Happy International Women’s Day 2024! (Belated — I meant to post this yesterday.) So many girls and women who’ve been a joy to work with as students, colleagues, teachers, mentors. I wish I could relive every moment with you. If you think you may be in that group, you probably are. If you’re not sure, message me and I’ll tell you. 🙂 I think I remember women better because there haven’t been as many of them. I work in software engineering. Women are underrepresented in software engineering. You may have heard. Women and men are different so it doesn’t seem surprising that they choose to do different things with their lives. Software engineering has been a good career for me because I like solving problems and building things, so I’ve been able to make a living doing, for the most part, things that I like and things that (I think)… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Students
A Few More Reasons Teachers Don’t Want Parents to Know What Their Kids Are Doing at School
Newlywed Iowa Teacher, 24, Accused of ‘Engaging in Sexually Oriented Acts’ With 3 Students as Young as 13 Special Education Teacher Charged With Sexually Touching 7 Boys at New Jersey Elementary School Teacher Charged With Raping Child Under 13 Says She’s Pregnant Teacher, 33, Charged With Raping Student She Met at 14 and Who Fathered Her Baby at 17 Read more →
California Teacher Helps Change Students’ Gender Identity Without Parents Knowing
California teacher helps change students’ gender identity without parents knowing — torontosun.com The biggest problem in education is too much emphasis on academics and not enough emphasis on teachers changing students’ gender identity without parents knowing. Read more →
Why Must Teachers Buy Their Own Supplies?
That's mismanagement. Avg per pupil spending in US is almost $15K. 30 kids in a class would be $450K. Deduct the teacher's salary and there should be enough left for supplies. P.S. Non sequiturs and false choice fallacies are not REQUIRED for every post. https://t.co/PMisLtoe4a — Paul Epps (@paulepps) December 21, 2022 Read more →
I Got a Bonus
I got my year-end bonus today. I really hadn’t given it any thought, how it was calculated, where it maxed out, because any company I’ve ever worked with where I was eligible for a bonus, I never got it. And my experience has been that nobody else ever gets the bonus either, with the exception of people in sales and people in the highest echelons of the company. Rank-and-file people don’t get bonuses. If the company wanted to pay you the bonus, they’d make it part of your salary. Anyway . . . I do training classes for software engineers, and it turns out my bonus is calculated based on graduation rate and student surveys, where students respond to statements like “I receive actionable feedback on my performance” on a 5-point scale from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. I had no idea. As it turns out, I did get the… Read more →
If You Gotta Go, Go Now
One of my students says she was so frustrated with an assignment she was ready to throw her computer out the window. “What floor do you live on,” I ask. “Second.” “Oh, well that probably wouldn’t kill anyone, just a bump on the noggin. But you can’t say for sure if it hit them just right. Be sure you’re wearing a mask though when you do that.” She lives in New York. My son also lives in New York so I had to call to warn him to be on the lookout for falling computers. “Because I know someone who may be throwing one out a window. But only from the second floor so you’ll probably be able to see it coming and step out of the way.” If I lived in New York and it came down to being killed by COVID or by a falling computer, I’d take… Read more →
See You in Hell, Educators
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Greetings mortals! Even though an alarmingly high percentage of Americans think the sun orbits the earth, can’t find the Pacific Ocean on a map, half the residents of Detroit can’t read, rather than teach basic literacy, science or geography, K-12 public school teachers in the U.S. will be teaching “expanding” gender identities and “evolving” sexual orientations. This instruction will be informed by the National Sex Ed Standards: Core Content and Skills, K-12 (Second Edition) I included a link to it because you will not believe me when I tell you what’s in it. For example: BY THE END OF THE 5TH GRADE, STUDENTS SHOULD BE ABLE TO: Distinguish between sex assigned at birth and gender identity and explain how they may or may not differ. Define and explain differences between cisgender, transgender, gender nonbinary, gender expansive,… Read more →
Healthy Enough to Type
I have a student in my class — let’s call him John — who missed the entire first week, so I sent him an email to the effect that I hadn’t seen him in class yet and what were his plans going forward. He replied that he had really been looking forward to the class but had a health condition that was going to force him to drop and who could he contact about a tuition refund. So he’s healthy enough to type. The class is online, so he could watch from his hospital bed if necessary. In short, I don’t believe him but what can you do? A slightly better way to play it, in my opinion, is to send me back an email saying “I’m typing this for John because he’s too sick to move his fingers. It’s really touch and go at this point. Please remember him… Read more →
We Owe All Students High Expectations
Now Here’s a Guy Who Gets Me
I teach programming classes for a living. The classes are 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 12 weeks. I put a lot of preparation into it because I want students to have the best, most up-to-date and relevant instruction. It’s a good job for me. Programming seems to me like an important, valuable skill . . . it’s allowed me to make a living doing (for the most part) things I like and things I’m good at. It gives you a lot of options. You don’t have to work for a tech company. Almost any field of endeavor now uses software and data and they hire programmers. You can work in education, healthcare, finance, sports, whatever energizes you. So it’s good to have a job where I feel like I’m helping people. The downside is that the students can’t really tell good instruction from bad instruction. Yes,… Read more →
Lowering the Trauma Bar
More than a hundred faculty members at Ball State University signed a letter to the student newspaper saying, in part, “We support our students of color as they deal with the trauma of these events and navigate its fallout.” The traumatic events, as it turns out, are that a marketing professor asked a black student to move to a different seat in the classroom and the student declined to move. First, why make a racial thing out of it? If my son, who is not black, were asked by a college professor to move seats, my hope is that he would would move seats, and if he didn’t want to move, he’d move anyway. Certainly there’s room for personal interpretation, but to me a traumatic event would be, say, losing a limb, or witnessing a murder. Being asked to move seats in a classroom is not a traumatic event. I… Read more →