I was the first to finish both of my philosophy finals. Language took roughly an hour. Science took a bit over an hour. On both of them, I had reached the point where I had answered everything as best I was going to. I could have sat there and fiddled with wording for a while, but there didn't seem to be much point. I thought of one thing on the Science final that might have made a slight difference, but that's it, and there's no guarantee I would have thought of that if I had just stayed sitting there. I think I did decently on both of them.
As for papers, I did not care for my Philosophy of Science paper at all. I thought it was shallow and poorly conceived. It got an A. I thought my Philosophy of Language paper was much better and stronger, and I had a lot of fun with it. It got an A-. Whether that means anything beyond "different people have different reactions to things," I don't really know.
Since I got done early anyway, I stopped over at Galaxy to check on my laptop. I may not need a new one after all. It was a problem with the cable to the monitor that was causing the flickering. The cable will cost $30, which isn't bad at all. As for the random dying, they defragged the hard disc and fixed something else that I can't remember, but it was all basic maintenance. I'm still happy to have almost every file on it backed up, now. And I may spend the money I'd been expecting to spend on a new laptop on getting this blasted desktop running decently. It is ridiculously slow and the sound has never worked right. At the very least it needs more RAM. A faster processor would be nice. That might be enough to straighten out the sound if the only problem is low memory.
Anyway, I have two sets of tests to grade, and I'll do those tomorrow morning, then submit grades and be done. I've got one mystery no-show on a final, though. A student who had been doing very well did not show up to take the final. This dropped her from an A to a D. I haven't submitted her grade yet, in the hopes that she'll contact me and we can work out an alternate time. I've also got an extra final that someone took with my 025 students. I presume he was in someone's 025 class, but no one has claimed him yet. Oh well.
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As part of the correspondence stats course I helped develop over the summer, I get various things to grade. I had one student e-mail me with a long harangue about what she didn't like about the course, and didn't even realize that she'd attached her first nonautomated assignment to the thing. Then she sent the long harangue again the next day. And the next. I stared at it, and decided to ignore it, still not noticing that she'd attached an assignment to this nearly incoherent rant. So...that assignment was late being graded, and my partner in crime, who did most of the actual work developing the course, is going to take over grading the rest of her work. I'm both relieved and annoyed by this development, but, given that I just cringe when I see her name on an e-mail heading, it's probably for the best.
FYI: the assignment was also nearly incoherent, but not incoherent enough that she didn't pass. You could tell that she thought big words were impressive but had no idea how to actually use them. If this were an English class, that would have had more of an impact on her grade. As it was, I docked a point here and there for the more egregious absurdities, and otherwise just hunted for the relevant information.
I have now reached the point of the semester where I'm ready for it to be over. It usually happens late October, but I was a bit too busy being ill to notice it then. One symptom of this is that I'm quite happy to see Christmas displays popping up like weeds in stores.
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Go to a philosophy club movie night when I haven't started the 8 pages of Chinese homework that's due the next day and when I haven't even looked over the characters on the quiz for the next day. Oh, and when midterms are due the next day and I have two classes for which I haven't calculated grades.
Amazingly, I got the homework three-quarters done by midnight last night, and finished the rest this morning. More amazingly, I managed to get all the characters into my head (mnemonic devices work!). And I got those last two classes' grades calculated and submitted despite having glitches on the web-site which allows me to access them (Math 108 is done through a computer program, and the company's site keeps track of the grades...but doesn't calculate them, as the programmers laughed when the grading schema was described to them).
I'm still not sure why I wasn't exhausted when I got up this morning, though. I came in under 6 hours of sleep. More than likely, I'll start to wilt as the day goes on, but for the moment I'm functioning. Well, I have a guess as to why I'm not as exhausted as I expected. I dug out an old tube of Flovent last night, which has theoretically been exhausted, according to the counter on it, but took a puff of it anyway...and my breathing is much better today than it has been for a while.
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We graded 143 exams this morning. It went more smoothly than in years past. I spent the last hour wandering around to see if I'd missed grading anyone's section, and assuming that I must have, only to find out that I was actually done. There really wasn't much of a curve this year. A's and B's were at the normal 90% and 80% cut-offs. We extended the C's a bit (to about 65%) and that pushed the D's down to about 55%. I do find it annoying that cut-offs for +/- were also specified, which means that I have to do 8 linear fits instead of 5. It would be 11, except that the A's and B's wound up cut-off at the usual percentage cut-off that I use anyway, so I can just use the same linear fit there. Oh, I had a student call while we were grading. He thought the 143 final was today at 3:00. Since I already had a 143 student taking the final with my stats class, I told him he could do the same. This would be more understandable had I written only the date on the board, but, no, I wrote "Monday" on the board.
And this has no bearing whatsoever on anything else, except maybe my philosophy paper if I were going into more depth, but I found a very nice discussion of problems with "original sin." Short version: it messes up free will and makes God look like an idiot.
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The homework question was, in essence, "Why wouldn't we generate a random number from 0-5 to simulate the number of boys in a family with 5 children?"
At least four students said that we should change this to 1-5, since there were 6 numbers and only 5 children!!! Ummmmm.... Yes. So, it's apparently impossible to have five girls in a family with five children. Not to mention that they missed the whole point, that it is less likely to have either all girls or all boys than to have a mixture of the two, so that this simulation would not match up with reality.
I also had one student think that the simulation was reality and the real world situation was...something else. Weird.
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