Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

And So It Begins...

Interesting that when you've been away from a machine for a little over three weeks, one sometimes has to look up a complex password, rather than depending on finger memory. (grin)

Yesterday, Monday 11 January 2010, my classes consisted of my usual shock-and-awe opening and an introduction to Dr. Phil which lets everyone know that (a) I'm crazy and (b) there's a method to my madness. Students never seem to believe me when I say I'm handing out a 14 page syllabus... Today we begin PHYS-2070 University Physics II (Electricity & Magnetism for Scientists and Engineers with Calculus) for real -- two shows at Noon and 2pm, I'm here all week -- and start doing some Physics.

Yesterday my office was toasty warm when it was 20°F outside in the morning. Today it was 19°F and not so toasty -- had to put my sweater back on. But it's sunny outside. Overhead murk from Allendale to 100th Street on the southside of Grand Rapids, then the sky opened up as in coming out of Mordor.

We did manage to snag a 50¢/gal discount slip from Family Fare on Saturday -- Mrs. Dr. Phil hadn't been sure we'd spend $100+ on groceries, but apparently that was no problem. And my fear that gas prices would irrationally spike by more than 50¢/gal did not materialize. Indeed, gas "dropped" to "only" $2.71.9/gal for regular, so the 50¢/gal discount actually amounted to something.

The deer were running this morning. I turned off Warner at 84th Avenue, but down the road by the campground -- now a KOA Campground -- I could see a trio of deer cross Warner in front of a car. Then two more. Then another. Then another, this one strolling across the road. Then I guess the car tried to move forward and three more deer wanted to cross, but turned away, followed by another clump of deer. Must've been a herd of a dozen or more. Great...

WLAV-FM is doing a bit of silliness -- they are clearing out 200 parking spaces at the Getty 4 Drive-In in Muskegon MI and will be doing an outdoor movie in the snow and a fish fry competition coming up. The movie? Fargo. In the cold outdoors. (grin)

*** UPDATE: (1) Fargo outdoors is for Saturday 23 January 2010, (2) the Getty 4 opens at 3pm, (3) the fish fry competition starts at 4pm, (4) Fargo begins at 5:30pm, and (5) I'll be at ConFusion 2010 on the other side of the state. (grin)

Let's hear it for irrational exuberance.

Dr. Phil

Huh?

Tuesday I tanked up the 1996 Blazer. Regular gas was $2.59.9/gal. It's been at that price for about a week or more. Today I was driving around town and gas was $2.75.9 and $2.76.9 per gallon for regular. WTF? Once again, gas prices have no relationship to anything going on in the world.

Nothing new here, I guess. Nothing to see, move on, move on. Bend over and pay the man.

Exam 2 Next Week?

WMU began Fall Semester after Labor Day -- and Labor Day in the U.S. came as late as it could be in the calendar. Unfortunately, not only do they want us to post mid-term grades this year, they also wanted us to post first-grades. And the posting cutoff dates to the Registrar's grade system were such that I had to move up my exams by about a week compared to the same class in Fall 2008.

Then there Tuesday's class. Only maybe half the students were there. I commented on this at the end to a couple of students, wondering if the missing were just skipping, hating my lectures... or whether they were sick. The students all agreed that it was probably the flu. H1N1 is racing through parts of the WMU population -- they have two dorms for use as quarantine dorms, or students are allowed to go home. Actually, West Michigan has a lot of schools which are closed for 2-3 days because so many students are sick. The bottom of the screen during the news looks like snow storm season with the latest school closings. (grin) Over the weekend one local school forfeited a football game because of the flu -- over 100 out of 300-some students were out at that school.

So now the game begins. Because we're locked into Exam 2 on Tuesday -- but I suspect we'll have a lot of no shows. Maybe people will be able to do a make-up on Thursday, but not everyone is going to have a complete mid-term grade. Can't be helped. Maybe I'll have to declare a forfeit.

C'est la vie.

Dr. Phil

Road Traffic Up

Tuesday was the first day of public schools in Michigan -- they set up a law the other year to help out the tourist industry over Labor Day -- and also the first day of classes at WMU. Though I missed driving through any of the School Zones with their restricted speed limits, definitely the case that there was a lot of traffic on the roads today.

