Things that are making you crabbit! [5]

That does sound better Dave

Well the typist of the original phrase was Finnish, I believe, and not great at English. That was my attempt to correct what he said.

Thanks though

Well now we have to see the original, and judge between the Finnish and American, though I've heard it's hard to tell mortals apart.

Forest Shepherd wrote:Help me out, this is making me crabbit. I came across this sentence recently, and I can't figure out whether all this is required for the sentence to be correct, grammatically.

"I am looking forward to this Tolkien movie with a thousand times more enthusiasm than that with which I am looking forward to the Amazon series."

Can we simplify this down, or is all of this required? And no need to comment about how English is a "living language" and how grammar is "just made up anyway" or any of that lazy tripe! I just want to know about what is technically correct.

Ellipsis (the avoidance of unnecessary repetition) is as important a grammatical rule as any [rule], so you're technically more grammatically correct to omit the second "looking forward". Also, the "that with which" appears to compare different enthusiasms rather than different ways of looking forward, so it seems much clearer to leave it out.

That leaves,
"I am looking forward to this Tolkien movie with a thousand times more enthusiasm than I am to the Amazon series."  
Simpler, clearer, and more grammatical but with the hyperbole left intact. Is that what you were asking for?

Acceptable

So Ma and Pa are getting up in years, and there's a big open space behind their house they like to go walking in, which is very good for them of course.  Well, about a month ago they go wandering back there, then Pa decides he needs to head back early, and Ma ends up getting lost and a neighbor had to go out and find her.

So this finally got it into their heads that a cell phone would be a Good Idea (we've been harping on this for years).  I've got a decade old model sitting around, and I tried it and found the battery was shot so ordered a replacement kit.  Well, first UPS managed to lose it, then a replacement of the replacement was sent, and it was almost here before getting sent halfway back to illiinois for some strange reason, and I complained and it finally ended up here.

Today I started what I thought would be a simple process.  They had sent me a very nice tool kit, and directions online and I was really quite excited to get the job done.  Until I turned the first little screw the wrong direction and stripped the head.  Right under the part I was reading it said in big red letters: "be careful, these screws strip easily!"   Well I'm clearly too impatient to read even one line ahead.

After fussing with it for 20 minutes I finally spent another 20 minutes drilling the head off the screw, and my phone came apart.  I was all excited again, taking out those tiny little screws and prying things out, until I tried putting the new battery in.

It slipped into place nicely enough, but the little screws were magnetic and refused to sit on the end of the screw driver - they preferred to crouch with the head flat against the side.  So you fool around with tweezers to try to hold them in place, and the thing is, with little dinky dudes like that, just a tiny bit of flex and they'll go flying across the room.  I lost two of them that way.

Then I discovered I had ordered the wrong battery.

Looked into returns, but the cost of mailing it is almost as much as the part, and I'd have to go cool my heels at the post office waiting to get up to that little window.  So I gave up and just ordered the new part.  I suppose I may eventually send back the mismatched battery just to get rid of it, but I'm simply NOT IN THE MOOD.

"I am looking forward to this Tolkien movie with a thousand times more enthusiasm than I am to the Amazon series."_ dave

Id drop the 'to' at the end as not needed-

"I am looking forward to this Tolkien movie with a thousand times more enthusiasm than I am the Amazon series."

Halfy indeed a tale to provoke the crabbit in anyone! This is where buckie will soften the blow! (and as you'll smash the phone up in a drunken crabbit rage also solve the problem of fitting the new one }}

So students these days often pay up for a service called Chegg in which online tutors will help them with problems.  With online courses they often think they can get away with doing this for a test.

A simple google search can turn up your test problems, and if you give different numbers to each student then it's pretty clear who is who.  I now have 5 students under suspicion.

How can Chegg tutors actually be so lacking in integrity as to fully work out problems for students?  That's NOT what tutoring is about.  How can students be so stupid as to think they won't get caught?

I'm now starting the process of officially requesting all relevant activity from Chegg.  If we nail them, they fail the course.  It's not comfortable because I tend to really like my students.   But they can't be allowed to get away with this.

students these days often pay- Halfy

{{ Right there is your problem. Instead of education being free to all who have the ablity to take it as far as they are able, like everything else American even education is just another capalist playground. Is it any wonder if your students treat it as such and pay for ways to pass?
Your entire system and countries narrative that money and captalism solves problems encourages such thinking. }}

Oh I doubt that has much to do with it. I'm sure you'll find Brit students doing the same. It's the desire for high (or an most cases, passing) scores that's driving it.

Cheating is as old as testing, whether you have money or not. A test is an artificial obstacle that's been put between the student an his goal, and a clever student will explore all the alternatives around it. Think Kobayashi Maru. The ethics are not always black and white and the slopes are slippery.

