Friday, February 25, 2011

BPB is uncommonly snark-free

I had to take a break from the snark, but I'm back - read that to mean, "It's midterms! Ahhhhhhh! I need to unload!" Unfortunately... or fortunately, depending on how you look at it... I have great students this term.

There is one who conveniently had walking pneumonia for a month, so her dissection teammates had to do the lion's share of the work for 3 weeks. Oh, and the one who regularly vomits because she can't handle cadaveric dissection. But she gargles with mouthwash after and brings her own barf baggies and never backs down, so it's all cool.

I'm wondering if it's one of those extraordinarily rare nexuses of good students that I've heard tell of from silverbacks. Or if it's the fact that this is the first upper division course I've taught and the seniors just have the sophomores beat. Or if I'm being punked. Regardless, I have no snark at the moment. But, the midterm is this weekend. I may LOTS of it come Monday...

7 comments:

  1. Thanks Ben! Good to see you're still here :)

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  2. My mom told me never to go to parties where throwing up was part of what goes on. Didn't Charles Darwin also have this problem in this class, which is why he gave up trying to become a physician and instead signed up as a ship's naturalist?

    I'm glad you have good students for a change, Beth. I thought I did too, this semester, but...I just discovered that my grad student who is writing his thesis has screwed it up, mightily.

    Seeing as we were getting ready to turn his thesis into a paper and publish it in a refereed journal, with my name listed after his (since the whole thing was my idea in the first place and I have extensively helped him every step of the way), I decided to check the references in the main table, one by one. Ordinarily this would be micromanagement. I'm glad I did it, because I found that the whole thesis unraveled. All the data need to be re-evaluated and referenced (carefully, this time), missing data need to be included, and all analysis and plots need to be redone. I guess it beats getting torpedoed during his defense, or worse, letting this get into print.

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  3. P.S. Sorry, my hands are shaky. I promise it isn't the D.T.s.

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  4. Hi, Beth. Welcome back. We missed you, but I agree, when you have a good bunch (or what seems like one) it's harder to come up with something for CM.

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  5. 'Sokay, BPB, Frod's taking up your slack.

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  6. Glad to see you back, Beth. I won't wish that your semester gets worse, but it's good to see a post from you -- and the young lady who needs airsickness bags to get through your class is a pretty good example of misery of the non-snowflakey kind. This education business can be hard on all involved (and I very much hope she succeeds in whatever career she's that determined to be prepared for; she sounds pretty impressive).

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