I LOVE stuff like this. I need to dig back a ways…I had a paper a student wrote on President Lincoln that was absolutely priceless. Their “Gettysburg Address” rendition was one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in my life.

I’ve had a lot of source material recently. I’m almost to my 800th student survey entered…

Today, I learned that “molecules” are also “maliqlues”.

... is a great source of cheap entertainment- better than cheap, because one usually gets paid at least a little bit to enter them. My work-study job my senior year of college was working in the school’s research office, entering student and faculty surveys. You know, the sorts of things that the college has to do every year to stay accredited:

“Think of the most recent class you took. What percentage of class time was devoted to:

A) Issues of race? __
B) Issues of gender? __
C) Issues of class? __“

Or, my personal favorite:

“In the last semester, how often have you:

A) Used illegal drugs? __ B) Drank wine or beer? __ C) Drank hard liquor? _”

I mean, come on- whose idea was it to rely on self-reporting for drug and alcohol stats when half the campus is convinced that the college administration is officially an arm of The Man, out to get them and their friends? Ack!

But I digress.

Not only do you get to sit and critique the surveys themselves (“Who the heck wrote these questions- trained spider monkeys? When the $7.00/hr work study drone could write better questions…” etc. etc. etc.) but you get to be entertained by the responses themselves.

I was amazed by the fascinating number and variety of ways that students at a fairly competitive liberal arts college found to mangle the English language. Even worse were the ways that FACULTY, almost all of whom have PhD’s, many of whom are recognized experts in their field, etc. etc. etc. managed to fsck up the language. Truly astounding.

Not to mention all the amazingly stupid things that these people said in the qualitative portions of the survey. There were students that actually seemed to beleive that our college’s administration was actively plotting, along with George Bush and his cronies, to oppress each and every one of them. One person actually wrote that the college’s policy of requiring everybody to be on the school’s meal plan as long as they lived in a dorm was a civil rights violation! And don’t even get me started on the dumb stuff that the faculty wrote…

Well, the dorm/food service thing is annoying, but if they think it’s unconstitutional they need to take a few more classes…

I guess for “silly adult survey entries” there are probably a few contenders somewhere in my head—like people writing on evaluations of a pilot project by the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, “Stop sending our money overseas! Keep it here!”

Cuz, you know, OWEB uses state taxes to fund elite salmon hit squads that swim to Japan to dispense sweet sweet justice. And stuff.

maliqlues? I didn’t realize our language had changed so much! If only to indulge me…please keep them coming. There’s nothing funnier than real life.

I’m absolutely cracking up. Dang I wish I did what you guys do! Not that I don’t love my job, but I’d almost rather be laughing all day. Feel more than free to get specific…I’m loving it all.

Well, I don’t do survey entry all the time. I am a Jane of all work here at the office. And I am mostly doing number entry today. But the surveys mostly have three questions in the free response:

If [you liked the presenter], what did you like best about the presenter?

If [you learned something new], what did you learn?

What was your favorite part of today’s program?

Here is a representative sample of fully half of the high schoolers who took part in the “Food Chemistry” program:

Fire.
About fire.
The part with fire.

By contrast, here is a (less) representative sample of middle schoolers who experienced The Ins and Outs of Digestion>

She let us smash potatose.
About smushes potatose.
When we murshed pototos!

Thank you, folks, I’m here all week. Tip your waitress.

One kid informs us: “I learned to take car of dogs.” That’s several kinds of theft in most states, son.

Another one notes under “Any other comments?”: “Thanks for teaching us what to set on fire!”

No, you really don’t… entering surveys, while sometiems entertaining, gets old really really really fast- and doing it for eight hours straight, day after day, sucks. It’s a never-ending job- by the time you finish entering the data for one cycle of evaluations, another has rolled around. Also, there’s the irony that multi-thousand dollar statistical analysis software packages used for… drum roll please… doing frequency counts. Not even a basic regression curve! Nothing! Just making histograms. Ack!

Of course, there’s also the joy of seeing hours and hours of entry work produce binders of information which is then promptly disregarded. That one only stings for the first week or two, though.

I wish I had someone to thank for teaching me what to set on fire. Just imagine the possibilities of the annual arson awards….