I Tricked Myself

I have online quizzes for many of my courses. As you might imagine, student's love online quizzes since they can use their notes and books to find answers. I've tried making the quiz time really short, but this disadvantages many of the international students who need time just to understand the question, so I give them plenty of time to complete it. Why? Because the questions are detailed. Not necessarily long but they contain information that may be incorrect. As I tell my students: In a True/False question, every portion of the the question must be true to be True. If even one part of the question is false then the answer is False. I will often place the false information towards the end of the statement so students have to read the entire question before answering or risk getting an answer wrong.

The non-international students find the extra time great since this gives them some breathing space, but they will accuse me of being "tricky" because I backload the false information. Me? Tricky? Students fail to read the entire question, get an answer wrong, then need to blame someone else for their failure, right? I mean, geez... y'know... I mean... well...

Okay, maybe I AM tricky, because I just realized that... that... I can't believe I'm gonna admit this....

I tricked myself...

As a conscientious teacher, I usually take the online quiz myself to confirm the quiz questions and answers are correctly matched. During the course of creating a quiz, it is quite simple to set the wrong radio button for the answer. Sometimes I will create a multiple choice question with answers then change up the order of the answers but forget to reset the radio button to the correct answer. Sometimes I simply forget to make a selection and leave the default choice--usually the first answer--as is. Anyway, to avoid these occasional omissions, I will take the quiz myself before making the quiz available to students.

Now the late-term online exam I gave last week had 77 questions. As per usual, I took the exam and found two mistakes, promptly corrected them and took it again. Result: 77/77. Grrrreat, the exam is ready to go. I double check the availability time--4:45-6:00--the date--yes, I have set the wrong date before--and other miscellaneous options. I send an email reminder to my students to find a computer with a hard Internet line--WiFi can ruin your quiz/exam if you become disconnected--and reiterate the time of availability.

Subsequently, I look on the Grade Sheet on Blackboard and can tell that everyone took the exam without any major incident. Whew. Actually this was the first time I ever gave an online exam. Quizzes yes, but not an assessment with more than 15 questions. So I'm glad that all went well. But any sense of relief I had was short lived.

Mere minutes later I get my first email.

I hate to ALREADY be the pain in the ass, but I just finished the exam and already have a few "contestations" to make about the grading.

Contestations? Huh? Did my student just call herself "pain in the ass"? (Oops. Did I just write "herself"?) Then faintly from my bag I hear in a soft voice: "LINE". I check it and find a message from another student.

Sensei! Tanizaki wrote the tattooer right? You made a trick question I think that said "it would not be far fetched to call the artist in akutagawa ryunosuke 's the tattooer sadistic" and I said false, because ... akutagawa didn't write that but it said I got zero points for that question? Obviously the tattooer was sadistic but akutagawa didn't write that! Lol

What? I mean, yeah, "The Tattooer" was sadistic and it WAS written by Tanizaki, not Akutagawa.

So I check the exam and sure enough I have the wrong radio button selected. Crap. But then how did I get 77 out of 77 when I retook the exam? Did I enter the wrong answer? Did I select True?

Did I... omigod... trick myself?

m(_v_)m

Uncle

I just learned today that my unlce passed away. The weird thing is that he passed away over a year ago in September. His wife--my aunt--told me in a Christmas card that he told her not to inconvenience other people about a death, presumably his. Apparently she took it to heart.

Now, this is something that I can relate to at a certain level--Don't make others feel obliged to travel to a funeral or send o-kōden. I get it. It's "just" a death and life goes on. I certainly wouldn't want or expect a lot of mourners at my own funeral. But this was a very special uncle to me when I was growing up. While I have not been in touch with him so much these past few years, the relationship I had with him previously was something that my aunt was aware of, I'm sure.

It is puzzling... and more than anything else, very sad that she would not have told me.

This Uncle taught me how to throw a baseball. He sat me in his lap when got my first taste of driving a car at 7 or 8 years old. When mom and dad said no snacks, he would sneak something in so we could enjoy a treat surreptitiously.

Anyway, I'm gonna need a ew moments... hours... days to process this news.

Gaining weight, losing inches

I am exercising much less than last year. I'm projected to do 90 hours--or about 2 hours a week--less. Of course, this year, I strained a quad, hurt my lower back and moved offices, so I took off for short stretches that total more than a month off and ultimately gained about 5 pounds I had lost the year before when I ran about 1600 miles on a treadmill.

Still since I'm doing more outside walking and indoor aerobics--the treadmill broke down in February--I think I've gained some muscle mass. According to M, even if you're walking, you have to propel your weight forward, so there's a good argument that walking may be just as effective as jogging on a treadmill where you don't push yourself forward but rather simply move you feet in a scissor action. Indeed, my skinny jeans feel tighter around the calves, and I've tightened my belt by one notch (inch?).

This has to count for something, right?

Teaching with hay fever

Teaching with hay fever
I hate ragweed. It is the bane of my life. I have a runny nose, itchy eyes, sore throat. I manifest all the yucky symptoms of a cold but without a fever. Ugh.

So in bungo today, we were learning the interrogative/emphatic particle や (ya) and I used a famous poem as an example. I set up the poem explaining how Narihira was hooking up with the princess Takaiko who was already promised to the emperor. Of course, when the powers that be found out--her brothers--they secreted her away where he could no longer meet her. A year later he goes back to the place they used to hook up and recited a poem expressing his loneliness:

　月やあらぬ春は昔の春ならぬ
　　わが身ひとつは元のみにして
　Is the moon not there?
　　Is the spring not the spring of old?
　　　My self alone being the same self...

So as I recite this poem, I sniffle a bit and suddenly feel a tear streaming down my cheeks.

Juliana: Sensei! Are you crying?!?

MarieClaire: It's the pol...

Juliana: "The poem?" she blurts out before MC could complete the sentence. "Are you so moved?!?"

The class--MarieClaire, Xavier, Monica, Irene, Mark, Phoebe, Pim, Yuta, Chloe, et al--exploded into laughter, as I try to explain my issues with hay fever.

Did I mention?: i HATE RAGWEED!!!

Literary vs. Non-Literary

Random thoughts for the day:

Literature is a representation of how we think, our mental capacity, our emotions, our memory. All those things that constitute being human. Mental representation.
Non-literary is a representation of the "real world" nature, society, physical representations.
Ki no Tsurayuki wrote:

やまと歌は人の心を種としてよろづの言の葉とぞなれりける。
世の中にある人　事・業しげきものなれば心に思ふことを見るもの聞くものにつけて言ひいだせるなり。

Yamato poetry makes the hearts of man its seed and it became the myriad leaves of words. When matters and machinations of people in this world are intense, they apply them to things seen and heard and they express them

"Matter and Memory" by Henri Bergson and his philosophy of Duration (la Duree) may be a starting point for reading Murakami Haruki's "Girl from Ipanema 1963/1984" and the concept of intertextuality.

This is just a first step.