This is another installment in my series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know! [Note from Dr. J: What follows is a guest post from Jeffrey Gower, a brilliant philosopher, dear friend, and VAP in Philosophy at Wabash College. Like me, Jeff also teaches the “White Bear” episode of Black Mirror in…
Read MoreWhat follows is the conclusion to a three-part series of posts detailing a pedagogical experiment that I tried out for the first time this term, which I call “An Experiment in the Redistribution of Grades” (ERG). You should read all the details of ERG in the original post here, but the basic idea was to give students…
Read More[NOTE: This is the another installment in my series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] “White Bear” (S2E2) is one of only two Black Mirror episodes that I use in class. (The other is “Be Right Back,” which I reviewed here.) In my regular, face-to-face classes, the…
Read More[NOTE: This is the another installment in my series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] When I originally posted my ranking of Black Mirror episodes at the beginning of this year, I didn’t include “White Christmas” in part because, in the grand architecture of the series, “White…
Read MoreLast week, I began my second year on the LGBTQ Advocacy Committee for The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). This organization and this committee are important to me, personally and professionally, and I take my service responsibilities to both very seriously. Contrary to the general demographics/trends of professional Philosophy writ large, SPEP has…
Read MoreThere’s an old dad-joke that goes something like this: A bear jumps out of the woods, in a rage, and starts chasing two hikers. They both start running for their lives, but then one of them stops to put on his running shoes. “What are you doing?!,” the other hiker exclaims, “You can’t outrun a…
Read MoreWARNING: If you still believe that academia is a meritocracy, that higher ed assessment instruments are useful (or unbiased), that grades motivate students to learn, or that grades accurately reflect students’ performance, this essay is not for you. Now, let’s talk about grades. No matter how fastidious one is about one’s course design, every prof…
Read MoreBack in 2015, Christian Brothers University asked some of its faculty (including me) to share some #WordsofWisdom with the graduating class. So, I made a short video (below), which more or less reiterates what any student who has ever taken a class from me will recognize as Rule #1 from the list of “Dr. J’s…
Read MoreFor the last couple of semesters, I’ve been trying to introduce my students, in as gentle and nonthreatening a manner as possible, to the idea that they may very well be the last of “humanity” as we know it. This has not been a well-received speculative proposition. In my defense, I really make an effort…
Read MoreZuckerberg totally proved me wrong in his testimony to Congress over the last two days. Contrary to what I anticipated in my blog post yesterday (here), he *DID* attempt to explain to Congress things that they (obviously) did not know or understand, he *DID* offer concrete suggestions for policy/legislative change, he *DID* explicitly oppose the…
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