Yay, Peja! Thanks for saving the Kings' game tonight against the Mavericks. I always knew you could play defense!

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My students made me feel defensive today. In lab today, there were lots of "I don't see how you could possibly expect us to figure that out by reading a graph"-type comments. My favorite, however, was the chick who asked in front of the class if I would put "more accurate images on the final, because the ones on the midterm weren't good enough to answer the questions". My response to her was, "would you care to rephrase that statement?" Is it too much to expect that, when the students get something wrong, they ask themselves "what did I, the student, do wrong?" as opposed to "what did that incompetent bitch expect us to do with that crap?" Sigh.

This was the same group of students that irritated me while grading their work this morning. On one lab exercise, I ask them the minimum number of images they would need to ascertain whether or not there was an asteroid in the region of the sky they were looking at. The correct answer is "two" - the asteroid would move amongst the background stars. And then, they perform an exercise on the computer, comparing two images of regions of the sky and saying "yay" or "nay" to whether an asteroid shows up in the images. They all do quite well in the comparison, but they DON'T go back to change their answers to the previous question, where they had said "5 images" or "as many as possible" or "needs video footage". I miss critical thinking skills.

Hmm...my disposition is getting bitter as the semester winds down. I must need more chocolate.