Why All Grades Are Subjective

It's been quite a long time since I posted a blog entry. My life has been very busy with a full-time job, a dissertation to write, and a household to maintain. Today I'm going to share a reply I sent to a student email about why all grades are subjective.

Image Source: Alexander Russo. "This Week in Education: Cartoons: 'Climb That Tree.'" Scholastic. Accessed 24 April 2019. Note: The attribution of the above quote to Albert Einstein is almost certainly false. See its entry on Quote Investigator for more information on its probable origin.

For context, Monday was the first day of BYU-Idaho's Spring semester. As usual, we went over the syllabus, and as I explained my somewhat heterodox grading policy (which I implemented in part to address the challenges of subjectivity and grade disputes), I declared that grades have nothing at all to do with learning, and that all grades, not just English grades, are subjective. At this point, I paused. I told them that one of my grad school professors, James Paul Gee, often says that "Academics is an evidence game," which means that when we make claims, we provide reasons and evidence to support our claims, and in so doing, we subject our judgment to scrutiny. However, there was insufficient time at that juncture for me to provide evidence to support my claim that all grades are subjective. I said if any of them would like me to do so, they could email me, and I would be happy to oblige. One student did (the first to take me up on my offer in three years, hurrah!). Below, I copy my reply:

Dear Student,

I'm so glad you asked!  

All grades are subjective because teachers (or administrators, or state and national standards boards) have to make choices about what to measure, how to measure it, how to weight each thing they are measuring, and so on. Let’s take math as an example.

Most people consider math to be the least subjective of all academic disciplines, because, at least at the level of arithmetic and simple algebra, it is clear whether a student got the answer correct or not—whether their final calculation “adds up.” However, math teachers still have to decide whether to grade solely on whether students calculated the correct result, or whether to include the student’s process of calculating their result. In other words, they have to consider whether students should get partial credit depending on how well their calculations demonstrate that they are grasping the concepts, even if they make errors along the way and ultimately may not get the correct result. If teachers decide to grade on both process and result, they have to decide how to weigh process vs. result in determining a score.

One problem with grading based only on getting the correct result is that any student with a calculator and an understanding of how to use it can get a correct result, even if they do not understand the underlying mathematical principles. If we only care about whether students can use calculators correctly, then why teach math at all? The reason is because we need people who understand mathematical principles in order to conceptualize and solve difficult quantitative problems that machines cannot do all by themselves—we need mathematicians who can think holistically and creatively. That requires that we measure process—but standardized tests, which measure outcome, do not measure process. In fact, if you ask a professional mathematician whether process matters less than, as much as, or more than outcome, I guarantee they will say that process matters as much as or more than outcome. Some ways of formulating a calculation are better, “more elegant” than others, even when they both get the same result. Thus process matters, and expert judgment, which is to some degree always subjective, is required to evaluate students’ answers to set problems. But as any builder or engineer can tell you, getting the right answer to a mathematical calculation matters a great deal! So we can't grade solely on process, either.

In creating exams, teachers have to decide not only what sorts of problems to set, and in what form (i.e. written out, multiple choice, etc.), but also how to weight different kinds of questions. They have to decide how to prioritize the importance of different mathematical concepts in determining how well students are demonstrating learning the core objectives of the class. They have to decide what those objectives are. They have to decide whether to “curve” their grades or not. Furthermore, even when a test and its scores are “standardized,” the teaching itself may not be. Different teachers will naturally emphasize different aspects of a standardized curriculum, and will be better at teaching some concepts than others. That will likely affect student outcomes on standardized tests—so then, how much are the tests measuring student outcomes vs. teacher performance? This is one (misguided) reason why some national school standards programs have tried to penalize teachers when their students underperform on standardized tests. But that, too, is problematic, because teachers control very, very little of what our students come into our classes with and take away from our classes.

So let’s consider some aspects of the student half of the equation. Going back to the question of results vs. process, some students start out “ahead” of others. The students at the top may make very few gains over the course of a semester—in other words, they did not learn much. In contrast, students closer to the bottom may make lots of progress. Yet if grades are based on outcome, the students who started out ahead and learned little would get an A, while the students who started near the bottom and learned much might still only manage a C. On the other hand, if we measure process, then the student who learned the most but still has a poorer grasp of the subject would get an A, and the student who learned little but has a better grasp of the subject would get a C. That also seems unfair, doesn’t it? Would it be fair to measure both process and outcome, and give both students a B? I don’t know—that’s why it’s subjective.

