(no subject)

I took much ribbing from my family on the weekend once they learned that I hadn't begun packing. This led to even more teasing about my general tendency towards procrastination, accompanied by suggestions that I was probably going to hold off on the packing until midnight of the 30th. (Sadly, their concerns aren't entirely misplaced; I do have a longstanding habit of putting things off. At my grade eight graduation, one of our teachers said a few lines about each of us as we went up to collect our diplomas. When I went up, he did not comment on my excellent performance on the Gauss math contest or my fantastic French skills. Instead, he noted that I was the envy of my classmates because of my miraculous ability to start assignments five minutes before they were due and still get an A.) In order to prove my family wrong (and because I suspect they may have a point), I began packing yesterday. Of course, technically I don't have an apartment yet, so I may be packing the boxes just to leave them on the side of the road while Roommate and I check into the Sheraton.

(no subject)

I'm marking the deferred exam of one poor student who apparently misread the question. On the one hand, I feel sorry for her, because I've been there...once...and I know how frustrating that is. On the other hand, she did a pretty lousy job of answering the part she did read correctly, so that tempers my sympathy quite a bit. Either way, she fails the question.

When I first starated marking, I perceived it through the lens of my own undergraduate experience. When I was an undergrad, any mark less than an A on anything (except for first year calculus tests) was a source of serious disappointment to me. (On calculus tests, I was ecstatic about a B-. I was even more ecstatic when I got a B+ in the course, a feat that required either a 90% on an exam where I don't think I answered 90% of the questions, or some serious mark boosting for the class.) As a result, I often felt horribly guilty about giving anyone a mark below an 80, unless they really, unclearly, undeniably deserved it. As in, their answer, assuming there was one, bore no resemblance to the material covered in class, and only a passing resemblance to the English language. It took a while for me to realize that for many students, a B or C is a perfectly respectable mark. The past three years has mostly cured me of this attitude, because I've seen the stuff that some students will try to pass in. Now, while I still feel slightly sorry for the students who write apologetic comments rather than answers on their exams, I feel no guilt in handing out low marks. They're almost always well-earned.