jeezus, can you tell i'm procrastinating, what with the high entry density lately. harkens back to 8 august 2001, when i wrote 10 entries. yes, all in one day.

right, to continue: i am grading exams from my class (not the one i was fired from/rehired by, but the one i teach all on my own, like a grown-up), and OH BOY COULD I USE A BEER RIGHT ABOUT NOW. which brings up a question: is it rude to return student exams with beer stains on them?

grading sucks, i tell you what. first, there's the whole multiple choice thing: easy to grade, but hard to write because students always complain that the question and/or answers were ambiguous and couldn't answer (b) also be right? i have, however, solved that problem by giving them choice in which questions they answer: i wrote 22 questions, they answer 20, leaving out 2 of their choice. that way, if they complain about a question's wording, i can just say "you didn't have to answer that one," which pretty well shuts them up.

but then there's the essay questions, which are always a bitch. first of all, you have to read student handwriting. some students, to be sure, surprise you with writing that looks almost typewritten, and god bless them for that, but there's always more who are clearly trying to write with their wrong hand, or are missing their thumbs or something, because that couldn't really say "Smith's experiment attempted to bash patients with green often has neural," right? (actually, sometimes that *is* what it says. oy.) after you get through the handwriting, there are some easy answers to grade: the ones that are totally right, and in fact better than you'd answer them yourself, and the ones that are so wrong that a quick read-through is all that's needed to give them a 0 and move on.

then, there's the hard ones. the answers that have gotten on the right train to philadelphia, but instead of ending up at Penn, have gotten lost and are wandering in the italian market, sampling cheeses and buying exotic cuts of meat. these answers require actual good comments, not just "great answer!" or "please see me, you are in danger of failing." these answers mention some of the right words, but fail to lucidly combine them into thoughts that actually answer the question. definitions are missing crucial parts, experiment summaries are so vague or circumlocutory i can't tell what the student actually means, and conclusions are drawn without any hint of the logic that is behind them.

for these answers, if you just give them a grade, or even a grade with a couple of shorthand comments ("need more detail here!" "yes, but WHY?") the student invariably comes to office hours to complain, and point out the convoluted, barely intelligle sentece that they claim explains it all. so the comments have to be specific. very very specific: this is wrong because you have mis-defined ipsilateral and contralateral, have failed to compare the patient data to the control subject data (which is needed because...), have included a graph from an entirely different experiment, and have forgotten to answer part (c) entirely. of course, all this takes time, which is why I'M STILL FUCKING GRADING. or rather, not grading and instead complaining about it here.

and after all the heartache of giving that very earnest non-traditionally aged student yet ANOTHER bad score even though she is clearly trying her best, after all the late nights grading while wishing you were watching "desperate housewives", you know there's going to be 2 or 3 students who come in the week after you hand the exams back, begging for a higher grade, or the chance to do extra credit, or 4 hours a week private tutoring, because they just HAVE to get an A in this class to graduate/get into grad school/law school/med school. and then when you say sorry, you should have studied better and come to class more than once, they start in with the "my daddy is paying $39,000/year for me to go here, and i deserve an A!" and then i get carted off to jail for throwing them into the schuylkill.*

*schuylkill. pronounced SKOOkle. river that runs through philadelphia, dividing center city (downtown) from west philly (the hood). also the name of a highway, and a regatta.

this having to write detailed comments thing is made harder because it means you have to have an actual grading rubric for each question (which yeah, i know, i should probably have anyway) so you can take off points in a consistent way across students. but making up a rubric takes up more time! and i secretly (well, i guess not secretly, since i'm writing it here) suspect that if you graded a set of essays just by general feel ("mmm, that feels like a 7/10 answer") you'd end up with the same grades as you would if you graded the same group of essay using a detailed rubric. in fact, i would love to do that very experiment. i would much rather be doing that experiment on grading than doing the actual grading itself. feh.

royal family? common peasants? you decide.

18 February 2005 - 10:40 am

ha! is it mean of me to find this totally hilarious?

charles and camilla were all set to get hitched at windsor castle. no church, considering that they're both divorced, but hey, a nice palace is a suitable alternative. but because it's not a church, they needed to get a permit to have a civil ceremony there. no problem. except...

some 1994 marriage law in britain says that when a permit is granted to a room, then that room must remain available for civil ceremonies for the next 3 years. meaning that any joe schmoe and jane doe who wanted to get married at windsor castle in the next 3 years could have. can you imagine? getting married in the queen's favorite palace? SIGN ME UP!

also, the law says that the ceremony must be open to the public, meaning that the whole of england could have shown up to see the wedding. GOD FORBID THE COMMONERS SHOW UP!

so of course they've changed their plans. charles and camilla are now going to get married at the local windsor town hall (town hall! can you believe it?), in a $700 ceremony, in a hall that seats 120 people. ha! guess great-auntie marge is off the list!

the queen says that this is the death blow to the mystery of the monarchy. i'm thinking that she's forgotten about charles' desires to be camilla's tampon. perhaps we can all be thankful she's presumably in menopause.