Judgments

Teaching is always difficult You never really know how much students are taking in until you read their papers and get back exam scores. I saw an article in Science magazine (March 14, 2008) about archaeological studies on how people learn. Although they are looking at primitive cultures, I wonder what it means for more complex cultures and what it means for students and teachers in a formal (school) setting. Maybe we're going about it wrong. And with the focus on assessment and learning outcomes right now in the universities, we are very conscious of the fact that learning doesn't always happen, or at least how we expected it to. I just finished grading another batch of papers for my first-year writing course. What students don't always realize is how hard it is to grade and how it is the most unpleasant part of teaching. No one is happy about it so why do we do it? It's the same idea of what's going on with the assessment of courses, schools, etc.---everything has to be quantified for some reason or other. I suppose value judgements are all around us in so many ways; it seems to be part of our lives. Judge not that ye be not judged! Yes, try doing that as a teacher! The only thing we can do is to be as fair as we can be.

Next Blog

Once in a while, out of curiosity, I click on the link that says, Next Blog. I don't know how they categorize what Next means because the "next blog" to my Family Files blog has always been different. Anyway, today I clicked on the link and found this fashion blog. I was trying to find out what the language was and ended up typing in one of the words magazinok (magazine, I presume) and then got more links with the same strange language. I finally recognized the word, Magyar and so found out that this is a blog in Hungarian. The last entry was the most interesting with a model wearing knitted clothes that are pretty weird as far as clothing goes, but as far as art is concerned, very creative. Check it out at http://modellekesmindenmas.blogspot.com/

I also tried the next blog from this site and came up with an Italian photographer. At least I recognized the language this time! Look at the stunning photos of the carnival in Venice taken in November: http://angelobattaglia.blogspot.com/