The shutdown is affecting my class. It is a shitdown!

My grandmother often warned against certain kinds of practical jokes with an advice, "you joke too much about it and it will come true."

Even though I wanted to, I didn't even crack that joke about class being canceled because of the government shutdown and yet it came true!  I am mad as hell--not because I missed out on the opportunity for a prank, but because this shutdown messed up my class discussions and students learning.

From now on, I want to call this shutdown as shitdown!

As I often remind students, the wonderful advantage with teaching and learning now, as opposed to even ten years ago, is the phenomenal availability of all kinds of information at the mere click of a mouse button.  And for free.  A contrast to the world in which I was a formal student.

This different world means that I teach very differently, even from many other fellow-faculty.  As I walk past classrooms, I am appalled to see faculty still doing the old lecture routine, with dull and boring text on the slides.  Sitting in those classrooms might make one wonder if it was 1913 or 2013.

Here is how the shitdown messed me and my students.  When introducing students to the ideas of population dynamics, I make them develop hypotheses for which I then directly pull up the data and charts from the US Census Bureau's database.  It is a phenomenal database on all the countries of the world, not merely the US.  I would ask students to choose any country, offer their hypothesis on population conditions--fertility rates and birth rates--and how they might also be into the future.  This approach is vastly superior to me lecturing on and on and on because it gets them thinking and engaged.

So, I pulled up the link, and the projector displayed this on the screen:

A couple more tries and it brought up the same screen over and over.  I was pissed off then, and I am pissed off even now.

A phenomenal advantage with information on a website is that we do not need personnel to answer questions once the data are out there.  Why did they have to shitdown this database when it is run by computers?  Granted that databases have to be constantly updated, and other features have to be worked on too.  But, they could have kept the database accessible and the updates could have happened whenever the politicians ended their pissing contest.  Instead they shitdown the entire site?  How awful!  Pox on all these people who are messing up our lives!

I did a few other things, but had to end class fifteen minutes early.  If the morons (mis)governing the country do not end the shitdown before the next meeting on Tuesday, then my students and I will miss out on a valuable teaching and learning opportunity.

This shitdown is one of those terribly ugly warts on democracy's beautiful body!