 would prevent students who didn't know earlier material from being pushed into material they won't understand. 2 gets a baseline for every student. 3 establishes their new level of knowledge, and 4 documents their improvement during their studies. 5 ranks the net improvement of each instructor's students against the other instructor's statistics, while 6 & 7 try to salvage failing instructors. 8 eliminates bad instructors and 9 gives failing instructors one last chance to be salvaged. 10 and 11 ensure "good instructors" won't be "stuck with crap students." 

You could also sweeten the deal by giving bonuses to AA instructors. This would take time, but continual review on a quarterly basis like this might work.

I'll bet the Captain will be ecstatic; I know I am.

School where knife attack took place now requires clear plastic backpacks

I shit you not. The school which was the site of a mass stabbing has responded by issuing plastic bags to it's students, to give them "peace of mind."

MURRYSVILLE, Pa. - Franklin Regional High School, where a teenager is accused of stabbing over 20 fellow students and a security guard, is changing its school backpack procedure in light of the recent attack, reports CBS Pittsburgh. 

The station reports that, while students will still be permitted to carry regular backpacks to and from the school, carrying belongings from class-to-class will require the use of new, clear bags. The see-through backpacks - which all read "FR Strong" - were distributed Monday by the Murrysville school, located 15 miles east of Pittsburgh. 

... 

"Our goal with [the backpacks] is to give an added sense of safety and security," said Mary Catherine Reljac, Assistant Superintendent of the Franklin Regional School District.  

Two students remain hospitalized as a result of the mass stabbings. 

I wonder if they will deliver the clear plastic bags to the two students who are still in the hospital. Seriously, we've said this over and over, that this could happen, that it's a violence problem, not a "gun violence" problem. In response, we're mocked, or they charge us with having blood on our hands. Or they say the NRA is making money off of dead children. And here it is, a mass knifing. They have no idea how to respond, so they hand out clear plastic bags.

When a kid brings a knife in his pants, will they mandate speedos?

Update:
Thanks to Trenchfoot on Calguns, we now know what the future school uniform will look like!

Trained economist whines about loan payments that "weren't explained to him"

DJ Cook, a college graduate holding a bachelor's degree in economics, is whining about his grad student loans.  He says that he "didn't realize what I was agreeing to when I was signing my student loan documents for graduate school because it had never been explained to me." 

Here we have a guy who earns a degree in Economics. He pays off his undergrad loans in 6 years while working various jobs, but then "discovers his passion is teaching," and goes back to school for a "teaching credential and a Master's degree in Education."  He's already college educated.  He's paid off his undergraduate student loans, so by any reasonable estimation should understand how the student loan process works.  So why is it that he's now claiming that he's been taken advantage of?

What happened to personal responsibility?  Why does anyone pay attention to these lying sacks of shit when they start whining and moaning about their student loans?  Borrowing means you have to return what you borrowed.  It's something you learn at the early age of, say, two.  Yet here he is, at the ripe old age of 36, still complaining that he, a trained economist didn't understand the difference between subsidized and unsubsidized loans.

I had no clue about the difference of borrowing from Sallie Mae or the federal government. I had no clue what the difference between subsidized and unsubsidized meant. I thought my loan repayments would be similar to my undergrad experience. One payment per month that could easily be paid off if I had a decent job. I knew a $36,000 education would take more time to pay off than my undergrad degree, but I didn't realize I was really signing up for four separate payments. This added up to about $400 in payments that I was not ready for.

And when things don't go his way in the employment market, he blames it on - I kid you not - "anti-teacher bigotry."

The erosion of respect for the teaching position in general allows potential employers (whether intentionally or not) to discriminate against former teachers using the logic that teachers in the U.S. are bad at their jobs and held up by their union, therefore former teachers are bad employees.

