Anschel

queer quaker commie cat

In addition to the blurb above, I'm a recovering mathematician, Jewish, and autistic as fuck--those didn't alliterate

Sometimes I write poems, mostly in English and Spanish

I feel weird putting my age in my bio but I am in fact a Grown Up if you were worried

רעד מיט מיר ייִדיש

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email
anschelsc@gmail.com

shel
@shel

I do believe in the value of a liberal education like learning both the humanities and STEM is a great idea I love interdisciplinary education but I think maybe we should incorporate like, a part of that education is just having to administer some sort of absurd and broken system or bureaucracy too. Like everyone in class can only use the pencils provided by the university and it's your responsibility to allocate 25 pencils across 30 students. And you're obviously going to say "but that's so dumb that's an artificial constraint the university should just provide 30 pencils or allow students to bring their own pencils" and then you're told if you don't do as you're told you'll fail the class and the students will not be allowed to use any pencils all semester also you see the university actually provided 29 pencils but four of them are designated as backup pencils in case anyone breaks their pencil so if you secretly do give everyone a pencil you need to make sure none of them break their pencils and also you will still he short one pencil and if you get caught the professor will be charged with theft of property and you will say that doesn't make any sense it's pencils and the professor didn't make the decision but you'll be told that that's just what it is.

Now of course the solution here is to change the policy but the semester is only 3.5 months long so you're not going to be able to fix the pencil problem day you do still have to assign the pencils in the meantime while you organize your classmates to demand that the Provost increase the pencil budget and guarantee everyone receive a pencil or be allowed to bring their own.

And somehow we just need to give every liberal arts student this experience. They can even be set up to win a concession from the provost where everyone is allowed to bring their own pencils but fewer pencils will be provided by the university (and isn't this better than those universities who don't provide free pencils at all?) and you have to decide whether to take the deal or press harder on the pencil issue while keeping everyone motivated to stay focused on this as your four short years of college quickly pass by and at the end you realize you spent four years trying to get a universal pencil program established at your university and the moment you leave they reset the scenario so someone else can learn from the experience. And in the meantime you didn't actually help any of your classmates get more pencils prior to graduation because pencil distribution reform took four years.

I just feel like this is a really important life experience to have. It pairs really well with modules on moral philosophy, political science, history, all sorts of stuff. And what's most important is when you're graduating having won a pencil reform where every classroom gets 35 pencils for every 30 students so everyone does get a pencil but only five can break their pencil they need an 18 year old freshman to criticize you for making too big a concession.


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in reply to @shel's post:

Cut to every stem major busily going about developing baroque time based pencil apportionment schemes.

Cut to the business majors running the pencil black market.

Cut to the econ majors inventing pencil futures.

Unironically yeah. I mean a lot of the kids already know it but the rich kids in particular need to encounter situations that aren't puzzles set up with clever solutions, they're impossible but you're not allowed to give up when you realize this, you still need to find the least-bad way to fail.

(Though you also sometimes need to see the "you can only use the pencils provided by the university" rule and go "says who?" Then just go ahead and bring in your own box of pencils and see if anyone actually does anything about it. This is also an important skill in navigating bureaucracies.)

Yeah see there's all sorts of different ways you can approach the situation but you need to experience like, trying to actually solve a problem in an imperfect situation rather than only criticizing things from the outside. If you can find a way to break the system entirely then that is also an important skill.

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