But wait, there’s more! Evidence demonstrates that students who get a good night’s sleep and eat a good breakfast before an exam will score much better than those who don’t. And students who experience greater stress in their environments tend to struggle more in school—it’s hard to stay focused on math when you’re worried about whether your older brother is going to get killed by someone just because they think he “looks suspicious,” or whether your unemployed dad will be drunk when you get home, or whether you mom will have managed to save enough money from being spent on alcohol to buy you and your siblings some fast food for dinner (because your electricity has been turned off and you have no way to cook meals at home). It’s hard to get enough sleep when you get woken up by the sounds of gunfire. It’s hard to stay focused when your stomach is gnawed with hunger because your parents can barely afford to provide one meal per day, and the hard classes you have to take are all scheduled before you get to eat your school lunch. And so on.

Thus, if a student who lives in a secure neighborhood, in a secure home, with parents who are financially secure enough to provide regular meals and other kinds of support gets an A on the exam, and a student who lives in a dangerous neighborhood, who has had to move three times already this year (changing schools along the way), who sleeps on a mat on the floor in an apartment with thin walls through which she can hear the neighbors fighting until well after midnight, and whose mom is working three jobs just to make ends meet and cannot afford to provide breakfast gets a C on that same standardized exam—does that really reflect the academic merit of each student? If a teacher takes such obstacles into account, though, then those grades are obviously subjective. They are tailored by the expert judgment of a particular teacher about the needs, circumstances, strengths, and growth of a particular student. If the teacher does not take any of these environmental factors into account (perhaps even relying on a blind grading mechanism to ensure they don’t know which exam was marked by which student), then the grade appears more objective, but as I said: it measures outcome, not learning; and that is itself a subjective judgment call about what matters.

All of these factors influence the subjectivity of grades. Nevertheless, we must have a way to measure students’ learning and their grasp of core concepts. We must have a way to give them feedback about their progress. Administrators and school officials like grades because, as numbers, they seem objective. Furthermore, they’re easy to add up and track over time (which is advantageous to teachers as well as administrators and school boards). They’re scalable in a way that more specific written feedback is not. These administrators and school officials rarely stop to ask what those letters and numbers mean—what they are actually measuring. Learning is far more complex than can be measured by any set of numbers, let alone a cumulative course grade or GPA.

And speaking of GPA, let’s talk about the way it’s calculated. Here’s a standard* grading scale:

Percent Grade	Letter Grade	4.0 Scale
97-100	A+	4.0
93-96	A	4.0
90-92	A-	3.7
87-89	B+	3.3
83-86	B	3.0
80-82	B-	2.7
77-79	C+	2.3
73-76	C	2.0
70-72	C-	1.7
67-69	D+	1.3
65-66	D	1.0
Below 65	E/F	0.0

Scores for all graded assignments are totaled up (using weighted algorithms that vary from one class to another) into a final percentage, which is then converted into a letter grade. This reduces the complexity of the data, because it’s the letter grade that gets converted into a GPA. Note that in some cases, a difference of only 1% on a final grade (a score of 89% vs. 90%) results in a loss of .4 points in the calculated GPA—the same as a difference of 5% (an 87% vs. a 92%). The final grade and its attendant GPA tell us nothing about the relative difficulty of the class, what specifically the student actually learned and can implement outside the context of a regimented classroom, or how much progress they made from the beginning of the class to the end. It’s just a letter. It’s just a number.

Anyway, that’s why all grades are subjective.

Sincerely,

Sister Robinson

*Note that I said a standard grading scale, not the standard grading scales. There are variations from one school, academic department, and even one course to another. 

This is my new Betta, Irving Braxiatel. He earns an A+ in Being A Fish. This is the only grade that is completely objective.

A Vocabulary (and History) Lesson

I teach college English--writing, mostly. Because it's college English, I almost never spend any direct instruction time on vocabulary. My students do develop their vocabulary in my classes, but mostly by doing a lot of reading and writing.

I do have one vocabulary lesson, however, which I will give if they ask and aren't satisfied with "read a lot; write a lot." It is this: learn affixes. Affixes are the bits we stick at the beginnings and ends of words to modify their meaning--in other words, prefixes and suffixes. If you learn affixes, your vocabulary increases logarithmically.

The word I most often use to illustrate affixes is "antidisestablismentarianism." Not only does it use a lot of affixes, it's also recognizable and generally regarded as a bit silly, which makes the lesson more memorable.

So I write the word on the board and ask my students to help me break it down. First, we identify the root ("establish") and note that it is a verb. Then we work our way outwards, identifying the affixes and their meanings, until they can successfully decode the word. I'll give you a moment now to try it yourself; the answer is after the break.

Image: A stack of LEGO blocks with the parts of the word
"antidisestablishmentarianism" written on them. CC0 Public Domain.

