You can buy a copy of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother from Amazon, and read Sophia’s response in the New York Post.

Sophia apparently has a new blog called TigerSophia: new tiger in town, where she writes that she has not made up her mind yet:

To set the record straight, I applied to three schools last fall: Yale, Harvard, and University of Virginia. I was accepted to Yale under Early Action in December. I withdrew my application from UVA, and I was accepted to Harvard this Wednesday. I was shocked and thrilled to receive both acceptances, and I’m seriously considering both Yale and Harvard.

For some reason, students no longer go to school to learn. They go to school to succeed, to graduate with Ivy League pomp and a laserprint diploma with latin words. They go to school to attain high grades, but not to master the material. They use clever minds not to probe, inquire, or study, but to pass their classes at any cost. For those with money, they may turn to services like Ed Dante’s:

In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company’s staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.

Using an essay-writing service is the easy out, a way to get ahead without actually getting ahead. Adding a kind of academic debt which they will never be able to repay, because they’ve starved themselves of the learning process and very curiosity that could save them in the future:

They couldn’t write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren’t getting it.

For students, the temptation is easy. If you write poorly, why not pay someone who writes well to get good grades for you? English and other courses, which engineering and science students are often required to take (at Cornell, mandatory freshman writing seminars ring a bell?), are considered by some students as distracting fluff. Not caring enough to learn to read, write, and think critically, they want to immediately jump into the technical field of their subject matter choice. What the western tradition has realized in setting these requirements in the first place is that fundamental skills in philosophy and writing form an underpinning for the domain-specific skills that will be set upon that foundation.

While the house-building metaphor is tired, the results are not. Students without solid language, reading, writing, and analytical skills act as a contagion for those around them, for their peers in the workplace, and their children. Without a solid foundation in this generations students, without fundamentals, America will continue its steep decline¹ in educational-quotient:

[E]ducation is the worst. [...] I’ve completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)

To continue the discussion, see The Term Paper Artist: The lucrative industry behind higher ed’s failings and this NPR transcript The Paper Market. If you are a student thinking of taking the easy way out, perhaps try to struggle through your work, and by doing so, enriching yourself. If you are a parent or an educator, try to encourage your pupils to learn, to be curious, and to take pride in their work.

Without some kind of change, the easy way will become the normal way.

Footnotes:
#1 – See U.S. students advancing in math trails most industrialized nations which ranks the US as 31st of 56 countries in the topic of math, for just one study. There are many others.

“At this time, foul play is not suspected,” Wheatley said. “We feel very confident [King’s death] was accidental,” said Kathy Zoner, chief of the Cornell University Police Department. “He got startled by something.”

Facebook profile picture of Khalil King

Khalil, according to his Facebook profile, was a profligate dancer and rapper, Hollister Co. model, well-traveled, and associated with the Charlotte Coalition for Social Justice. He described himself, in his own words on Facebook, as “dope as Zoloft, a big shot, a show off,” smiling in all his pictures.

Tonight there is a Light Up the Night for Khalil Jamal King event on Ho Plaza. Please direct all your thoughts to the Facebook page “RIP Khalil King”, created “in accordance with the wishes of Khalil’s family to preserve his last actions on his facebook profile.”

Subject: media croney (sic)

I WILL WRITE IN “ALL CAPS” THAT I DO NOT LIKE HOW YOU CUT DOWN LISA A. LAKE IN YOUR CYNICAL “METRO”-STYLE STORY ON HER EX, ABRAHAM SHOREY..YOU DO NOT HAVE MUCH OF A SOUL.
YOUR WRITING IS ALSO VERY POOR. I THINK YOU SUCK DICK, ASSHOLE.

Sigh…

As the economy evolved into a predominantly service industry, “industrial engineering” in the school’s title began to feel obsolete. “For virtually any element of the service industry, a primary commodity is information,” Shmoys said. “And that is exactly the reflection of what’s going on in the name change.”

Serious consideration for the change began a little over a year ago, according to school director Jim Renegar. The process involved discussions with Dean Kent Fuchs, other engineering directors and chairs, approval from Provost Biddy Martin and, eventually, presentation to the Cornell Board of Trustees.

This came as a surprise to me. When I graduated in 2006, the ORIE webpage looked like this:

Now the ORIE webpage has its new name:

It’s interesting to reflect on how things change as time passes. ORIE is not the only Cornell division to receive a rebranding–there’s now a faculty of Computing and Information Science–and the future undoubtedly holds many more, as Cornell attempts to stay relevant in relentlessly changing times.

Making the most of the fences

The recent Cornell sun piece, Ithaca Is Fences, does a good job of debunking the utility of erecting fences on Cornell’s bridges. As the fences only protect bridges, not the entire brim of the various gorges, they do not present a plausible barrier to jumpers, who can simply leap off of some other precipice:

Even if we see a drop in suicide rates, it will be difficult to claim success. Given that the number of bridge jumps this year likely constitutes an outlier, statistical theory dictates that the number of jumps per year will regress to the mean — in our case, somewhere around zero. Therefore, we should anticipate seeing a drop in the number of suicides — but for reasons having to do with chance, not policy.

A student lead initiative called Re-think the fence calls for artistic submissions that re-imagine Cornell’s fenced bridges. There are no parameters; one could fully remove the guard rails, or send in a submission of an enclose-on-four-sides bridge.

The west campus slope, as seen on my way to North.

A little higher up.

A snow-covered log.

Window covered in fall leaves and ice.

Prickly seed-pods.

North campus bridge, at night.

A look over the bridge’s gorge.

Balch hall.

Robert Purcell Community Center (RPCC).

Cornell’s Donlon Hall.

You can check out full size versions of any of the photos in the Cornell University Flickr Set. If you’re interested in using any of these photographs in your work, please send us an email to request permission.

It would be nice if the cameras indicated whether they would be used to monitor your computer usage, whether the recordings are permanently archived, or what privacy policy (if doubtful any) governs the surveillance.