10 Years After

Lost Vagueness

I've been stressing about the first presentation for my Literary Criticism class. It's a New Criticism analysis of a poem or a song. I choose "The Road Not taken" by Robert Frost. I choose this because a few days after the assigment was given I ran across a writer using the poem in a didactic way contrary to what a close reading of the poem would reveal. Anyways, enough justification. It turns out that my name didn't come up to do my presentation today. That means that I'll be doing mine next Tuesday. The odd thing abotu that was the fact that he asked students to add up the last four digits of their social security number, oops- I mean student ID number (yes, they are one and the same). This total was suppose to be our number and we would go with the highest numbers going first. I thought since my came to as a 9 that I would be one of the first to go. Though, after some refelction I realized that with 4 numbers to combine, it was foolish to have thought that 10 was going to be the highest number. I was thinking, apparently falsely, that it would be like one of those astrology/numerology thing were the numbers are added until a single digit is left. Anyways, now I have to write a 250-300 word journal entry giving Milton's mask, "Comus" a new title. Exciting.

Oh, and I thought I'd check Blackboard, the proprietary interface that ETSU is pushing it's instructors to use rather than open to the public Web pages. To limit access to the content a student has to log in. The username assigned is the same as one's campus assigned email address. However, the password appears to be their social security number, or student ID if you are afraid to call it as it is. What's strange is that when you sign in the page must write a cookie to keep you signed in. Simply closing the window with the web page up doesn't cause you to have to resign in. In order to sign out you either have to click the sign out icon, reboot, or wait for an hour or so for the server to time out. I mention this because when I went to log into BB instead of asking me for my username and PW it brougt up some other student's account. Nothing too damaging. For instance, I could go into the Discussion feature and make all sorts of improper postings that the class and instructor would see.