The midterm seemed to go quite well today...A number of people finished early, while some took the entire time; and it looks as if the scores will be generally quite high, too. I underestimated my flock. I gave them two questions that I really had no idea how they'd do on: I defined for them what it meant for a matrix to be nilpotent and idempotent, and asked them to come up with a nontrivial example of each. It's easy as sluts if you know what you're doing. I didn't know if my students knew what they were doing. It seems they generally do. Which is a nice surprise. They've been learning!
Do you know what's much more boring than taking an exam? Watching other people take an exam. I wound up doodling again...I came up with a little something called 'Octopus Jesus Feeds a Duck', but I was too lazy to go all the way up two flights of stairs to scan it for you. I don't know why, but I just can't get enough of octopi lately; I drew a big one on the chalkboard in my office this afternoon before I left, as a little surprise for my office-mate Monday morning. This octopus bears a message:
Octopi are just so darn cute!
Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, decimated by the cruel hat trade.
There's a little story I like to tell whenever test-time rolls around...My second year as an undergrad, as I was still foolishly in physics, I had a classical mechanics course, and in this course we had a midterm. The professor--I can't recall if this was before or after we took the exam--explained to us his strategy for grading exams. He would gather them all up in a big envelope and take them home, and stash them in his study to fester a while. He would wait a few days, until he felt that test-grading magic flowing through him. Then he would have a nice dinner, go up to his study, whip out a bottle of bourbon, and start drinking continuously until the exams were all graded. If one had done well, one wanted to be on the top of the pile; if one had done poorly, one hoped to be on the bottom.
Not that I advocate any such thing, you understand. Nor would I ever consider the merest notion of pondering a dream of employing any such strategy myself. The very idea! I mean, pshaw. Get real, dude. Pay no attention to the bottle of sake behind the curtain. (Really, though, the sake is for something else. Seriously this time. It's the beer that's for the grading.)
Posted by aloysius at April 23, 2004 07:29 PM | TrackBack |