Greg and Kat's blog

In week 2 of the semester, I started blogging for CMPT 376. Since then, I have made 37 posts with an average of 284 words per post (not counting this post).

If I had blogged thrice-weekly during that time, there should have been 36 posts. Somehow an extra post slipped in there. The offender seems to be a throwaway post about gaining back an hour of my jetlag.

I managed to more-or-less keep the Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule too, but certainly wasn’t too anal about a little drifting:

Posts by day of week: MWF schedule kind of worked.

I also allowed Ted to mock me during lectures. I have clearly earned my full 5% class participation marks and will appeal anything less. As the one who handles mark appeals, I’m pretty sure I will emerge victorious.

That makes my final mark in the course… 5%. Hrm. Clearly I haven’t taken the most efficient route to passing the course. I guess it’s time to do what every student who is about to fail miserably does right before the final: email the instructor and ask if the course is going to be curved. (If you thought the thing after the colon in that sentence was going to be “study”, shame on you.)

Certainly the most surprising thing for me from the course is how really easy the daily writing exercises (a.k.a. blog posts) were. It turns out that I actually think three things a week. Writing close to 300 words about each one didn’t feel like work at all.

I am firmly convinced that writing is like any form of physical activity: the more you do it, the easier it gets. The dailies were a good way to exercise the writing muscle.

So, if I ever end up teaching 376, I will certainly keep the daily writing. I probably wouldn’t do as much free-writing as Ted did, not because I don’t see the value, but doing it in lecture time just isn’t my style. I would probably keep the assignment structure more-or-less the same as well. The thing that would scare me about the course is that, even having seen Ted give most of his lectures, I have no idea what I’d say in 150 minutes of lecture per week.

Oh well, let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.

Edit: I thought it might be worth sharing the email I sent to Ted as promised above:

Dear Prof Dr Kirkpetrik,

im a student in ur COMP 376 class. i want 2 know if the class is going to be on curved grading or regular? i am worry about my mark, so i want to know what happens.

Maybe there’s a little hyperbole there, but down around the bottom of a first year class, that’s not totally out of range. As you can see, it’s not just ESL issues, but total lack of attention to detail: prof’s name and course number are incorrect. Also note that the form of the question indicates a level of understanding which means an honest answer to the question (e.g. “not curved”) will not help the student in any way.