On the news last night was a story about a horrific fiery crash on I-196 over Chicago Drive in Grandville, right in the construction zone. Semi-truck filled with pies versus a Chevy Tahoe. People with fire extinguishers managed to save one of the two in the Tahoe. Most of the damage on I-196 was at the road's edge and they'd put up some concrete barriers to patch where the guardrails had been. Scary. Actual Michigan Labor Day weekend death toll down two from 2008.

Jerks

Sometimes you're driving along and you can see a spray engulfing a vehicle and you realize that it's running its windshield washers. So this morning, there's this silver Honda sedan which had passed me -- 70mph not being sufficient apparently -- and there was a huge spray on just the right side. About half a minute later it happened again. And again.

And I realized that there was a hand coming out of the right passenger window. And though they were ahead of me by quite a bit, I was getting a bit of spray on my windshield... and the unmistakeable smell of coffee. The bastards were dumping coffee -- a lot of coffee -- out the damned window in traffic at 70+mph.

What the hell is wrong with people? I don't even drink coffee!

Damn, The Students Are Back

Yeah, I know, that's a terrible attitude. But look at it from my perspective. It's tough coming back to the full regular semester after the summer. The Everett-Rood parking lot was FULL. Stuffed. No spaces left. There are not that many faculty with "R" stickers for those spaces. But the students know that they don't crack down and start towing for a week or two. So rather than park in the student places, they fill in the faculty spaces like mad. Eventually it will settle down, but it's stupid season right now.

Talked with a Parking Services Public Safety officer, who was busy writing tickets. He says that student infamously get indignant when told they can't park there and write letters to the President. "'Cause we paid our money!" Well, actually, you paid part of the cost of your classes. You didn't actually pay to park in those spaces, because they aren't for sale. "But can't you old fuddyduds (probably not the word in vogue today) just park elsewhere?" Sure, but we're old fuddyduds. And we're bringing stuff back and forth from home, because our workday doesn't end when we leave campus. And part of your money is paying me to teach your classes. So what good is all that if I can't get to my office and to our classroom? It's the difference between inconveniencing one person (you) from parking closer to the buildings and inconveniencing 128 people -- me and all my students.

Yay, The Students Are Back

Well, that's a better attitude. It was really quiet last week. And you never know how the first class is going to go, but I thought it went quite well. I have a few diversionary tactics to get everyone's attention in the first five minutes -- get the heart rates going and clear the cobwebs.

The problem with killing the lights in the lecture hall these days is that there's too much ambient light from laptops and cellphones being used. (grin) But my TITANIC model Acme Thunderer whistle wakes everyone up.

Did have some troubles making my syllabus. Twelve pages, a little short for me, but printed as 2-ups and copied double-sided, so I'm not really killing all the trees in North America. But the humidity was running so high that (a) my office LaserJet output got "eaten" by the document feeder on the copier, and I had to peel two pages off its rollers, make one copy of the six pages to get flatter masters. By then I'd lost most of my allotted copying time, so (b) I only had 65 of 130 sets made. Then (c) we ran out in the classroom after the secretary had brought the rest in because (d) the copier had actually jammed up and so the last 20-30 sets weren't actually in the pile. But it worked out in the end.

Ah, the joys of teaching. (double-trouble-grin)

Dr. Phil

A Beautiful Fall Day

Driving in to the office today was quite striking. Huge, towering mountains of clouds -- they rapidly alternated between blanketing the sky and allowing brilliant sunshine to light up the world, almost immediately followed by heavy rain squalls. You name it, you got it. And it was still 66°F at 11am! This is the Dog Days of Summer in August?

The Usual Gassy Complaints

Wednesday, when I didn't need gas, it was running at $2.42.9/gal for regular. Thursday and Friday? $2.59.9/gal. So with a sudden 17¢ jump, my 25¢/gal discount from the grocery store was mostly eaten up. Arrgh. And what were they just saying the other day? That crude had dropped below $69/bbl?

Revving Up For Semester 53

Fall 2009 semester starts late this year because Labor Day is so late -- and WMU is actually following the public schools which are required by Michigan state law to open after Labor Day, to help eke out the last tourism dollars -- so classes actually begin on Tuesday 8 September 2009. My PHYS-1060 Introduction to Stars and Galaxies astronomy course is a Tuesday/Thursday course, so the 8th it is! You are supposed to be able to link class webpages to the registration pages. This didn't work the other year, but I decided to give it another try. Unfortunately, as faculty I get a different view than the students, so I don't know if it worked right.