Politics and Moral Reasoning (An Argument for and against Myself)

I grew up in a deeply conservative household. Most of my family remains conservative or very conservative. I live in a very conservative state and work on a very conservative campus. Yet some years ago, during one of those wonderfully long conversations you have on road trips, my younger brother observed (in a bemused rather than a judgmental tone) that I was "kind of liberal." I laughed at the absurdity of it, because having just finished my first two years of graduate study, during which I had almost daily experienced direct or indirect disparagement of my conservative and especially my Christian values, I was keenly aware that by liberal standards, I was much more likely to be regarded as "kind of conservative." And so it remains.

It's true that I've moved to the middle, and am, at present, probably a bit left-of-center, whereas at the time of that conversation I was more right-of-center. I am, as my brother perceived before I did, "kind of liberal," and it turns out I kind of always have been. I did not experience my shift toward the political center as a shift away from my core values, but rather a more nuanced and self-determined understanding of their application in the world. What has most changed is that I no longer feel at home among conservatives; nor do I think I will ever really feel at home among liberals. Whereas the attacks on my perceived conservatism that I experience among liberals have been sly and insidious, the attacks on my perceived liberalism that I have experienced within my conservative community have been direct and vicious. As painful and exhausting as this frequently is for me, maybe this inability to belong, politically speaking, isn't entirely a bad thing.

This next paragraph is the only paragraph in which I'm going to mention the presidential candidates by name, and then I'm going to write instead about broader principles, because that's what I want to talk about right now--not which candidate was wronger, or more corrupt. I'm tired of that.

I've read a lot of statements this week to the effect that for democrats (or those who voted for Clinton, not all of whom are democrats), this election was about deeply moral issues, while for republicans, it was largely about the economy, or about preserving their way of life. Of course that's no more true than the inverse would be: that for republicans (or those who voted for Trump,not all of whom are republicans), this election was about deeply moral issues, while for those who voted for Clinton, it was about the economy, or about preserving their way of life. While it's probably true that for a lot of voters, this was about the economy, it's worth noting that regardless of their political ideology, most people believe economic issues are moral issues (and they are), and obviously, so is preserving a way of life. It may be true that some people did vote primarily out of self-interest, but I think that's as likely to be the case for liberals as for conservatives.

However, I've really only seen one side of this political divide argue that voting out of self-interest is at least potentially acceptable, and that's the liberal side. Liberals don't usually argue that they vote out of self-interest. Rather they complain that their political foes are voting against their own interests, and that they must really not understand the fact that they are doing so. The implicit argument is either that conservatives are inherently selfish, and/or that self-interest is a valid reason for political decision making. To the conservative mind it must follow that either liberals themselves vote not out of principle but out of self-interest, or that they regard conservatives with outright contempt.

Which is maybe why conservatives have scoffed at liberal moral outrage throughout this whole election cycle. And who can blame them? Liberals make regular sport of scoffing at conservatives' moral outrage, and justify it in turn because conservatives regard them as morally bankrupt. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

To be clear: I believe that liberals vote out of self-interest no more than conservatives do, but also no less (an assertion that is unlikely to win me friends on either side, so I'll just add that I include myself in this unflattering assessment). That is to say, of course people vote out of self-interest, whether consciously or unconsciously. But however rational a political argument from self-interest might be, or however necessary to healthy political life it might be that we analyze the ways that self-interest plays a role in political decision-making, as a persuasive tool for conservatives it is much worse than a non-starter.

Much has been written about the moral reasoning of liberals and conservatives. It is a truism that conservatives tend to think in terms of moral absolutes, whereas liberals tend to be more comfortable with casuistic moral reasoning. To the degree that such a generalization is accurate, it should be obvious why accusing conservatives of voting against their own interests is sheer folly, if it is not malice.

I remember an argument, many years ago, between a cousin and another one of my brothers. This cousin could not understand why, given that both my parents are disabled, and this brother is himself disabled, my family tends to vote for politicians who promise to cut medicare, medicaid, and social security. How could it be logically or morally consistent to vote against the very programs on which my family depends just to get by from day to day? But it is absolutely logically and morally consistent to vote against such programs, even if you benefit from them, if you believe (as conservatives do, with a great deal of political philosophy behind them) that they are beyond the proper purview of government. For conservatives, what matters is voting for what is good, not simply what is good for them. Liberal readers will be quick to point out that this is what matters to them as well, and they'd be telling the truth, too. But to liberals (at least to white, middle- and upper-class ones), it often seems that only they have the moral courage to knowingly vote against their own self-interest; they have so much privilege to lose, and they are eager to lose it. We all see through a glass, darkly. Sometimes the glass is so dark it's more of a mirror than a window on the world.

