Primrose Road

Bear with me while I set up an allusion: Way back in the day (like, seven years ago), Chris Isaak starred in a Showtime comedy as (sort of) himself. In one episode, a stalker keeps leaving gifts, including a loaf of banana bread, on his doorstep. Chris later sees one of his bandmates eating the bread, and says something like, "Are you eating the stalker bread? You can't eat the stalker bread!"

Late last week, in what I'm going to assume was a cultural misunderstanding, a student gave me a gift-wrapped bottle of wine along with his final portfolio. I told him I couldn't accept it, but he insisted, so I went to give the wine to the department administrative assistants, who said that since I obviously understood the ethical wackiness of the situation and wouldn't let the wine affect the student's grade, I should take it home with me.

So now I wonder: is drinking student-bribe-wine the equivalent of eating stalker bread?

Victoria Strauss over at the Writer Beware blog writes on a rather creepy vanity publishing program that's overtly targeting teenagers. While other publishing scams have been targeting young adults for some time now, this one is downright wacky (and somewhat frightening).

It's fascinating (yet not surprising) that confidence doesn't correlate with correctness at all. In fact, when a professor teaching a Cognitive Psych class showed us some studies published in educational psychology journals that suggested a negative correlation between learner confidence and learner correctness, I wanted to jump up out of my seat and wave the studies in the faces of those "self-esteem philosophy" advocates who prefer feel-good teaching to methods of teaching that actually allow learners to, well, learn.

Harriet Hall offers a nice summary of this concept in her review of On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, which will most likely be my book-of-choice for a 12-hour train ride I'll be taking early next month.

Though I wish the commenters on the Science Based Medicine blog would stop hatin' on postmodernism. ::sniffle:: ;)