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

The Awesome Internet Contest

In case you didn't already know, there is a contest to fill the internet with Awesome. It has been going on forever, and it may never end. Here are the 7 official contest rules:

1.  Be awesome on the internet.
2. If you see someone being awesome on the internet, award them Awesome Internet Points.
3. If you see someone being lousy on the internet, subtract Awesome Internet Points.
4. You cannot award yourself Points, but you can subtract Points from yourself.
5. Points should be awarded (or subtracted) in proportion to actual awesomeness (or lousiness).
6. It is possible (even probable) to have less than zero Points.
7. The first person to achieve 10,000,000,000,000 Awesome Internet Points wins.

Grand Prize: The actual Internet. You will own it, and you will have the key to prove it. Also a Pagani Huayra, the awesomest car in existence. To claim your prize, just send verification of the authenticity of your 10,000,000,000,000 Awesome Internet Points to Pagani and the owners of the Internet. This is not a hoax. They will totally deliver.*

Image source: http://kronos-kirbi.deviantart.com/art/You-Win-the-Internet-349270288

*This contest is not sponsored or even authorized by Pagani or the owners of the Internet, whoever they might be, and they probably don't even know about it. If they did know about it, they would reserve the right not to deliver. But who cares? Awesomeness is its own reward. 

Jock the TA Octopus

My friends and I have been grading a lot lately. It's that time of the semester. Reading students' papers can be very interesting and rewarding, but it also (as I think most teachers would agree) frequently tends to be a frustrating experience, when it's not simply mind-numbing. Often, we fantasize about ways to make grading easier. Tonight, an exchange about grading between fellow Comp instructors on Facebook somehow led us to imagine sea slugs writing papers, and thence (naturally) to the idea of an octopus TA. 

It's actually not that far-fetched. I recently read some articles about octopus intelligence. They use tools, play, solve puzzles, are amazing escape artists, can crawl around on land, and have awesome camouflage skills. Then Abby shared this little article about Jock, an octopus in Scotland who has taken to cleaning his own tank. Feeling that an intelligent cephalopod like Jock might be interested in switching from janitorial to clerical work, in a moment of stress-relieving silliness, I invented Jock the Octopus TA. Below, I share some of Jock's recent assessments of student writing. Also, apparently octopuses refer to themselves in the third person. They are solitary creatures who evolved at the bottom of the ocean; their brains are not like our brains. Don't question it.

"Jock says your source is invalid. Try JSTOR next time. Jock loves peer-reviewed articles almost as much as he loves rearranging his tank furniture to be more feng shui." 

"Jock wishes to use this paragraph to scrub the scum off the side of his tank." 

"Jock is not interested in how comprehensive sex education is the solution to the failure of our entire educational infrastructure. He thinks you should write a paper about cephalopods' right to privacy." 

"QUOTING ACTUAL SCHOLARS! Jock approves."

"Jock finds your mastery of academic style over substance simultaneously impressive and depressing." 

"Jock is intrigued by your thesis statement, but finds your argument's credibility hampered by poor paragraph organization and weak source attribution."

 image source: dailyvisits.co.uk

 When Jock is not grading papers or cleaning his tank, he practices playing his bagpipes. He and Paul II, a German octopus guitarist, are hoping to start an international Octopus band. Paul II's predecessor was allegedly psychic, but Paul II is an empiricist and doesn't believe in such pseudoscientific nonsense. Inspired by his high-achieving bandmate, Paul II thinks he may have a future in academia as well--perhaps as a research assistant.