But if conservatives don't believe in casuistic moral reasoning, what right had my parents to take government handouts which they believe it has no right to give? Pretty much the same right that a liberal who votes for strong gun control would have to shoot someone in the face to save the lives of their children. Put in less visceral terms, even the most ardent conservative can't completely avoid casuistic moral reasoning (and I don't believe that, if pressed, many of them would argue that they should), but they prefer a more clear-cut moral consistency. They would prefer a world in which people are free to keep more of their hard-earned money and choose how to bestow it charitably, rather than have the government take it and decide who deserves to have it, and how much, and for how long.

Having been welfare recipients since almost my earliest memory, my family knows better than most how precarious welfare is to rely on, and how unhealthy dependency on it is. The prospects of homelessness and hunger are terrifying, especially when thinking of your children. If a government is in control of your rent and your bread, you are at serious risk of being enslaved by it. A great many conservatives will tell you that this is why a majority of low-income and people of color vote democrat; they even call it "welfare slavery." Of course private charity can be precarious too, can foster unhealthy dependency too. And contrary to conservative protestations, private charity has never in recorded history been adequate on a widespread scale, which is why we have a social safety net in the first place. But given how well-versed liberals are in critiquing the mechanisms of power, is it really so hard to understand that government welfare is a twice-over exercise of alarming force? Is it really so hard to understand why conservatives who rely on it for survival would still vote to abolish it, not out of ignorance or foolishness but as a matter of principle? Is that not exactly what liberals urge us to do by enacting policies that they argue are necessary to abolish systemic racism, sexism, etc.? Is it not more worthy of respect than ridicule? Alfred P. Doolittle was wrong, you see: you are never too poor to afford moral principles.

Ironically, liberal bewilderment at low- and middle-income conservatives "voting against their interests" also makes it hard for conservatives to take liberals seriously when they talk about "the Patriarchy." What is more patriarchal than the assumption that conservative voters do not really know what is good for them? What is more patriarchal than liberal policies which aim to expand dependence on government to provide for basic necessities, rather than affirming that responsibility to provide food, shelter, and health care belongs with individuals, families, and communities? How can it be morally and logically consistent to uphold the right of self-determination (which liberals seem to hold above almost all others) while denying that huge swaths of Americans are capable of exercising it responsibly on their own behalf?

Well, we liberals and "kind of liberals" would answer, it's also pretty hard to exercise self-determination when you're chronically sick and can't get health care; or when you don't have access to a shower and clean clothes and a car so that you can get and keep a job; or when you have to choose between being able to feed yourself and your kids or getting out of an abusive marriage. Expanding the social safety net isn't about expanding dependence on but about expanding access to welfare, with the goal of helping people get back on their feet as quickly as possible, which we assume is what everyone involved wants.

Except it isn't necessarily what everyone wants--and I don't mean the debunked and extremely demeaning conservative myth of welfare queens and the undeserving poor. I mean the principle which both liberals and conservatives believe in: that people with power want to hold onto it. And if you put the power to help people increasingly in the hands of government, it's not really in government's interests for people to stop needing their help. There's a lot more power in giving than in receiving.

Conservatives, for their part, keep voting in ways that put us all ever more at the mercy of the ultra-rich, who are no less likely to do everything in their already terrifyingly considerable power to hold onto it, who are not answerable to the electorate, and who keep on amassing to themselves a greater and greater share of our nation's wealth, which is our only means of "voting" against them by refusing to buy what they're selling. But since most of their wealth now is self-generating via financial market manipulation, and since government demonstrated after the crash of 2008 that it has no interest in curbing their power to continue manipulating said markets, we're all basically screwed anyway, and that, dear readers, is another thing that conservatives and liberals basically agree about. Alas, it's also one of the many things we seem incapable of agreeing about how to solve.

I've offered a handful of examples of liberals and conservatives arguing from principles (some of them the very same principles) to reach very different conclusions, both of which are (sometimes, sometimes not) based on facts as well as moral reasoning. I assure you, I could offer more, but a thorough enumeration isn't my goal. My goal was to prove to myself, if not to the few people who occasionally read my blog, that it really is possible to find common ground between liberals and conservatives, on principles if not on policies. That ground is where I try to live.

I don't offer any solutions. Perhaps I ought to try, but I don't know what they are, and right now I'm too tired from having to defend my moral principles and my political choices from every direction. A lot of people seem to think that being moderate (like voting third-party) is a cop out, the most morally inconsistent position of all. Maybe sometimes it is. But it's also really hard. It's lonely. At least in the trenches you have lots of comrades to guard your back. It's pretty exposed out here in no-man's-land, and this war doesn't seem close to a cease-fire anytime soon.

