Life

December 18th, 2007, 9:55 pm PST by Greg

Well, the semester is winding down for me. All of my marks are in and approved. [Angelina: your mark is in.] Relatively few students are complaining about their marks. There are a few with inflated senses of their accomplishments, but it’s pretty quiet.

I have a few more sets of grades to approve, and a few last meetings, but it’s all pretty much over.

I had a discipline hearing today. I was on the board; it wasn’t a CMPT case. It was a serious case that they have been trying to schedule the hearing since May. The end result was the harshest I have seen: upheld department’s Fs, retroactive removal of degree, student must surrender parchment, 9 semester suspension, permanent notation on transcript. This was considered somewhat lenient.

Kat should be hitting YVR tomorrow at about 21:00, so that’s good.

After that, it’s all food and drink until the new year.

Edit: On the subject of complaining about marks… What goes on in a student’s mind to get 74.6%, and then ask if 75% is the cutoff for the next letter grade, and shouldn’t that be rounded up? Do students really think some spreadsheet has a roundoff error just for them? If I had wanted the cutoff at 74.5%, that’s where I would have put it. There are 180 students, so some of them are going to be close to boundaries no matter what I do.

Ack!

December 6th, 2007, 11:31 pm PST by Greg

People wonder why I have occasional Scroogey tendencies around this time of year.

I’m just sitting here watching TV as I work. I think this quote from a commercial I just saw sums it up pretty well:

Now in stores: Christmas with Boney M!

Really? The world needs this? The newly remastered version of this no less?

I can’t be the only one that thinks we might have lost our way here.

And not to rag on anybody’s religion, but I don’t want to hear any story that ends with “Now where’d that body get off to? Gaw-lee, that fella in the cave says it dun-gone to heaven.” There’s less nutty stuff later on, but are you really going to take the word of some guy hanging out alone in a cave where they chuck dead bodies?