I'm happy to report that S is doing much better. Apparently a good portion of his problem, in addition to the disappointment of a potential relationship not being what he'd hoped, was that he was "feeling unattractive", which he has subsequently (and quite rightfully) gotten over. And yes, it did strike me as mildly entertaining that he was apparently able to get over his feelings of unattractiveness in one day, whereas I'm still hard at work on mine after oh, say, 23 years, but S is pretty objectively hot (insofar as there is objective attractiveness), so I guess it makes sense. Similarly, whenever I'm upset because I feel stupid (such as the great B+ scare of Spring '06), it generally only takes me a day to get over it. Because dude, I'm way smart. And I'm actually feeling reasonably attractive at the moment, too (well, not at this very moment, but that's only because I need a shower).
I finished grading and recording the Intro Micro exams last night. In small doses I love grading, but it gets so boring after a while. And I really feel for the students who write a whole paragraph that I don't even read, because I'm just scanning for a particular word or phrase (say, "specialization of resources"), giving them full credit, and then moving on. In contrast, I really hate the students who don't say the magic words, because then I actually have to read their bizarre, convoluted answers and decide how much knowledge I think they're conveying to me and how relevant this knowledge is to the question being asked. Anyway, I'm done, and I'm glad to have helped Dr. J out, because he's super-busy (not to mention I do actually get paid to do this), so yay.
Now the two major tasks looming over my head are putting everyone's picture on the econ board and entering our data from the summer into Excel. I was supposed to have the picture board done last Friday. Oops. My only comfort is that my predecesor did an even more half-assed job than I'm doing, so I don't feel so bad. The data entry stuff I think won't be so bad once I start, but starting seems overwhelming. I'm going to see if I can get myself to do it this afternoon in exchange for not having to drag my ass to school to work on Econometrics.
I think I'm also going to try making some cream of asparagus soup (asparagus was on sale, and I love it so I bought some, but I've been in one of those don't-cook-and-live-on-cheerios-and-luna-bars places right now, so I need to eat the asparagus soon before it goes bad). I've never done this before, but I know how to make a cream-based sauce, I have some chicken broth I can throw in, and I have a food processor to blend the whole mess up in, so how hard can it be?
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Ah yes... the great B+ scare of spring '06... I remember it well.
Remember to make sure the lid is on the food processor *completely* before blending your soup so that you may avoid a repeat of the the 'Cesar salad dressing on the ceiling' incident of Fall 2003.
;)
don't be too hard on the non-magic-word-saying students...i used to get irrationally pissed off (and actually still do, only at work now instead of school) at professors/coworkers/judges who prefer it when one writes in catchphrases, so i'd specifically avoid using anything that sounds like "worldviews speak" or now "DHS speak" and try to articulate what i mean in lay-person language. i know, it's irrational, but who ever said i was rational?
-mj
rebel- the lid *was* on all the way (the food processor won't run if it's not) during the Caesar Salad Dressing On The Ceiling incident of '03. the problem was that i stuck a rubber scrapper in the lid's chute while the processor was on, and it hit one of the blades (surprise, surprise), causing the scrapper to get jammed and the lid to fly off, and, predictably, salad dressing to fly everywhere.
mj- well, i can understand your aversion to subject-specific jargon; it can be useful shorthand when speaking to others who understand the exact context, but it can also be pointless and pretentious. and further, just because you memorize that "opportunity costs increase because of specialization of resources" doesn't mean that you understand what any of that means. it's more apparent that you understand the concept if you say that a car company has to give up producing an ever-higher number of cars for each additional truck it produces because some of the machines and workers it employs are better at making cars than trucks and so more of them are required to produce another truck. but do you see how that sentence wasn't that easy to follow, and i'm fairly good at explaining economic concepts clearly? now pretend i'm 18, not terribly bright, and i don't fully grasp the concept, so i'm writing a meandering paragraph that may or may not indicate that i understand anything at all. and then pretend there are 90 of me, and most of me have only semi-legible handwriting. mosts tests are painfully imperfect ways of evaluating a student's knowledge of a subject, and if i want to get through them all i have to take some shortcuts.
but if it makes you feel any better, there was a question on the test about market efficiency with a price ceiling (like, say, rent control). the answer is that price controls make the market less efficient. so i pretty much looked for the word(s)
"inefficient" or "less effecient" or some variation thereof, and gave the person full credit. but there was one student who wrote this narrative about how a price ceiling makes producers produce less because they can't make as much of a profit, but stuff costs less, which is great for consumers, but then when they get to the store its a "total buzzkill" (yes, he used that exact phrase) because they're already sold out of what they wanted to buy (because price ceilings causes shortages). and i gave him full credit, because he seemed to be describing an inefficient market pretty well.
Be careful when you are processing the soup, when hot the soup produces steam, and that make the blender more full then it actually is, which can blow the lid right off as well. Refering to the cream or mushroom incident of fall 04'
I stand corrected. ;) How did the soup turn out?
As I spend most of my life (and yes, I do mean that in its most literal sense) grading papers, I've loathed dealing with exams on the few occasions I've been forced to. Not that grading papers is fun, per se, but I've developed a keen sense of what I'm looking for, and know how to mark errors and/or problems with quick and somewhat legible slashes of my pencil.
My distaste for exams usually forces me to lean heavily on two strategies in writing them. My first love is quote identifications, as they're easy to grade: either the student recognizes that "When in the course of human events, etc." is the opening of the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson, or s/he doesn't. And my second love is the "tell me everything you know" form of identifications, in which I simply list terms/concepts or figures and have students write as much as they can. In this case, the volume of words provided is usually correlative with the amount of knowledge possessed (if we can even think of knowledge in such reductivist terms) by their provider.
I did have a student show up extremely drunk for an exam in Critical Theory. This student chose to "define" differance (as in, "Derrida's notion of, as espoused in de la Grammotologie") by rambling on about how drunk and ashamed he was, and explaining that the course had taught him quite a bit. In a rare exception to the rule listed in the paragraph above, the number of words provdided in this instance was more-or-less directly correlative to the number of shots consumed immediately prior to the exam...
Certainly, the most fun experiences I've had with an exam to date.
By the by, "provdided" isn't actually a word.
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