So I'll just end this post with a meme that's been making the rounds recently among both my liberal and my conservative social networks. I don't know where the image came from; I wasn't able to track it to its source, but if anyone can point me to it, I'd love to give proper credit.

Review: Ghostbusters (2016) and Ghostbusters (1984)

I went to see Ghostbusters (2016) on opening weekend, mostly because it's the first movie of the summer that I was really excited about this year, but also partly to spite certain factions of the internet who have tried to pre-emptively tank the movie by spiking reviews without even having seen the movie.

I was too young to see the original Ghostbusters (1984) when it first came out in theaters, but I did watch it and Ghostbusters II (1989) around the time the latter was released, and those two films (plus the cartoons) sparked a significant interest in the paranormal among my circle of friends for a time. We got up to some silly stuff, and to this day I'm not entirely sure how much of it we believed and how much we knew was just pretend--it's funny how the childhood imagination works that way.

My point is that Ghostbusters was a big part of my childhood. I'm really fond of this franchise; it's partly why I was so excited (and a little bit nervous) for the reboot. And it's a big part of why I was so pleased with the 2016 film. It was just really fun. I deliberately did not rewatch the original film before going to see the new one. But in the past few days, I decided I'd like to see how the 1984 film, which I hadn't seen in several years, stacks up to the new one, so tonight I popped in my old Ghostbusters DVD and wrote up a review.

Image: Ghostbusters logo stencilled on a car door.

CC0 Public domain. Free for public use. No attribution required.

To start with, here's the short review I posted on Facebook the night I saw Ghostbusters (2016): 

I really liked it! It hit all the right notes, and though the tune was familiar, it's an old favorite. I felt like it did a great job of winking at the original films without feeling beholden to them. The cameos were marvelous. The main characters were likable and at times lovable. The new gadgets were awesome. 

There were things about Ghostbusters (2016) that I did not like, but they were minor: some crude humor, Leslie Jones's character is still pretty much a token.[1] These minor criticisms are pretty much the same ones I have about the originals (though in the case of Jones's character, the fact that more than 30 years have passed make this criticism significantly less forgivable, and I really hope they fix this for the sequel).

Wondering if you should go see it? Here's my advice:

• If you liked the original Ghostbusters and are not opposed to a remake on principle, you will very probably like this movie.

• If you like sci-fi/action/comedy movies, you will very probably like this movie.

• If you like summer blockbuster movies, you will probably like this movie.

• If you are an academic, you will like at least parts of this movie, if not the whole thing.

• If you are a butthurt dudebro, you are the villain of the story, both in real life and in the narrative, and you will definitely not like this movie.

• If you like poetic justice served meta, with a dash of ectoplasm, you will DEFINITELY like this movie.

Now that I've rewatched the 1984 film here's my comparative review:

Ghostbusters (1984) is still a good movie. The special effects have held up well, it's got some great sight gags and set pieces, and the character actors all do a stand-up job. The soundtrack is awesome. It's still fun to watch!

But you know what? With the exception of that soundtrack, Ghostbusters (2016) is a better film. I would even say a much better film. The comedy is better. The science is better. The action is better. The characterization is better. I'm not saying the reboot is a great movie. Just that it's a good movie, and a better one than the original.

Humor is highly contextual, so it's possible that some of the jokes from 1984 have just dated poorly. The 2016 reboot does a great job of poking fun of a lot of contemporary issues; I laughed most of the way through the movie. I was a little kid when I first saw the original films, and I'm sure a lot of their contemporary humor flew over my head even at the time. Slapstick humor is more ageless, and both the original and the reboot make good use of it. Slimer and ectoplasm, pratfalls, "scares" that are not especially scary--I laughed harder at these jokes in the reboot, but it cashes in on callbacks to the original, so it's not a fair comparison. We'll call it a draw. Jokes that rely on social faux pas have never been my preferred flavor of comedy, but I recognize their role within the genre. In the 1984 film, that kind of social humor routinely punches down. In the 2016 film, the punches are aimed upward, or at least on a level, which is not only funnier but also more responsible.

Not at all surprisingly, the 2016 film's special effects and battles are more exciting. Again, I'm willing to charitably attribute this in part to technical advances over the past 30 years. But only in part. Sometimes, bigger effects and more extensively choreographed fights come at the expense of character and plot; in the reboot, the opposite occurs. The fancy new gadgets and more elaborate battles reveal aspects of the characters and advance the plot.