Students who are used to solving problems with money will inevitably consider buying help that's not available to poorer students. I made a lot of money tutoring such students in my university days, and I was always facing the ethical dilemma of "am I being paid to make this person wiser in the ways of mathematics, or am I being paid to help them pass this particular course, which would mean showing them how to game the system?"
The answer was almost always that I was being paid to help them pass the course, which would mean for example sharing what I knew about a particular prof and the types of questions he'd typically ask. Is that forbidden knowledge, and is it ethical to take money for sharing it? I still don't know.
It got murkier when the college paid me to live in a freshman dorm and keep first year students from failing, because the college had a financial interest in continuing to take their tuition dollars. It seemed everybody wanted these kids to pass their tests by any means possible, and the whole burden of deciding where the ethical line was fell to me....

The ethical line is in whether you provide hints and guidance versus full solutions, and when you do so. Full solutions to problems they bring to you is ALWAYS wrong. Hints and guidance is only wrong in a test situation, which would only happen for take-home tests.

I'm not going to fault Chegg for hints and guidance, though they should realize that often it's happening during test time. I fault them COMPLETELY for providing full solutions. No grey line there whatsoever.

If they have their own problems and then produce solutions for them, that's completely fine. But working out a solution for someone else's problem? That should reek of dead rat.

As far as helping to game the system in giving advice about different professors, that's fine - it's still within the system. The students who do best are almost never working in isolation, and it's good training for working as a team in the future. But the rules are clear: you discuss and get ideas, you don't simply crib off someone else. And when you see the same arithmetic mistakes it 's pretty clear when there's discussion versus flat-out copying.

I want to add that most professors (including me) actively encourage students to work together on homework - but you have to explain to them what "working together" means: everyone does EVERYTHING themselves, then compare notes and figure out why there's differences. So many students don't understand this concept.

Petty it happens in the UK too. The problems of plagiarism and cheating are everywhere. With the internet came the possibility to copy and paste and there are many companies who offer to write whole essays/thesis for cash. All students at my Uni have to submit work through the Turnitin online program which exposes copied and pasted work down to individual words and sentences. Most experienced tutors can spot plagiarised work a mile off. They get to know the students style of writing and their 'voice'. It means that students have to reference and correctly cite the fuq out of everything just to be safe.

Also at the beginning of the course we all have to do an ethics training course which helps students to understand the differences between group work and individual work and how to negotiate ambiguous situations.

Yeah, the internet's made it so much worse, and cell phones. Gone are the days of writing answers on your hand. I told some grad students that cheating wasn't so bad when I was in school and they laughed at me because they had no concept how much harder it used to be.

still it must be a horrible situation that they have put you in.

yeah. but you have to harden your heart or the whole system comes down.

I'd rather we not provide grades at all; every employer or grad school would have to administer their own tests and interviews to decide if they'll take someone. Then we'd only get students who were actually paying to learn. You give tests for their own self evaluation but don't publish the results anywhere. All jobs should have a universally understood one month trial period: pay half time or something. Boot them out if they don't perform.

Of course I'm shifting the burden, but it's real world testing as opposed to the fake testing schools have to provide. You can't cheat for long in a real world test.

That's an idea I like to see implemented. Goes back to what I said here or on another thread. You can have all the certificates, grades etc, go to a top notch school & it looks on paper that you are bloody clever & a hard worker yet, most adults are as thick as a plank.

I keep getting a pop-up from a search engine called teoma, it is a fake engine and I don't allow it, but it wont go away, does anyone know how I can get rid of it?

Unplug the computer.

Try this:
https://www.pcrisk.com/removal-guides/10366-teoma-com-redirect

It DOES try to sell you something, but then goes ahead and gives you manual removal instructions.

{{ Are you using some sort of anti-virus/anti-spam prog like bitdefender Figg? If so run a full scan, not a quick scan- depending on the size of your machine this can take a long time, you might want to just leave it to scan overnight. If this pop up is dodgy or has embedded itself in dodgy fashion it should find and quarantine it then you can just delete it once scans done through the scan results. If it blocks anything you know is not dodgy and you use, you can easily unquarantine it by adding it to the exceptions list. }}

cool yes I do have Bitdefender and I am doing the full scan. it is taking ages but its doing a thorough job. I am very impressed with Bitdefender, they are always super helpful and quick to reply. its a great product.

halfwise wrote:Try this:
https://www.pcrisk.com/removal-guides/10366-teoma-com-redirect

It DOES try to sell you something, but then goes ahead and gives you manual removal instructions.

thanks Halfy, if the scan doesn't work I will try this.

now I am getting a load of 'this page cannot be shown' nonsense. specially with my emails.