ME, that’s who. I still have to upload these last few grades to the official site, but my computer is acting up, as always, so I’m going to have to walk in to my office and do it there. But to celebrate, anyway, I took off to fly my gadget. This is a quick buzz around the Morris Wetlands management district offices. Just because it’s empty and open land, and it’s very quiet (the whole town is quiet right now — students have gone home for the break).

This thing is fun, and the mechanics of flying it are easy, but just a word of warning to anyone who gets one: it takes practice. Lots of practice. Right now I can do all the basics of getting it to go up and forward and backwards and left and right, but I tell you, when it’s a kilometer off in the distance and you’ve lost track of its orientation and your depth perception is off so you think everything is fine but the camera is telling you you’re flying straight towards a tree, it’s a little nerve wracking.

Also, it’s really cold out there, around -15 to -20° C, and you’re actually kind of relieved that the battery is only good for about a 20 minute flight, because you’re fingers are freezing off. Note also it’s not the best day for photography: hazy and gray, flying over a world that’s mostly white. But that’s Minnesota.

This is the Transsiberian Railway.

It stretches across the whole of Russia, cutting through places with incredibly cold, barren reputations. It’s the middle of winter.

Our crazy brave daughter Skatje is off to that place today. She’s going to spend three weeks visiting St Petersburg and Moscow, and then boarding that train and crossing Siberia, in winter, from Moscow to Vladivostok. Why? She loves Russian culture and the Russian language, and she wants to learn more and see more, and this is her opportunity. So she just decided to go.

Now, while I’m quite proud as a father to have a child who has grown to be so fearless and confident, her parents are going to be a bit anxious for the next few weeks. So, to any Russian readers out there: if by some slender chance, you’ve both read this mention and also encounter an enthusiastic and adventurous American woman on a journey across your country, say hello and remember that she’s there as a friend. And we need more friends around the world.

I am getting there!

1. X Grade lab final (50)
2. X Grade fourth lecture exam (50)
3. X Grade final lab reports (25)
4.   Serve students pancakes at Midnight Breakfast
5.   Grade term papers (9)
6.   Write final exam
7.   Grade final exam (45)
8.   PARTY HARD

I am enervated and enfeebled, my eyes are bleeding, and I’m currently prone to fits of vomiting, but I got through all the current paperwork for my cell biology course. Tonight I’m on the 11:00-12:30 shift of our UMM tradition of serving pancakes to the students the night before finals week begins.

Tomorrow will be spent in my office composing a final exam and dealing with distraught students who have just learned what their grade is. I give the final exam on Wednesday, and only 45 students are likely to take it — it’s optional, and I’ve already informed the five students who have a locked-in A in the class that they shouldn’t bother to show up.

Yeah, 10% are getting As. I’m such an easy grader.

Oh, where it says “PARTY HARD“? I think that’s going to involve going to the midnight showing of the new Star Wars movie, because I’m such a nerd, and optimism is briefly winning out over cynicism…but I will walk into that theater with very low expectations.

Here I am, deep in the grading mines, and my laptop has decided to expire on me, with intermittent periods of constant crashing interspersed with lulling sessions in which all is working smoothly. I never know when it’s going to behave itself or throw little electronic temper tantrums, the screen going black and then rebooting itself repeatedly.

Grades are all backed up on multiple media, of course, so nothing is lost, but updating those grades has become unreliable, and I’ve also lost several things I was writing to laptop hissy-fits. So I’m reduced to the iPad, which is simply not as good for long writing sessions. Updates here might get sporadic and weird.

The only real solution is that Mary is getting me this for Christmas: Apple MacBook Pro 15.4-Inch Laptop with Retina Display and Force Touch – Intel Quad-Core i7 2.8GHz, 1TB Flash Storage, 16GB DDR3 Memory, AMD Radeon R9 M370X Graphics with 2GB Memory. Isn’t she nice? Unfortunately, there goes all the slack in our budget for the next few years, and also I’m going to have to wait a week to get it.

I’m warning you, I might just lose my mind for a while. How do people function without a big slab of splendid silicon supplementing their existence?

Tomorrow is the last day of the semester. I’m giving an exam, lab reports are due, as are term papers in another class. I’m giving my final exam on Wednesday. I’m done literally teaching until January, but I can’t figure out whether I’m on the easy slide through, or whether I’m about to smack into a wall very hard.

Cynic that I am, I’m guessing the latter.

Oh, boy: our twice-a-year ritual, in which we hand out forms in our classes and let our students grade the faculty. And then, in another yearly ritual every fall, the faculty will gather and peer intensely at the numbers, presented with at least three significant digits, and we will see graphs and charts and over-interpreted analyses of these gnomic parameters.

Unfortunately, they probably aren’t as useful as administrators would like to imagine.

Michele Pellizzari, an economics professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, has a more serious claim: that course evaluations may in fact measure, and thus motivate, the opposite of good teaching.

His experiment took place with students at the Bocconi University Department of Economics in Milan, Italy. There, students are given a cognitive test on entry, which establishes their basic aptitude, and they are randomly assigned to professors.

The paper compared the student evaluations of a particular professor to another measure of teacher quality: how those students performed in a subsequent course. In other words, if I have Dr. Muccio in Microeconomics I, what’s my grade next year in Macroeconomics II?

Here’s what he found. The better the professors were, as measured by their students’ grades in later classes, the lower their ratings from students.

“If you make your students do well in their academic career, you get worse evaluations from your students,” Pellizzari said. Students, by and large, don’t enjoy learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some good.

I also have some reservations about this study, though. What if the Macroeconomics II professor simply shares some biases with the Macroeconomics I professor, and is an easy grader? I wouldn’t want my teaching to be evaluated by how well students do in another professor’s course. That’s as scary as the arbitrary roller-coaster of student evaluations. I’ve had a few students openly downgrade me, for instance, because they know I’m an atheist, and they love Jesus so much.

But otherwise, yes, this jibes well with our general assumptions about the process: grade leniently, give light amounts of work, and students will tend to rate you highly. (They’ll also rate you highly if you’re inspiring and enthusiastic and entertaining, too, so it’s not all a drive to slackerdom).

If you must know, my student evaluations are fine — not the highest at my university, but not grounds for concern (oh, yeah, another thing about faculty assessment of these things: apparently, we’re all supposed to be above average, which simply doesn’t work). I generally ignore the numeric scores, which are mostly pointless noise, but the written comments are often actually informative and let me know what aspects of the course I should change next time I teach it.

Also, I had my students evaluate me on Monday, so I’m saying all this after they’ve had an opportunity to hack at me a bit.

I am 100% done with my grading. My desk is clear. It shines so…I can see a glint of light reflected off the tears in my eyes. Perhaps I will dance, or sing, or raise my arms and eyes to the heavens and shout, “Hallelujah!”

I am totally caught up for the first time this semester.

Do not tell me that next week I’m giving a lab final, an in-class exam, and that I will be getting nine major term papers turned in. No, that’s not happening. If I deny it enough, they’ll all go away, right?