Everything!
8 March 2007 19:54![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enismirdalOK, so there has been stuff that's happened since my last update. Nothing earth-shattering, but stuff.
I have lots of undergraduate marking to do, which means money but also means frustration, as around half the scripts show some signs of being copied. I do, however, get some consolation from the amusing range of answers.
Question: Name four important commercial products from palms.
Answers included: Ice cream (sort of makes sense as it contains palm oil, but still), Bananas (unforgivable, as the next question starts, "Bananas, like palms, are monocots..."), Coffee, Rubber, Breadfruit, etc.
And then there was a question about the alternation of generations in lower plants. To illustrate, one person drew a moss. With a random flower growing out of the middle. WTF? I call it a moss-poppy...
On Monday, a random junkie wandered into the foyer of our student flats, as the door didn't shut properly. He was creepy and gross and was a bit weird at me. Luckily I ran into some lovely friends who made him go away, and then I phoned security and told them about him. And my lovely friends fixed the door so now it does shut. Yay!
We had no heating for about a week, but the steward found a switch somewhere in the boiler room or something, and flipped it, so now we have heating again. Not that we really need it. We have also had distinctly unreliable hot water for the last week, though seems to be getting better.
Today I demonstrated in a rather challenging practical which was rather fun really, even if the lecturer rather oversimplifies the peppered moth story. It was to do with a computer simulation of population genetics. Most of the undergrads tried very hard and were making pretty good progress. Unfortunately, there's this one weirdo undergraduate who makes me want to hide under the table these days.
I am wondering if this was the same guy who talked to the sci-fi society for nearly an hour about the artificial womb project, which altogether sounded like something out of a bad sci-fi novel, so I suppose was oddly fitting, except that he believed it. In any case, we know him to be fixated on wombs. He also has a strange approach to work. This was the guy who called at the lab the other day because he thought he deserved to get an A when he was given a C. The exercise was the kind where the marks scheme is very, very clear, so I am rather sceptical that a marker could have been two whole grades out...
This was also the guy who asked if he could hand in 2 sheets of copy-pasted printed material from the internet, rather than actually doing the exercise required of him on last week's field trip. Um. No. (Instead, what he appears to have done was copied out the material off the printouts he made, and then done the incredibly clever thing of still stapling his printed material to the back, so it isn't terribly hard to compare the two and notice the diagrams are basically traced...)
Today he just engaged me for about 20 minutes in a discussion about a question that all the other undergraduates I spoke to grasped straight away once it had been explained to them properly. I explained it about 3 different ways, with analogies, without analogies, with technical terms, without technical terms. It was like he wasn't listening to my explanation. Argh.
I try my hardest, but when there are 4 demonstrators and lecturer leading a practical with 100 people in, I can't afford to spend 20 minutes a circular argument with someone! *sigh*
I went back to the lab, fed the bees, and then sat at my computer and demolished 100g of Co-op chocolate. The stuff with the yummy little crispy rice bits in. My favourite. (20% off until 11th March, YAY!)
We also have a new flatmate. He's a Taiwanese gastroenterologist. Don't know much else about him yet except that he always locks his door when he leaves his room, even just to go to the loo. But he seems nice enough.
I have lots of undergraduate marking to do, which means money but also means frustration, as around half the scripts show some signs of being copied. I do, however, get some consolation from the amusing range of answers.
Question: Name four important commercial products from palms.
Answers included: Ice cream (sort of makes sense as it contains palm oil, but still), Bananas (unforgivable, as the next question starts, "Bananas, like palms, are monocots..."), Coffee, Rubber, Breadfruit, etc.
And then there was a question about the alternation of generations in lower plants. To illustrate, one person drew a moss. With a random flower growing out of the middle. WTF? I call it a moss-poppy...
On Monday, a random junkie wandered into the foyer of our student flats, as the door didn't shut properly. He was creepy and gross and was a bit weird at me. Luckily I ran into some lovely friends who made him go away, and then I phoned security and told them about him. And my lovely friends fixed the door so now it does shut. Yay!
We had no heating for about a week, but the steward found a switch somewhere in the boiler room or something, and flipped it, so now we have heating again. Not that we really need it. We have also had distinctly unreliable hot water for the last week, though seems to be getting better.
Today I demonstrated in a rather challenging practical which was rather fun really, even if the lecturer rather oversimplifies the peppered moth story. It was to do with a computer simulation of population genetics. Most of the undergrads tried very hard and were making pretty good progress. Unfortunately, there's this one weirdo undergraduate who makes me want to hide under the table these days.
I am wondering if this was the same guy who talked to the sci-fi society for nearly an hour about the artificial womb project, which altogether sounded like something out of a bad sci-fi novel, so I suppose was oddly fitting, except that he believed it. In any case, we know him to be fixated on wombs. He also has a strange approach to work. This was the guy who called at the lab the other day because he thought he deserved to get an A when he was given a C. The exercise was the kind where the marks scheme is very, very clear, so I am rather sceptical that a marker could have been two whole grades out...
This was also the guy who asked if he could hand in 2 sheets of copy-pasted printed material from the internet, rather than actually doing the exercise required of him on last week's field trip. Um. No. (Instead, what he appears to have done was copied out the material off the printouts he made, and then done the incredibly clever thing of still stapling his printed material to the back, so it isn't terribly hard to compare the two and notice the diagrams are basically traced...)
Today he just engaged me for about 20 minutes in a discussion about a question that all the other undergraduates I spoke to grasped straight away once it had been explained to them properly. I explained it about 3 different ways, with analogies, without analogies, with technical terms, without technical terms. It was like he wasn't listening to my explanation. Argh.
I try my hardest, but when there are 4 demonstrators and lecturer leading a practical with 100 people in, I can't afford to spend 20 minutes a circular argument with someone! *sigh*
I went back to the lab, fed the bees, and then sat at my computer and demolished 100g of Co-op chocolate. The stuff with the yummy little crispy rice bits in. My favourite. (20% off until 11th March, YAY!)
We also have a new flatmate. He's a Taiwanese gastroenterologist. Don't know much else about him yet except that he always locks his door when he leaves his room, even just to go to the loo. But he seems nice enough.