I also found the new Ghostbusters more personally relatable, possibly because the main characters are women and I'm a woman, but I think there's more to it than that. First of all, all four of the 2016 leads are much better developed than those in the 1984 film, which mostly focuses on Venkman, who is actually a deeply repugnant character (more on that in a minute). All the 2016 leads are given backstories and character arcs. The amount of time spent on each of them is also more equal. Ghostbusters (2016) is truly a buddy movie.

More so than because of my gender, I believe I found the new team relatable (and the old team comparatively unrelatable) because I am now an academic myself. I aspired to academia from a very young age, but I had only the vaguest notion what it was like--one friend's dad was a professor of archaeology, another was a rocket scientist, but my most vivid notions still came from the media. Both the 1984 and the 2016 teams are made up of three academics and one everyman character. But with the exception of Egon and Stanz's characters, I don't recognize my professional world at all in the 1984 film. The 2016 film's depiction of academia and academics had me and my fellow academic friends in stitches. It was absolutely on point.

I admit that "relatability" is highly subjective, and I don't pretend to be unbiased. But even if the 2016 film's increased relatability is at least in part because I share a gender with the leads, that's a really good argument for more films with primarily-women casts. I lived 37 years enjoying hundreds of SF/action/comedy movies starring men. I've identified with male heroes in the movies and TV shows I watch and the books I read for 37 years--much more so, often, than I did with the women in those same stories (who typically didn't do much and were most often written by men, I must add). And it's a real shame that I had so few opportunities to identify so strongly with women heroes in the genres I love best. It's perhaps an even bigger shame that men of my generation had so few opportunities to identify at all with women characters. 

As much as I still love my male-led genre classics, the 2016 Ghostbusters was special for me because I didn't have to put as much effort into identifying with the heroes. Now, I think making an effort to identify with people who are different than you is really important, but so is seeing yourself reflected in your heroes. I want the rising generation of girls and boys to grow up with plenty of opportunities to identify with and admire both men and women heroes.[2] I don't want the box office to be dominated by female-led films the way it has historically been dominated by male-led films (though I'm totally up for more gender-flipped remakes; it's a really interesting creative exercise and frankly, shaking things up creatively in a major way is pretty much the only good reason to do a remake). I would like something much nearer to parity. Contrary to the popular narrative, women have always been a large and essential part of SF fandom. There is an audience for women-led genre films like this, and Hollywood has begun to realize it. The butthurt dudebros are going to lose the culture war, but only because they can't abide sharing any toys at all. (If you are a guy who is not opposed to seeing more women leads and women in general in your media, you are not a butthurt dudebro, and you have nothing to worry about.)

The question of relatability isn't simply one of gender or professional identity. As I wrote before, Peter Venkman is a surprisingly repugnant and unredeemed character for a heroic lead in an '80s film (antiheroes are more common nowadays). In contrast, all of the 2016 reboot's leads are likable as well as heroic. It wouldn't be fair to compare Venkman to four awesome women, and I don't have time to line up the other three counterparts, so let's stick with one whose narrative arc is most similar to Venkman's (though it is, as you'll see, a very superficial similarity): Dr. Erin Gilbert.[3]

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Dr. Erin Gilbert (Kristin Wiig):

• Appears to be a brilliant and conscientious physicist
• Is first seen nervously preparing to give a lecture; the equations on her white board are apparently legit awesome science (plus some nifty Easter eggs)
• Craves acceptance and prestige from those she perceives as her peers (this gets her into trouble)
• Through backstory we learn that she set aside her interest in studying the paranormal in order to be seen as credible in the eyes of her colleagues; in doing so, abandoned a research partner and childhood friend (but believed that she was doing Abby no professional harm)
• Is denied tenure and fired for having written a book on the paranormal prior to her career in academia (likewise, their unconventional research subject causes Abby Yates and Jillian Holtzmann to lose their institutional support, such as it was)
• When she realizes the pain she caused her friend, Erin is remorseful and works to repair the relationship, both personally and professionally
• Awkwardly tries to hit on Kevin the airheaded blonde secretary; is totally ignored by him, still likes and looks out for him. Though she continues to admire his appearance (something he seems accustomed to and comfortable with), she does not press her advances
• With one notable lapse back into her selfish need for personal validation[4], works together with Abby, Erin, and Patty in a true partnership to do Awesome Paranormal Science and save the city from ghosts
• As a reward for saving the city, Dr. Gilbert and her team ask for and get a firehouse and other resources to continue their work of doing awesome science and protecting the city. That's it. There's no romance. No fame. Just awesome women supporting each other and doing awesome chaotic-good science because awesomeness is its own reward

Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray):

