Last class

Today was the last class of the semester. We ran our poster session and the students presented their finished projects. We were all exhausted. They worked really hard.

We really needed another week. The semester was a week short this year: we only had 13 weeks of class. We really needed one more week to pull everything together. Or maybe I should just drop one of the projects. It's hard to imagine doing that because I somehow need to provide all of the pieces.

When I first taught the class, I didn't have an "observation" project at the beginning, but I found that without it, students were unprepared to do the methods project. But without the methods project, they can't write a proposal. And without a proposal, its hard to choose a Research Project. It's hard to know what to cut.

A student asked me if we were going to do teaching evaluations. I've had students ask me once or twice *if* we're going to do teaching evaluations. I guess there are some people who don't, but the question always makes me feel a bit weird. Of course we're going to do teaching evaluations. I always do teaching evaluations. I used the opportunity to recruit that student to do the teaching evaluations for me and to drop them off at the Chairman's office.

I remember talking to Pop years ago about teaching evaluations. He pointed out that he mostly didn't pay any attention to them because he knew what the students were going to say. He'd arranged the course as well as he could and some of the things they didn't like were intentional and some were just side effects of who he was. I understand his point better now.

I've been enjoying doing more photography with my new little camera. I'm trying to carry it everywhere and to take pictures of everyday things. It's incredible when I download the pictures and find that they don't need any retouching: I look at them and can't find anything to fix. My Pentax can take great pictures, but they nearly always require tweaking. Maybe I could set it so it would be closer to what I want at first pass. But the canon is already like that. It's wonderful for snapshots.