Spring Monday

Due to a Spanish exam that I was taking at 8AM, I found myself downtown before any traffic really started rolling. I also found myself seeing flowers on trees that were effectively bare on Friday.

I sat down with my breakfast of some Eastern Accent coffee and a BBQ pork bun and watched as the city slowly came into life. (The exam wasn't the nicest in the world; I thought that there was too much emphasis on topics not fully covered in the course of the semester by my section, but that kind of is the way things are when you have roughly a dozen different sections all ostensibly learning the same material...)

As a closing comment that isn't really associated with the photos, I think that the best thing to do with the final grades of all the sections is to normalize grades across different instructors. The most fair method would be to normalize each grade fraction (e.g., all homeworks, all tests, etc.) for each section, and apply a "correction factor" unique to each section to normalize the distributions of that particular section's grade fraction. That way, not only are different instructor's sections somehow marked along a similar distribution, but also each instructor's own sections are done so as well. That means that if an instructor has a much better time teaching the same topic a second or third time during the day - and that is reflected in the grades - then the earlier sections would not be penalized for the inability for the instructor to teach as facilely as in the latter section(s). Of course, another might argue that so long as the instructor did a "fair" job of teaching to the requirements and schedule of the class, then a test across all sections is fair. Oh, well. It's over now.

Yesterday was sunny and warm...

Almost record high temperatures in Ann Arbor yesterday. Definitely above average temperatures, at any account. I was half considering holding my discussion section outside (especially since they can hardly fit into the assigned room), but looking outside at all the frisbee-playing, hands-holding students, I decided that it would be a bad idea (plus, the ground was likely to be soddingly wet).

Since today is Wednesday, I am holding office hours for my students. However, as in previous weeks, no one is likely to show up. Of course, I will make use of the time by updating my blog and grading more homework. They have just turned in a larger, rather open-ended assignment, meaning that I will take a longer time in going through it.

Such is my life at the present time.