Then he claims that in six and a half years he's only paid down $2,000.  I think he still doesn't understand those loans, myself.  I just checked and if he's really signed up for $36k in loans at 6.8% interest, he would have paid off $20k by now. (FYI, with a $36,000 loan, 6.8% interest gives you a 'roughly $400 per month' payment ($414.xx) on a 10 year loan.  My guess is that he's missed a lot of payments, deferred the loans excessively, and is racking up late fees.  Honesty would clear it up, but this guy is chronically incapable of honesty.

He finishes off his editorial by expressing his jealousy over the wealth of others.  Spewing tired rhetoric of the communist class, he complains that capitalists are extracting wealth from the economy at the expense of everyone else; the 1% is hiding a depression by reporting record earnings!  Those evil capitalist dogs!

Taiwanese student is too petite for Yale's "medical professionals" - forced into weekly psych checkups

Apparently Yale has never seen a petite Asian woman.  They were so shocked when one walked in at five-foot-two and ninety pounds that they decided she must be crazy!  So they threatened her with "medical leave" (expulsion) if she didn't gain weight.  They also mandated weekly bloodwork and psychiatric voodoo to handle her "eating disorder."

What the fuck is wrong with people medical people?  They think they get to order anyone around and if they don't obey, watch out, they will ruin your life.  Fuck them.

Yale has threatened to kick out a 20-year-old history major because she's too thin. 

New Jersey native, Frances Chan, who is 5'2" and weighs 90lbs, claims she's been force feeding herself Cheetos and ice cream in an attempt to add flesh to her tiny frame after the Ivy League school became convinced she was suffering from an eating disorder.
Chan said the New Haven, Connecticut, college wouldn't even let up when her parents confirmed she, and the rest of her family, had always been naturally skinny and even sent in childhood medical records and had their doctor contact the school.

 ...

Harsh: Yale has threatened to kick out 20-year-old history major Frances Chan, pictured, because she's too thin

'It felt really bad to be this powerless,' Chan told the New Haven Register. 'I ate ice cream twice a day. I ate cookies. I used elevators instead of walking up stairs. But I don't really gain any weight.'
She said the battle over her weight began in September when she noticed a lump in her breast and went to get it checked out.

"Too thin":

I'll bet you a nickel this gal will major in psych or some other worthless subject

She's already incapable of working to support herself, which is why she decided to sue her own parents for her expenses.  The Captain will have a field day.  Or a brain hemorrhage.  Or both.

 

A New Jersey teenager claiming that her mother and father tossed her out of their home and cut her off financially is suing them for immediate support, current private-school fees and future college tuition. The parents, meanwhile, say that daughter Rachel Canning, 18, moved out voluntarily after refusing to abide by their rules.

“We love our child and miss her. This is terrible. It’s killing me and my wife,” Rachel's father, Sean Canning, a town administrator and retired police officer, tells the Daily Record. “We have a child we want home. We’re not Draconian and now we’re getting hauled into court. She’s demanding that we pay her bills but she doesn’t want to live at home, and she’s saying, ‘I don’t want to live under your rules.’”

Update:

I hope this teen drama queen loses, and loses hard.  I hope that the parents are awarded legal fees and the man who is fronting Canning's bill, (over $12k so far) is named responsible for their fees.  Teach everyone a lesson here.

A Morris Catholic High School honor student and athlete who claims her parents threw her out of their Lincoln Park home when she turned 18 has taken the highly unusual step of suing them for immediate financial support and to force them to pay for her college education. 

Private high school senior Rachel Canning, a cheerleader and lacrosse player who has aspirations to be a biomedical engineer, filed a lawsuit last week in the Family Part of state Superior Court in Morristown that seeks a judge’s declaration that she is nonemancipated and dependent as a student on her parents for support.

...Rachel Canning’s lawyer, Tanya N. Helfand, will ask that parents Sean and Elizabeth Canning, who haven’t paid an outstanding $5,306 Morris Catholic tuition bill, be ordered to settle that debt, pay Rachel’s current living and transportation expenses, and commit an existing college fund to their daughter...