Re: Do you use the term SWAG in your teaching?

[Charles Bell <charbell@BELLSOUTH.NET>]

Thank you Michael,

I wish you all the best in your teaching. I awaken every day and find
myself in an ever changing unfamiliar world dominated more and more by
"technical" people who can not do integrals. Somehow they are the
"technical" supervisors and managers.

I used to think that "guessing" at an answer was inappropriate. Nowadays,
if you can't integrate or do radicals or exponents, you "try" a, b, c, or d
instead of working the problem to an answer.

I'm just going to let it go.

At 03:59 PM 1/9/2004, you wrote:
> I don't use SWAG in my teaching.  However, my curiosity was up, and i=
> t's
> Friday, so I did some Googling.
>
> There seems no doubt that WAG predominantly means wild-assed guess.
> However there is considerable discrepancy over what s stands for.  He=
> re
> are some common ones...
>
> scientific, smart, sophisticated, super, silly, sheer, stupid, someon=
> e's
>
> SWAG is even in some on-line dictionaries, and they tend to dual defi=
> ne
> it as scientific or silly.
>
> Some other possibilities, also in acronym dictionaries, include... so=
> ld
> without guarantee, standard written agreement, still wondering and
> guessing, stuff we all get, shit we all get, and more... some pretty
> crude.
>
> I have found that some students seem to be genuinely hurt when
> professors use words or acronyms that have "bad" words in them.  When=
>  I
> was younger, and wanted to make a point, I might have said, "This isn=
> 't
> just small, it's damn small."  But about every time I have said
> something like that I have had a student come up after class and ask =
> me
> not to swear in class.  Personally I never thought damn was that bad,
> and was surprised students reacted to it.  One the other hand, I know
> students who would react badly to damn but then use the word friggin =
> in
> almost every sentence.  I myself would never use that word.
>
> Go figure. (That doesn't mean anything bad does it?)
>
> Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
> Professor of Chemistry and Physics
> Bluffton College
> Bluffton, OH 45817
> (419)-358-3270
> edmiston@bluffton.edu