Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Finals

Luke and Ariel have started finals. This means Ariel needs a steady supply of chocolate and is willing to even eat 85% to 90% cocoa dark chocolate, which tastes like dirt. She’d prefer chocolate with sea salt, but that bar is mine. She had a bar of chili chocolate and a bag of Lindt truffles, but she’s already gone through them. Now she’s eating dirt. Too bad, baby girl.

Luke does not have a chocolate fetish. He just gets a dazed expression on his face and mutters imprecations against one of his professors. The “dark side” of Luke amazes us all because Luke has always defended his professors, explaining that every thing they do is for the benefit of the student. This semester changed that. Prof Bad Guy started off okay. He was genial enough. Then he began giving odd writing assignments. He’d give the students something to read and they were supposed to respond to it, but not actually respond about it. It was to be a springboard to something greater. (What that “greatness” was continues to remain a mystery to all the students.) The grading was arbitary: an A was “Wow me,” a B was “not quite a wow,” a C was “sticking to the topic of the reading material.” Okay, right—can you say “totally arbitrary?” Then midterm came around. Profs are supposed to tell students what their grades are. The problem is BG hadn’t graded any papers yet. Oops.

Then BG started missing the occasional class. And then there was the week he took off because his kids were on spring break, and he wanted to go on vacation with them. The problem when a prof misses a lot of classes is that he can’t give you assignments. Now it’s the end of term and the papers he was supposed to assign hadn’t been. Guess what? He assigned them (2 or 3 short ones and 2 long ones). Just turn in the papers the first day of finals. Even Luke can’t defend that.

I’m so glad I graduated a long time ago. Time for a piece of that chocolate with sea salt. Yum!

9 comments:

  1. Ooooh. The dark-dark stuff is awesome! It is the only candy-like thing that I like:) I love the chili chocolate. I'll bring you some when I visit, Ariel.

    Luke can eat ketchup, or whatever he was eating out of the fridge. Or maybe spaghetti squash. Silly him for not liking chocolate.

    That teacher sounds annoying. Maybe Ariel and Luke should have a mutiny.

    Grace Duke

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  2. I do like chocolate; I;m just not an addict. As soon as I'm out of Parker's class I will sing for joy. He is a horribly annoying professor.

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  3. Don't worry Luke, we don't doubt your love of Chocolate. (If you didn't, we would have to filet you.)

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  4. I hate chocolate! My indulgence is now a nutritious Optifast shake with sugar free French Vanilla syrup. It's like drinking a candy bar. Yum.

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  5. Reading this blog post is kind of like reading Rate my Professor posts of teachers you've already had.

    He he. Mr. Parker was great. I really liked him. :) I got A's with very little effort.

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  6. Well, Duncan, you only had to write two short reading responses and two full-length papers when you took Parker.

    Luke has had to write about twelve reading responses as well as four full-length papers. Obviously the teacher has revamped his class assignments. You were lucky enough to take the class before it became difficult.

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  7. Mr. Parker must have gotten in big trouble. Anyway, I don't have much respect for profs who say they couldn't grade your essays because they were too busy watching the Olympics.

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  8. What next? Professors watching Glee or Americas Next Top Model. Puh-lease. You should offer to grade your own papers.

    Grace Duke

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