• Has two PhDs, in psychology and parapsychology
• Is first seen unethically tampering with his own research project, deliberately causing pain and humiliation to a male research subject and ignoring the very results he is supposedly looking for, in order to hit on a hot blonde female research subject
• Peppers his colleagues (and pretty much everyone else he doesn't want to bang) with sarcasm and put-downs
• Gaslights a woman librarian about having seen a ghost (sees the ghost himself shortly thereafter and flips out)[4]
• Loses his team's funding and evicted from their research lab not because of their unconventional research subject but because Venkman is legitimately a terrible researcher who until now doesn't even believe in his own work. He deserves to be fired, and he takes his colleagues (who apparently do care about and are good at research) down with him
• Immediately tries to drum up the team's morale by talking about how they don't need academic support anymore because they can provide a very expensive service that will soon be in high demand. (Throughout the film he is consistently motivated by self-interest)
• Creepily hits on a client, and persists in his pursuit of her even after having been rebuffed multiple times and even though he acknowledges that his behavior is creepy[5]
• Continues to be an arrogant a-hole throughout the entire film. His knee-jerk antagonism of an EPA agent who was actually doing his job (and whose own contempt is at least partly a reaction to Venkman's bad behavior) leads to the shutdown of the team's ghost containment unit, which puts the entire city in Armageddon-level danger. Projects responsibility for this onto the EPA guy; is never called out on it in any way
• Is portrayed as the hero of the film; the others are basically his vastly more competent sidekicks
• As a reward for saving the city, gets fame, glory, and the girl

If "relatability" is an important part of what makes a movie enjoyable, then I guess I can understand why butthurt dudebros cling to the original Ghostbusters with such extreme fervor: like them, Venkman is an entitled a-hole loser. And for this, he gets everything they fantasize about--a fantasy the realization of which is becoming increasingly scarce both in the media and in real life (thank goodness)! For me, and for a lot of guys I know, Venkman was always alienating; I identified with Egon, and I'm happy to say I still identify with Egon because Egon is awesome. But Erin Gilbert, Abby Yates, Jillian Holtzmann, and Patty Tolan are all my kind of heroes--heroes I can not only relate to but also genuinely admire, even with their faults.

The aforementioned butthurt dudebros were afraid that the reboot would ruin their memories of a beloved film from their childhoods. Perhaps they were right to fear that. If Ghostbusters (2016) had been an inferior film, Ghostbusters (1984) would have remained untarnished. By not only being a better movie on its own merits, but also one which both affectionately and critically talks back to its predecessor, Ghostbusters (2016) has indeed diminished my enjoyment of the original. I didn't expect that, but in retrospect, I think it's a good thing.

[1] Jones' acting and comedic timing were great; she's often the best part of any scene she's in. What I mean by saying that her character was a "token" is that she is the only POC among the main cast--and there are precious few POC in the film at all. Seriously, scroll through the full cast list on IMDB. SO MANY white faces. And this is NYC! Seriously! I will say that although both Patty in the 2016 film and Winston in the 1984 original were the "blue-collar" members of team, Patty at least had a greatly expanded role, and she wasn't just world-wise. She had studied the weird and creepy history of the city in her spare time, and her self-education contributed vitally to the team's success. Though she lacks their credentials, Patty is Erin, Abby, and Jillian's intellectual peer.

[2] Shout-out here to Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I wish she were there for 7-year-old me; I'm proud she's there for my nieces and nephews, who all love her and identify with her.

[3] A note on names: whether we refer to someone by their first or last name indicates a degree of familiarity or formality. First name typically is less formal and more familiar. Last name is more formal and less familiar. The tendency to use only last names in professional contexts has also faded over time; it's much more common now to call colleagues by their first names even in professional contexts and especially when those colleagues are equals and friends. Although they're both doctors, in his films Peter Venkman is typically called by his last name, and in her film, Erin Gilbert is most often called by her first name (as far as I can recall anyway). But I would argue that this isn't a gendered slight; it's actually a reflection of how relationships are constructed within the films. I take the liberty of following the films' own name-use conventions.

[4] In a key bit of backstory from the 2016 film, we learn that Erin was gaslighted about her own paranormal experiences as a child. This is definitely not a narrative accident. It's subtly lampshaded by Bill Murray's cameo as a paranormal debunker who goads Erin into releasing a trapped ghost. This leads directly to his character falling out a window and probably dying (it's not explicitly shown). What a beautiful piece of intertextual comeuppance!

[5] To his credit, Venkman refrains--not without a struggle--from taking advantage of Dana while she's possessed by Gozer and extra-highly sexualized. But it's worth noting that later Gozer-Dana does get it on with her extremely dweebish (and likewise then-possessed) neighbor, whose advances she has previously rebuffed. And Venkman does still win her in the end. The sexual politics here are truly appalling, though not extraordinary for the time.

