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The Academics Thread


Pariah

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I am someone who succeeded in getting two awful astronomy puns inserted into Austin's street map.  The story is longer than I want to relate here, but you can find streets named "Transit Circle" and "Sidereal Drive" in north Austin.  Those were my idea.  A pity they don't intersect.

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At the end of fourth quarter last year, as I was finalizing grades and trying to deal with my mom's death, I had one kid in my honors chemistry class who wanted to have all kinds of conversations about why he needed an A instead of the A- he had earned--maintaining his 4.0, the many hours he had spent working on practice problems, the numerous YouTube videos he had watched trying to understand concepts, that sort of thing. Over the course of about a week I told him that neither the number of hours he had spent doing homework, nor the number of videos he had watched, nor his GPA from other classes, determined his grade in my class. What determined his grade in my class was how he had performed on the assessments. The scores he earned gave him an A-, so an A- is what he got.

 

So, having just posted final grades for first quarter this year, the same kid who is now in my honors physics class, sent me a canvas message wanting to discuss his grade and how to bump it up the extra one and a half percent he needs to get it to an A.

 

My response, and I quote: "I feel like we've had this conversation before."

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Junior year English Literature class, I was heading into the mid-term test with a B, and the teacher announced that it was essentially impossible to score high enough on the test to change our letter grade. When we received the results, she announced that she was incorrect, as one student had managed to change their grade from a B to an A for the quarter. She offered me congratulations when she handed back my test.

 

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The story I tell is from my Quarter From Hell as an undergrad, when I took the entire sophomore physics lecture series in one quarter (other things added to this "hell" qualifier, believe me).  The prof handed back the first mid-term in Thermodynamics, on which I got a 67 out of 150, and spent a few minutes wondering I would do with my life now that I had f----d it up with that exam.  Glanced over the shoulder of the guy in front of me, saw a 4, which was a perfectly plausible score for the problem on the first page.  Time went by.  Eventually all the papers were handed back, and then he told us that scores on the exam had ranged from a high of 67 down to a low of 4.  Day had come again (though the passage that would inspire that last comment would not be published for a couple of years).

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Jeremy Bentham goes up to the counter at a coffee house, holding a $50 bill. “What’s the cheapest drink you have?” he asks. “That would be our decaf roast, for only $1.99,” says the barista. “Good,” says Bentham and hands her the $50. “I’ll buy those for the next twenty-five people who show up.”

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