Tuesday, December 17, 2013

"Psychedelic Shots, Neanderthals, and Discretion," from Dr. Magnus.

When the boredom of grading just begins to overwhelm my already weary mind, I am grateful that I typically run across something that breaks up the monotony.

Consider this paragraph, which is quite unprofessional but so very, very fascinating: "I don't know if I can validate this hamster wheel model. At this point my brain is quite fried. So, I will just illustrate some neato-groovy, psychedelic shots from the software I used."

My immediate thoughts were that said student might have been drinking shots or taking some interesting drug during the preparation of this submission. However, upon further reflection my conclusion is that his mind is not fried due to excessive intake of libation or pharmaceuticals, but simply a side effect of procrastination that lead to working too late into the night.

Next, consider this line taken from a senior level report dealing with an initial idea for the design of a gerbil impact attenuation device: "It was a very crude and caveman like idea but it served the purpose." Oh my, I thought I was the only one that thought some of my students behaved a wee bit Neanderthal! I, too, have been guilty of ONCE writing a similar sentence in a report, but it was my FIRST technical report, not my 25th.

Are any of you familiar with CAD as an acronym for computer-aided design? It appears that some of my students think CAD is a verb, as in, "The first task was to CAD up the design." I assume that CAD up means to use CAD software to create a model. Or, it could be a euphemism for something I do not want to know about. Again, I strongly suspect brain exhaustion in this case because the rest of this submission was done quite well.

I am always amused by why my students think are "discrete" attempts to criticize test problems. I saw several of these today, and it reminds me of a student who wrote on his hamster anatomy assignment that he refused to work one of the problems because, and I quote, "It is stupid." It will be interesting to see how that young person fairs in the world outside the ivory towers.

Am I alone, drowning in a morass of papers -- papers that one minute fill me with hope for the future and the next minute fill me with fears of intellectual apocalypse? Have I stared too long into the abyss we call final grades and lost my mind?

I shall stop my rambling commentary before someone suspects my iced tea is spiked (it is not!). I will, however, ask that my Fellow Miserarians share in the comments any items that have made them laugh (or bang their head against a wall) while grading this year.

23 comments:

  1. "I found this subject interesting because. . ." Not ubiquitous, but more common than I'd like in papers that are supposed to be condensed versions of genres aimed at a professional audience. Yes, we have discussed audience, and placing at least an implicit "why should you [a professional in the field]/we [as professionals] care about this?" statement toward the beginning of the introduction, but some of them seem to have real trouble with the idea that professional academic writing (and most writing, period) is all about the reader (not the writer).

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  2. One of my students wrote about fishermen who lack courtesy, only he spelled it "curtsies," which produced the adorable mental image of men in hip-waders curtseying to one another, and then the same student concluded his paper by wondering what happens when a contest ends in a "drawl."

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  3. I tend to get a lot of "wallah," rather than "voila!"

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  4. Orangutans will develop affectations from climate change

    I think it means they will be affected, but I do like the notion of them all gesturing camply and wearing monocles...

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  5. "Throughout human history...."

    In response to an essay prompt about a phenomena that has only been happening over the past couple decades.

    Variants include: "Since the beginning of time..." "People have debated XYZ for centuries..."

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    Replies
    1. I got 18 of these intros on an essay about social media.

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  6. Isn't the famous one, "In society today…"

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    Replies
    1. Yes, and it usually goes, "Guns are a big issue in society today."

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  7. my student used the term "orgasm" when she meant to write "organism" twice.

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    1. Orgasms are a big issue in society today. People have debated orgasms for centuries. Orgasms first made themselves known to me when... well, you know... WALLAH!

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    2. From SNL a long time ago: "Man first discovered the orgasm around the time of the Tutankhamen Dynasty. Women discovered them around 1970."

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    3. From SNL a long time ago: "Man first discovered the orgasm around the time of the Tutankhamen Dynasty. Women discovered them around 1970."

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    4. From an essay last year: "climate change is a problem because many orgasms will go extinct"

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    5. "Pubic policy" will pass through a spell check, no problem. Even when you are writing about "public policy". In a resume....

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  8. I learned that one line of evidence in support of plate tectonics as a theory includes the interesting factoid, "Glaciers had markings on them from the continents moving."

    Try to visualize how this might work.

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  9. Two of the Ancient Greek architectural orders are Doris and Ironic.

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  10. I don't know if it's a trope from a local high school or not, but I've had students start essays like this recently: "Racism first made itself known to me when..." and "Guns first made themselves known to me..."

    Because, after all, in analytic writing, the "me" is what we're really interested in.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, the "me" is always the most important part of anything today.

      That's because, "It's got electrolytes."

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    2. But does it have what plants crave?

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  11. You essay people have all the fun. I have to content myself with:

    I ask for the potential function and you give me--a vector?

    This region is on the left half-plane, and you give me a centroid with a positive x coordinate?

    "I know this can't be right, I must have done something wrong somewhere."

    They differentiate 1/x and find... log x.

    I know, it's not funny, it's technical. But believe me, it's at the same level.



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    Replies
    1. How about an absolute SI temperature that is a negative number -- as in -300 K?

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    2. Sure. Population inversion. Negative absolute temperatures are, oddly enough, hotter than infinite temperature, but if you think of temperature as the partial derivative of energy with respect to entropy it makes sense.

      Your student wasn't talking about that? Never mind then....

      What I've been seeing a lot of lately is "solving" an "equation" that has no equals sign in it. A young man spent three hours in the tutor room today trying to figure out how to cancel something from the numerator and denominator of a fraction--he never did get it.

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  12. Three differences between A and B is A has a thing B doesn't have, B doesn't have any things at all.

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