Human rights hypocrisy

The other day, the US abstained from voting on a UN resolution condemning our decades-long trade embargo on Cuba.  The US ambassador to the UN (I think) commented after the vote while we didn't veto the resolution, we are necessarily still concerned about Cuba's human rights abuses.  And just to be clear, I'm sure that Cuba does commit human rights abuses.

Meanwhile, in the United States, people continue to be denied access to health care for not having "insurance."  People continue to be overwhelmed by the costs of education and the debt they must accumulate to make themselves more competitive in the "job market."  And also meanwhile, workers in "right to work" states as well as in the country more generally find themselves at the mercy of a system that denies them the right to bargain collectively with their employers for better working conditions and benefits.

Make no mistake: these are human rights abuses carried out by the United States on a massive scale, and apparently with no end in sight.

More complaining about students

OK, so the linguistics students had an assignment to write an ecology of a specific dialect of a language.  They were to avoid broad generalized "languages," like "Spanish" or "Japanese," and focus on more localized varieties such as "Panamanian Spanish" or "Tokyo Japanese."

The ecology is developed by answering questions based on my reinterpretation of an article by Einar Haugen in The Linguistic Reporter, Winter 1971, page 25.  My questions:

• What is the name of the language variety (what do its speakers call it; what do nonspeakers call it; what do linguists call it)?
• Who are its users, and how are they grouped by nation, geographical location, class, religion, or any other relevant grouping?
• What larger “language” does it belong to? What are the main closely related dialects?
• What other dialects are employed by its users?
• Is this dialect written? If so, how and in what contexts?
• Is its use restricted or limited in certain ways, for example religion or ritual, written literature, legal proceedings, folk tales, and so on?
• What issues of power and authority are relevant to this dialect?
• Is the dialect endangered? If so, what factors might be involved? If not, what might be contributing to its vitality?

Most of the students turned in papers that correctly identified a dialect to write about, but then proceeded to ignore the questions.  Some wrote about their personal reasons for being interested in this dialect; others focused on issues of grammar; others focused on other issues not really relevant to the questions at hand.

And, far too many offered a list of references but did not bother to cite those references in the text of their papers.

What do we do, when our university students can't do what they should have learned to do in high school?