Been getting a steady stream of emails about whether one has to buy the 5th edition of the textbook. Well, actually, yes. Now sometimes I am honest and have pointed out in other classes in other semesters that if they are one or two editions behind, it probably won't hurt them. Most of the introductory physics courses are well-established and I don't teach "out of the book" and I don't assign specific homework problems, so that's all right. But astronomy has been very dynamic, what with the amazing array of new tools, upgrades, methods and theory which has blessed the field, especially since the Hubble Space Telescope first flew. So yeah, the 4th edition won't cut it.

"But I was told in the other class (PHYS-1040) that we'd use the same book!" True, but upon questioning I found you took the course three semester ago, so it wasn't adjacent semesters. Sorry. Buck up and spend the bucks.

Updated a number of class webpages, so things are well set up for Fall. Will work on my authorly webpages at dr-phil-physics.com over the weekend and bring them up to date. If I have the time.

Next Novel

I have an ending to a short story to revise for Abyss & Apex -- I haven't actually officially announced that yet -- so I am planning on starting the second sabbatical novel project on Monday. I think I'm going to spend some time expanding my short story "The Gravediggers" to a novel. This was my first story to appear in print, but as an Honorable Mention in the CrossTIME anthology contest it earned no money. It's 2009, which is 2004 + 5 years, so the short story should be released. But I'd have to rewrite it to bring it up to current 29th century universe specs (grin) and if I have to do that, why not look at the novel length? Note: I haven't actually done anything to the story, just taken the word count as the short story stands.

GRV Project

Due Date: none

Away!

And now I should probably back up my files and pack up for home. Maybe I won't get rained on heading out to the Blazer. (double-trouble-grin)

Dr. Phil

I Suppose It Has To Happen Sometime

Today was my Exam 1 day for all three of my classes -- two sections of PHYS-2070 (Electricity & Magnetism, Calculus level) and one PHYS-1150 (E&M, Algebra level). It's busy, but it's been fun so far. I had hoped to spend my 2-4pm block of back-to-back exams doing some writing. Alas, twas not to be. Had a fire to enrage and then put out.

I'm in my 51st semester of teaching. Exams are both good things and bad. But if you're going to go ahead and give exams, you've got to take them seriously. And sometimes someone is going to take them way too seriously.

2:00pm

One thing I do after everyone starts is to take the remaining stack of papers and start numbering them from N downward, where N is the number of copies made. Then I count Students In Chairs, usually twice to check for errors. Then I ask if there are any extra papers out in the room -- and if there are, I ask "Why?" (grin)

This class had 70 copies made. My own count accounted for 68. Sure enough, there was one up in the "stands", which was brought down. Then the unbelievable.

"This Guy Left With One"

Say what? What do you mean someone took an exam and walked out with it? Why that would be cheating!

I asked if anyone knew the miscreant. Didn't really expect an answer. Then I suggested that if anyone did know who it was, that after the exam they should have that person contact me as soon as possible. Before it was reported to the Dean.

SERIOUS PROBLEM

I have a report that a student left with a copy of the PHYS-2070 Exam
at the start of the 2pm class. 70 copies were made and I can only place
69 of them. The conclusion is that someone has stolen a copy of the exam.

THIS SORT OF MICKEY MOUSE BEHAVIOR IS NOT ACCEPTABLE BY ADULTS IN THE UNIVERSITY.

If the person who stole the exam contacts me immediately, I may not fail
them or forward their name to the dean for disciplinary action.

If you know who this person is, please tell them to come forward immediately.

There will be NO Make-up Exam 1's on Monday, as I have to write a totally
new Make-Up exam. The stolen exam will be useless to the person for the
purposes of cheating.

I am not pleased. -- Dr. Phil

A Folded Piece Of Paper

In between classes a student brought me a folded copy of the 2pm exam and confessed that he had taken it and left. One of his buddies had told him to turn himself in, that "Dr. Phil was pissed". Seems the student was terrified of failing the exam. I ended up giving him a copy of the Noon exam and told him to take it right then and there.

Last semester I suspected that some ringers were coming into the back of the big lecture hall and taking the astronomy exams for others, because they didn't stay for the lecture after the exam. Of course, it turns out that some students figure that in a big lecture class like that you just have to cram the books and screw going to the actual class, so maybe it was nothing. I've added procedures to deal with these things.

But I was always such a goody two-shoes in my life, that cheating is totally foreign to me. While I am wily and wise to the ways of others, I do wish my ideal was a little more widespread.

Sigh.

Dr. Phil