No effort not to be disjointed
Oct. 23rd, 2007 02:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garranRain has been everywhere, rain, rain! but today it is sunny again -- and not just sunny but clear, and golden, and cool but not cold. After a September and early October that were chill, grey and remote, and poignant as winter, and the past few weeks of deluge, the year has resolved after all at least for a moment into the kind of Autumn I like best.
Just because it has been cold doesn't mean that I have had a cold, as Harvey Keitel probably wouldn't say, but in fact both are the case. It's now almost gone (lingering only enough to interfere with my ability to sing high notes at parties), but it's been around for about as long as the rain has, the persistent descendant of the vague fever that incapacitated me over Thanksgiving weekend. (NB: I am Canadian.) My personal myth about that sickness is that it happened because I'd been under the stress of being so relentlessly anxious about school, which weakened my immune system; this may not actually be true, but it was a useful thing to think because it made me look at why I was anxious and realize that it was almost entirely about the enormous (by my own standards so far) term paper I need to write for the Honours seminar. Even when I was apparently reacting to some other, more immediate reason for stress, I was really going, "I have this homework to do now, and I have this 5000-word paper sitting on my future like a brick". Having had cause to look directly at my worry and sort it out into discrete concerns, instead of adding that major one to everything like that, has made the time since rather easier.
It's strange the degree to which part of what I have to worry about for school now is my grades, because there are scholarships etc.; I feel almost betrayed that these things, in their capacity as collectable tokens rather than as feedback, didn't remain irrelevant epiphenomena, even though I thought before that their irrelevance was one of the marks against them. It doesn't help that at least some of the courses at UBC undertake practises that totally undermine the usefulness of good marks except as somewhat arbitrary collectables, e.g. grading on a curve.
Music stuff that I have been meaning to mention:
There is a new Noe Venable album. Unsurprisingly, I think the free downloads are pretty great.
There is also a new Radiohead album. I haven't heard a thing off of it yet, but check out that distribution method!
Non-music stuff:
We're getting the libraries back! I wonder how the pay equity stuff worked out?
I have been invited to a Hallowe'en party. Maybe I ought to come up with a costume this year, after all.
Just because it has been cold doesn't mean that I have had a cold, as Harvey Keitel probably wouldn't say, but in fact both are the case. It's now almost gone (lingering only enough to interfere with my ability to sing high notes at parties), but it's been around for about as long as the rain has, the persistent descendant of the vague fever that incapacitated me over Thanksgiving weekend. (NB: I am Canadian.) My personal myth about that sickness is that it happened because I'd been under the stress of being so relentlessly anxious about school, which weakened my immune system; this may not actually be true, but it was a useful thing to think because it made me look at why I was anxious and realize that it was almost entirely about the enormous (by my own standards so far) term paper I need to write for the Honours seminar. Even when I was apparently reacting to some other, more immediate reason for stress, I was really going, "I have this homework to do now, and I have this 5000-word paper sitting on my future like a brick". Having had cause to look directly at my worry and sort it out into discrete concerns, instead of adding that major one to everything like that, has made the time since rather easier.
It's strange the degree to which part of what I have to worry about for school now is my grades, because there are scholarships etc.; I feel almost betrayed that these things, in their capacity as collectable tokens rather than as feedback, didn't remain irrelevant epiphenomena, even though I thought before that their irrelevance was one of the marks against them. It doesn't help that at least some of the courses at UBC undertake practises that totally undermine the usefulness of good marks except as somewhat arbitrary collectables, e.g. grading on a curve.
Music stuff that I have been meaning to mention:
There is a new Noe Venable album. Unsurprisingly, I think the free downloads are pretty great.
There is also a new Radiohead album. I haven't heard a thing off of it yet, but check out that distribution method!
Non-music stuff:
We're getting the libraries back! I wonder how the pay equity stuff worked out?
I have been invited to a Hallowe'en party. Maybe I ought to come up with a costume this year, after all.
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-24 01:57 am (UTC)the difficulty of the problems varies the most, so grading on a curve makes the marks the most less wobbly. it also introduces weird incentives that the class might just not bother to cooperate on stuff (because if everyone gets involved, it has no effect on the grade) and that people work "as hard as everyone else". but otherwise i think it's a nice grading scheme, and its big problem is that it takes away some motivation, so it's not so bad ^_^
no subject
Date: 2007-10-24 02:21 am (UTC)-Andy H.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-24 02:33 pm (UTC)[edit] your teacher might not even know what to expect from your class. XD