I know exactly how these guys feel.
One lab today, and it’s an easy one. The stack of grading on my desk is less than half an inch thick. I may make it after all.
Also, the new Avengers movie is opening at the theater in town tonight. I should go, since there won’t be any lines while all the students are holed up and studying for finals, right?
Oh, do tell! Anything particularly interesting?
I enjoyed the movie. Take a break and enjoy it.
I thought it wasn’t supposed to open until tomorrow?
There’s a really good shwarma place near my office that says their business ticked up after the first Avengers movie came out.
Probably because I keep going there. It’s really good shwarma.
This is the first time I’ve seen this picture. Are the red and yellow bottles filled with ketchup and mustard? Is this how you eat shawarma in USA? You don’t use amba or tahina? Do you at least use zhug?
One of the downsides of the quarter system is that we are at mid-quarter at the moment. On the other hand, I don’t have to start teaching again until mid-September.
No, nothing interesting. I look at their fly stocks and make sure they’ve managed to keep them healthy and alive all semester, and then I tell the students to put things away and clean up. We are all done with our crosses.
Meanwhile, the University of Florida has already begun its commencements.
Why do Northerners move so slow?
Being near the equator rots your brains.
</snark>The reviews I’ve heard for it are pretty good. I’ve got tickets for saturday afternoon to see it.
We are just at the turn; going into week 5 of 10. My stack is 4 times as tall as yours, and there are more stacks to come. Plus there is all the un-stackable stuff that arrives via the learning management system (quizzes to be “moderated” and discussion questions to be answered. etc.)
I am grading the first midterms for two classes. My STEM majors — mostly computer scientists and EEs this term, but who are supposed to be completing Calc IV concurrently with Physics III — are killing me. More than half the class made no attempt at the problem that was identical to the first quiz. Which problem I had them work out on the board in recitation, and for which I posted an annotated solution on-line (annotations which included the advice “You may be asked to carry out a similar derivation on an exam.”). All of this I did because a delegation of students came to my office hours to complain that “…the exam problems don’t look like the problems you do in class!”.
None of the students in that group — who claimed to have been speaking for the majority of the class — attempted the problem.
I’ll retire to bedlam.
I suspect, midnite Thursday, to open technically on Friday, but scooping up all the eagerbeavers (you know, those who demand being able to say, “I saw it first!!!!”), who operate as though Friday only starts AFTER sleeping Thursday night.
[that’s always bugged ME about our time system: _Dawn_ should be the zero point of a new day. When people say a show will be on “Xday at 2 am”, I always am baffled, whether the X refers to the ‘virtual’ day (the daytime before) or the ‘technical’ day (daytime after).] I know the original intent was to change the day at midnight while everyone’s asleep, but we don’t live that way anymore. [and Dawn should be the time we set clocks to 6am, every day. to eliminate the DST confusion]
DONE WITH THE LAB. IT IS ALL CLEAN AND SHINY, AND THE FLIES ARE ALL DEAD.
My stack is half the size it was earlier. Will be reduced to nothing by the morning.
Now I just have to write the final exam, which will be fun. This is an optional cumulative final. I tell the students that 70 points will be on basic stuff you damn well better know, having taken genetics; 20 points will require a little logic to sort out; and the last 10 points, I take off the mask, go full Satan, and contrive a tricky wicked problem that I expect an A student to master.
Someone needs to redo this song for us, replacing “humans” with “flies”.
Your grading comes in “stacks”? How many megabytes is that?
Alexander Z @ 5:
I’ve never seen amba (had to google it), but it sounds delicious! Tahini is in every restaurant here with roots in the eastern Mediterranean. But I live in a major Northeastern US city that has a high population of immigrants (in general, and from the eastern Med in particular), who make authentic dishes of their respective cuisines.
Which doesn’t excuse whatever they were doing at the end of Avengers, since that takes place in NYC, which has plenty of Middle Eastern restaurants.
We’ve found that when we want to see a film on its opening weekend, the smart time to go is the first showing on Sunday morning. That’s the time that most of the Texas rubes are in church and the teenagers who prefer to go to the movies at night are fast asleep.
I of course got to see the movie last Sunday, (I waited a couple of days) since for once we in the antipodes got to see it first. I must admit, drive in with a double feature of Guardians of the Galaxy was a fun way to spend a Sunday night.
Wait? You don’t have to have your exam in over a month before the exams are given? *sigh*
frog #16
Thanks for the explanation!