"Because administrators by and large are politically conservative, and..."
Actually, the position of Administrator is a roach-motel for psychopaths. That is the number one reason for tenure.

Somebody's Law states that Management ends up with the Union it deserves.

And just how fast do they need to be able to download pr0n?

I have converted over to Neat. I have both their sheet feed scanner and also it imports from the Fujitsu. I hate that it is closed source trap but it works very well. I put the scanned documents in a plastic box, when it is full I put the end date on the box, put in some moth balls, tape it shut, and bury it in the back pasture (I suffer from the hoarding gene and this lets me cope.)

In the mid 70's someone gave me a stack of punched cards that were a fortran version of the text based Startrek game. I loaded it onto the what ever I had an account on, probably a 360/370 system, and got something less intellegable than ROT13. The swami of the department told me I needed a Hollerith to EBCDIC converter. Somehow I got a hard copy listing of the thing.

The math department had a "calculator" made by HP that had a 32 char led dot matrix display, a casette storage and 8k ram that had been hopped up to 16k. Also, there was an attached typewriter that was fed fanfold greenbar. It was a typewriter that whopped one key at a time and every so often the ribbon had to be replaced. While it was on the books as a "calculator" it spoke basic and they left it unlocked at night. After a while we had it killing klingons and I had figured out how to program.

I still have the deck of cards somewhere. I suppose I could load it 50 cards at a time with the Fujitsy scansnap. Also, I have some old DEC system stuff on paper tape. Maybe I should feed that to the Neat scanner...

Next lest squabble about whether Hollerith is better than ebcdic.
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>hand the students a piece of paper at the start of the semester and say keep track of it
I remember back when Nixon was compeeting with Carter to be the worst president ever and we had shortages not just of motor fuel but also paper. Not handing a student a peice of paper is a good goal. My wife who is a high school teacher routinely has paper shortages.

I wish it wasn't so [our family raises pine plantation timber and so everyone should use all the paper the want, we will grow more for you to use] but the facts on the ground are that institutions are always skimping on paper to hand out.

I have found that the best way to respond when someone suggests 'we' need to do something is, "Sure, go ahead. Knock yer-self out!" Keep telling them, "Sure, go ahead. Knock yer-self out!" ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times if necessary. Eventually they will come out of denial and realize you are not thier thrall. Really, it works.

I saw Shatner live, solo, in a very small venue in the mid 70's. The man can perform. He defined performance that night. Do not forget, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," or his performance in the Hallmark version of "The Glass Menangerie." Shatner is an elemental.

My high school teacher wife added up the days they wasted on standardized testing, pre-testing, re-pre-testing, coaching for the testing, blah-blah-bla and it was *ONE FOURTH* of the steenking school year. Fact, not making it up.

Flushing the standardized testing would allow us to cut the school budget, and taxes presumablly, by 25%. I would buy that for a dollar.

(Or, we could spend more on the football team, this is Texas :)

"Texas" is an old native-american word meaning, 'Once you cross over into this territory the Law will stop chasing you because if they caught you nothing they could do would be worse than to leave you here.' People can handle drinking a little piss.

>Having an understanding of what a derivative or integral of a function is a good insight to have, no doubt.

Learning calculus is to statistics what getting undressed is to sex.

1] You have to learn algebra so that you can figure out how to take derivatives.
2] You have to learn derivatives to learn how to integrate.
3] Once you can integrate you can integrate y=1/x from 1 to x and then learn what a logarithm is (real, Naperian logarithms, not log10 that the engineers uze.)
4] Then you can evaluate the integral of y=1/x from 1 to infinity and discover from where arises 'e' the base of logarithms.
5] *NOW* you can contemplate e to the negative x squared and understand the distribution of men's chest sizes and distributions normal and otherwise.

To claim you know anything about statistics with out knowing integral calculus is to make the silly claim that you know all about sex from having seen a few copies of Playboy. To understand sex you and a partner must get out of you clothes, and once you get good at it you will need a shower afterwards. To understand statistics is just as much work, just as messy and just as rewarding; and just like sex, not something one brings up in every social circumstance.