Day 165

Wow.  Today was simply all over the place.


I got up and made my lunch.  This week when I cooked my chicken for my salad I cooked it with some onion and mexian spice.  And it tastes amazing.  So onion needs to become a regular occurrence.


I got to my office around...9:30 I think.  And I did some grading.  That was pretty depressing.  The average test score was a 68.  The highest was an 88.  So.... I think I'm going to be offering a chance to earn bonus points.  I think I'm going to assign the extra credit tomorrow and then give them a week to work on it.  I really  hope they do it.  About a third of the class did it last time.  I really want more of them to do it this time.  I doubt that any of them will be happy with their exam scores.  Even though small handful who got in the 80s I'm sure were hoping for higher with the amount of studying (I hope) they did.  So we'll see.


After I finished grading the exams Timbo came to my office and we studied stats.  That was a thrilling experience, for certain.  I felt decently prepared for the exam.  I knew all the basic concepts and how to do the problems, so I thought I should be good.  I then went to go work out.  That went pretty well.  My shoulder is still bothering me when I do any sort of lifting from a lowered to raised position.  So I had to get a little creative.


When I got back I did some more studying.   Woo.  Hoo.


Then...the exam.  Oh my word.  The first problem wasn't a huge deal.  Then...the second was pretty hard.  It took me a long time and I know I didn't do it correctly.  I got to the third problem and was 100% clueless.  So I wrote an equation down that was helpful only if I had information that wasn't provided...but that's the way I knew to solve for the thing in question.  Then we moved onto a few proofs.  There was one that involved finding the partial derivative of a general function with respect to both variables.  And...then we moved onto a problem that (I think) used the Poisson distribution, but I had no idea what arguments to use.  So I looked at the table she gave us...matched some numbers on the table with numbers in the problem... and hoped for the best!  On the last problem I wrote some stuff down that got me absolutely no where.  It was basically the same thing as what I had in the beginning except that I used Y's instead of X's.  I didn't have a clue what I was doing.  I was feeling pretty down afterwards.  When I was out of things to write down I turned it in and she asked if I had answered every question.  I said "Well... I have something written down for everything."  I was not in a good mood after the exam.  I tried to think of how I could have studied harder or prepared better.  And I couldn't come up with anything.


So when I got back I had my little mope-fest for a while.  Then I ate some celery.  A little after 6 Kathryn called me.  She, Erica, Dustin, and Jacob were all going to Thai Smile for dinner and wanted to see if I would like to join.  I did.  It was at this point that they informed me that no only was everyone at least as clueless as I was (including the smartest guy in our class), but that she decided to give us the exam to retake as a take home exam.  I was more than over-joyed.  So that made my day way better.  And Thai Smile was very good.


After dinner I did some lesson planning.  I'm trying really hard to make the lesson as applicable and understandable as possible. We'll see how it goes....


But for now it's bed time.  Good night!