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November 21, 2005
Still Autumn in New York!
Autumn is hanging on - I blogged about this at the first of the month and it's still true. No one in shorts today, but very few people in gloves and hats. We'll take it. [Update: I just saw someone in shorts, nine minutes after posting.]
On the other hand, I'm in that annual state of annoyance brought on by students who leave a week early for Thanksgiving. We give them Wednesday off, so they only have to miss one iteration of classes by skipping the whole week. IF we had classes on Wednesday skipping the week would mean missing a Monday AND a Wednesday class, and perhaps the calculation would be different. I'm willing to be that we'd have an additional 20% in attendence on Monday and Tuesday. My class today was at about 60% strength, so I worked hard to set up the final exam themes.
When I was teaching discussion sections in grad school it used to drive the Renaissance specialist NUTS that the Wednesday before Thanksgiving seemed to fall every year on (1) one of his lectures and (2) the Northern Renaissance day (Emory did the departmental-parade of lecturing faculty for a room of 250 students followed by weekly discussion sections approach to Art 101 and 102, so each faculty member got about 6 lectures more or less in period or area of interest). He ALWAYS insisted that we had to have something covered in that lecture for a major section on the final exam, like the key slide in a 20 point essay question. I understand the way he felt now.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at November 21, 2005 10:43 AM