Writing Metaphors

One of my favorite teaching activities for the first day of class is to have students write a metaphor or simile for their writing, or for themselves as writers. Lately I've also had students add an image that represents their metaphor. The activity is a way to introduce some concepts and practice some technical skills right off the bat, but more importantly, it's a quick way for me to get some insight into how my students think about writing.

Here is the example that I made tonight:

Old-School Revision

Experienced writers know that the hardest part of writing isn't putting words on the page: it's revision. It's massaging and coaxing and wrestling and chiseling texts into the proper shape, the proper texture. I've been working on this article for a really, really long time. It's now in its 9th major revision, and it's 30 pages long, and last week, I realized that the bottom half of it needed some serious reorganizing. So I fell back on an old-school revision activity: the literal cut and paste.

It works like this. You take a printed copy of your paper (or in my case, thankfully, only half of it), and some scissors and glue, and you cut it into paragraphs. The glue is for pasting together the parts of paragraphs that span multiple pages. After your paper has been chopped into its component paragraphs, you mix them up and you find a large surface and you lay them out in your new order (this activity can be an interesting peer response technique too, if you let someone else rearrange them for you. Among other things, when somebody else tries to put your paper back together in the right order, you really start to get a sense of how important transitions are). Here's what my reassembled text-puzzle looked like:

Each column is a different subheading (though actually that first column contains two subheadings (one is transitional), and the remaining four are all sub-subheadings). The paragraphs with larger space between them are primarily transitional or meta-textual. The paragraphs on their sides didn't fit conceptually very well; that's my way of visually representing that they need to be heavily reworked or deleted (one of them was deleted, along with a bunch of bits of other paragraphs; the other three were reworked).

Using this method, I was able to get a birds-eye view or map of how my paper needed to be organized, which made my digital cutting & pasting much easier to manage. Of course I didn't exactly follow the map in the end. Reorganizing so many paragraphs required a lot of line-level revising too, and that in turn created alternate (and better, I think) organizational possibilities for the several paragraphs. It also gave me a better visual sense of how my sections were balanced than merely scrolling through a .doc could. And it offered me a fresh perspective on the text overall. After 9 revisions I was really having trouble seeing the trees for the forest; physically handling each paragraph individually was eye-opening.

I'm a proud tech nerd, but I have to admit that sometimes, low-tech solutions work better.

Now if only I could think of a better title, and a better conclusion for that beast.

The PhD Plan of Salvation

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, I present to you:

Latter-day Saint readers will recognize this immediately. For the rest of you, this probably looks a bit weird. Basically, for the past couple of decades LDS students have been taught the "plan of salvation" (a set of fundamental LDS doctrines concerning our origin, purpose, and destiny) using what one of my Institute teachers cheekily refers to as "those hop-scotch diagrams." When teaching about the plan of salvation, Brother Richardson encourages his own students to re-create their own visual representation of the plan, using symbols that are personally meaningful to them. The second he mentioned it, this image sprang nearly full-formed into my mind. So I sketched a draft in class on Thursday, and today I took myself over to easel.ly to create the glorious infographic you see above.

Of course this representation is the thinnest of analogies, and it only works when held extremely lightly. For instance, I'm not sure what in a PhD program would be analogous to the atonement of Jesus Christ; I don't know that I even dare play with such a comparison. And it is absolutely not true that job outcomes reflect the "righteousness" of the PhD-holder, or that alt-academic jobs are less worthy than faculty jobs--in this case, my diagram reflects perceptions which I regard as rather unfortunate, not reality.

But from an affective point of view, the analogy does kind of work, and it was pretty fun to think about. Beyond that, I will leave it to you to explore the scriptures to see how each stage of the plan corresponds to a stage of the PhD process. If you think different scriptures make a better fit, please do suggest them in the comments--there's no reason I couldn't revise my little diagram. Here they all are in linky form:

• The Premortal Spirit World: "First Lessons" D&C 138:56
• Birth: "The Veil of Forgetfulness" Encyclopedia of Mormonism (this phrase is not used in the scriptures but is very common in LDS parlance; hence I link to the releveant entry in the EoM instead of the standard works)
• Earth & Mortality: "A State of Probation" 2 Nephi 2:21, 27
• Death: "I Will Prove You in All Things" D&C 98:14; D&C 29:42-43; D&C 101:36-37
• The Postmortal Spirit World: "Paradise or Prison" Alma 40:12-14
• "Judgment" 2 Nephi 9:15
• Our Final Estate: "Three Degrees of Glory" or a state of no glory 1 Corinthians 15:40-41; D&C 88:20-32