The pain of grading

The pain of grading

Shame on me (honte (?) sur moi) for not writting for so long.
I mean, now that Ahmedinejad has a blog, I know that fewer people read mine...but I should keep up the good job!

This past weekend I decided that it's a good time to look for a roommate starting January. OH MEIN GOTT. What a pain! I mean, everyone seems so pressed as if they are oving into the apartment tomorrow! Calm down people, it's for 3 months later. The other thing is that you need to make sure that they don't find sth better in the meanwhile. Contract? First rent? I'll see. Let me first choose an interesting roommate. Oh, I'll definitely keep you updated on that!

The truth is that I've been trying to be productive during the week, and really unproductive during the weekends to make up for the week.
For example, this Saturday I was trying to learn Vaggelis how to sail, which clearly worked well, except this single point in time when Vaggelis was trying the jibe and after hearing a quite scared "get down!" from me since the boom was comng directly to his head, he bends not only down, but also forward. Clearly, the mainsheet came to his neck and the image was Vaggelis trying to put his head in the guilotine...
So, trust me...I can teach you how to sail. These small out of balance details are only to spice up our lives :)

The other (hard) reality is that I have to grade. Yes, and while I like teaching, explaining and trying to convince my Fluid Mechanics 27 students that the buoyancy does not depend on how deeo you've emerged the object, I don't like grading. I mean, after all, they usually know when they've looked up the answer at the end of the book, or whether they fussed around and did things messy to try to get partial credit. So, why are we here grading? Like absolute monarchs we say "2/10, 5/10", "Good job", "see solutions" etc...
Anyways, I just hope this semester passes with them learning fluid mechanics, me training in patience and trying to sneak of grading to do some of my experiments.

I heard Google has a chat that has rotating emoticons...! Cool!
I have to talk to Christine. She told me about them...