the starfish story

I'm gonna have to remind myself of this given what's going on in the world, in the state, in higher ed, etc., etc.

In short, the story is apparently from one of Loren Eisley's books. A man is walking down a beach when he meets up with a boy. The boy is picking up starfish that have got washed up on the beach and throwing them back in the ocean. The man asks the boy why he's doing it and the boy says, "When it gets hot as the morning goes on, any of the starfish not in the water will die." The man responds: "But look at all the starfish on the beach! What you are doing is pointless, you cannot possibly make a difference."

And the boy picks up another starfish, looks at it, throws it in the ocean. "I made a difference to that one," he said.


I dunno. It's all very much right now, with the terror attacks in Brussels and a fight brewing over k-12 educational standards in my state (when there isn't even agreement on how to pay for the schools, and some districts are talking consolidation and others have gone to a four-day week and larger class sizes and are talking cutting "frills" like art and music). And we've been warned that more cuts are coming for us. (I fully expect to earn 10% less pay - at least - next year than what I do now. I just hope to still HAVE  a job).  I have these periodic fits where I feel like, "Why am I even bothering? We're doomed" for whatever value of "doomed" (fiscal, geopolitical, cultural) seems to be most in the news that given day. (I remember first feeling this around Sept. 12, 2001, trying to prep info on probability for Biostats: why on earth, I wondered, do my students need this? What they NEED is to learn what plants are edible. And basic first aid....and all those end-of-the-world things.)

And the Sonic drive-in nearest me has apparently closed and is being torn down - so yet another thing on the side of town "near me" is gone, and eventually I figure if I want ANYTHING I will have to drive the several miles out to the Wal-mart area. And yes, that doesn't seem like a big deal, except it is at lunchtime or at the end of the day because there are three east-west streets in this town and two of them have schools on them and the third is the main drag, so traffic gets very bad some times of the day.

Not that I ever used the Sonic much, but it was nice to have the option to stop off there on the way back to campus after fieldwork and grab a cold drink. And it does feel like the town is slowly dying, and maybe it gets to the point where the ONLY thing is wal-mart.

I will also say that one thing I learn fast from the lab sections of some of my classes, which students I would want along on an Indiana-Jones-like quest, and which ones I'd leave behind. Because there seems to be a critical mass of people (I don't know if it's the up-and-coming generation, or if it's always been so and I never noticed before) who totally ignore warnings and instructions and would blunder ahead and trigger all the booby traps and get us killed.

I also had someone ask me yesterday if I had the sheet where they signed up for topics for a short paper. This is a paper I assigned mid-February. It is due on Thursday. Even beyond that: (a) I don't carry all my class papers with me to lab, that's too much to carry and (b) it's really not my job to remember what each of roughly 25 people chose as a paper topic.

I dunno. I flirted momentarily with the idea of telling them they could have until Tuesday to do it and hand it in, seeing as Friday (the first day I'd have time to grade them) is my second Furlough Day (tm) and I'm not supposed to work (though I suppose I could Saturday, even though all of this has brought home to me that We Are Not Paid To Work Weekends). But doing that would just mean people put off doing it until Monday night, I guess. And due dates should MEAN something, I think - too many of my students seem to have been allowed to slide through without ever fulfilling a due date, and surely there are still careers where missing a deadline is a v. bad thing?

I dunno. If that portal to Equestria happened to open in front of me, I'd step through it in a heartbeat. Even if it meant never coming back here. Even if it meant I had to be a mule.