That’s sorted, then

I did nothing but grade, grade, grade all morning and early afternoon, and it looks like I’ve completed all the exams and papers for this semester, tallied up the grades, and even submitted everything to the registrar. I think. I worry that I’ve forgotten something, like the student who showed up to take the final this morning, and it was the first and only time I’ve seen them, including the fact that they never bothered to take the 3 previous exams or turn in any homework. They did manage to get 15% of the questions on the final correct, though, so I’ll use that to give them a letter grade.

If they could forget to attend class for 15 weeks, it makes me wonder what I might have forgotten to do now.

But otherwise, yay!

It is finals week, and I have a plan

Just as I get caught up in all my grading, I have to go and foul it up by giving more tests this week. But I have laid out my schedule, and will deal with it.

Today I give the genetics final. Immediately afterwards, I will retire to grade it, and I will not stop until they are all done. This is manageable. The exam is almost all math, and if they understand the concepts the answers will fall out easily, while if they don’t understand the concepts they’ll get wacky answers that are easily scored as wrong. That will get that course out of the way by tomorrow.

Tomorrow I have to proctor an exam for a colleague, but I do not have to grade it. I will use that time to compose the exam for my Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development course. This one will have lots of essay questions, I think.

Wednesday I give that exam, and then immediately turn around and lock myself in to finish grading it. I should be done by Thursday, and then I am FREE! Totally free!

Except that I’m committed to attending the Paradigm Symposium as a squinty-eyed skeptical observer this weekend. It should be weird. But once that’s done, I’m free for next week.

Except that I’m also going to have to do a review for Quarterly Reviews, which I am determined to get done promptly, as soon as I get the copy. So I’m going to whip through that one next week. I’ve also got to put together an extension for our HHMI grant. Then I’m free?

Except that the week after is when the family is flying off to South Korea for a week. OK, that’ll be fun and exciting, but it’s going to lock me down for a while. So after that…will I be free?

Nope. That’s when my new summer student and I start our summer research program, tracking melanocyte migration. It’ll be interesting, I hope, and might set the stage for a new line of research in my lab.

I’ve heard these rumors that college professors take the summers off and goof around for three months. It’s all a lie. The only true part of that story is that I’m on a 9 month appointment, so I won’t be getting paid. Yes! Finally, there’s a sense in which I am free!

I think I’m going to make it…

papers

It’s the last day of classes! I’m pretty sure I’ll be surviving this semester. Today is the due date for a huge pile of long, detailed lab reports, and I was dreading it — it was going to be like being run over by a dump truck. But I told my genetics students that I’d really, really appreciate it if they turned in their papers early, so that I could spread out the burden and get them all graded a little early. As inducement I also told them that I’d be able to give them more information about their final grade sooner, which is important to them since the final is optional, and they could use that knowledge to decide whether to sink time into studying for it.

And my students were awesome, and 3/4 of them got the papers to me early, so they sort of trickled in in manageable numbers over this last week, and I only went mildly nuts with grading, rather than majorly nuts tonight and this weekend when I tried to wrestle with them all at once.

(Any students who are turning them in on the due date: you’re also awesome, still. Getting the submissions spread out was my goal, and that mission has been accomplished.)

I also told them that not getting them all at once would allow me to take time off tonight to go to the movie tonight and see Captain America: Civil War. There are lots of nerds in science classes, so I think I tapped into their empathy.

The grind is not over. More papers coming in today, and final exams to grade next week, but for a change, today is not looking like the giant woodchipper on my calendar that it was earlier.

There are always those guys

nightvale

Jeffrey Cranor is a writer for the podcast, Welcome to Nightvale (I listen to it, it’s entertaining). And he gets messages.

I was just about to listen to Episode 3. If you continue to advertise “trigger warnings”, I will no longer listen to your podcast and will advise every person whom I know not to listen.

The clarification that the podcast contains a description of someone being assaulted is pathetic. Stop it or lose listeners.

[Read more…]

A word of warning about Hits & Mrs.

hitsmrs

I’ve read Karen Stollznow’s new book, Hits & Mrs.. It’s fiction, a novel about a skeptical detective. But I need to warn you about two things.

It’s got sex in it. Not the kind of explicit recounting of urological details you’d find in pornography, but the characters are boinking regularly, and enjoying it.

One thing it lacks is reverence for organized skepticism — many skeptics are portrayed as jerks. It’s almost as if the author’s insider familiarity with the skepticism movement has disillusioned her.

Gosh. I imagine every one who reads this site is now horrified and is going to avoid the book.

It’s like the author read my mind

uonfire

Or maybe it’s just that the situation is so obvious. This past weekend, I gave a talk in Minneapolis about how messed up higher education in general was becoming, and specifically about the problems facing science education. And then this morning I run across an article from a couple of years ago that basically says many of the same things. I should have just phoned in How Higher Education in the US Was Destroyed in 5 Basic Steps and spared myself all that thinking and planning and preparing stuff.

Here are the 5 steps in the article:

Step I: Defund public higher education.
Step II: Deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s).
Step III: Move in a managerial/administrative class that takes over governance of the university.
Step IV: Move in corporate culture and corporate money.
Step V: Destroy the students.

Dang. I talked about all of those things. Now you can just read the article to get the gist of my discussion.

World’s most popular spot for racists, creationists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, and Christians

cesspool

You know what I like about Twitter? Everyone lets it all hang out. It’s humanity without the filters, where people say precisely what’s on their minds without trying to second-guess whether it might offend someone. And it reveals the ugly truth: a lot of people actually are world-class assholes.

Take the announcement that Harriet Tubman will be honored on the $20 bill. As expected, some people on Twitter are raging over it. Cynics, rejoice: the ugliness of humanity is on naked display in one easily accessible place. I mean, look at this:

That’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t normally see outside of Twitter, or a Ku Klux Klan rally, or Thanksgiving with your relatives, or some such similar venue outside the bounds of civilized society.

Here’s another example. I am not a sports fan, but even I have heard of Curt Schilling, but not because of baseball — it’s because he’s an astonishingly ignorant jerk on Twitter. He’s a creationist, he’s a homophobe, he’s simply a disgraceful human being. Without Twitter, though, people might still think of him as a guy who was really skilled at playing with a ball and stick. But no, he happily exposed the rotting, maggot-filled black pudding that constitutes his brain to everyone, and now ESPN has fired him. ESPN has never been at all coherent on their policies on these things — they suspend contributors over far more trivial offenses than Curt Schilling routinely committed — but he made some sneering transphobic comment about bathrooms that finally was enough, and the just plain fired him. About time.

So he wasn’t humane enough for a sports network, but you’ll be pleased to know that he still has his Twitter account, where he’s currently representing Christianity and weeping over his martyrdom. Twitter has no expectations of decorum or intelligence.