(no subject)

We got the results of our midterms back in Child Development today; I got 86% That's the bad thing about short tests: missing only a few questions (I only missed 5) knocks the score down _fast_. The teacher also told us that the mean for this test in our class was 74%, and her tests usually have a mean of 78%, so she asked what she could do to help us. And it sounds like a few more than half of us say that having more questions, but worth only half a point each - instead of the full point each question was on this test - would work better. It especially makes sense to me for the True/False questions to be worth only half a point, since they require roughly half the thought that the multiple choice questions do.

My Linguistics class is driving me nucking futs. Oh lord, it's so frustrating it makes me want to cry. The semantic hangups of the other students and the teacher's non-native-English-speaker inability to tweak phrasing slightly to better explain concepts like "sometimes words are not words, they're just morphemes," (and the students, with their aforementioned hangups, go "wtf do you mean words are not words?") And OMFG someone asked the difference between a root(word) and a stem, and she tried to explain it by having someone draw a _tree_ on the blackboard! Now, analogies are all well and good, as long as people don't take them literally: We were tracing the construction of "purification" whose root, of course is "pure" (which, for the purposes of the chalkboard demonstration, was actually the trunk of the tree, not the roots, which caused several wtf's around the room already). Then the first branch was "-ify" which turns the noun in to a verb ("purify" being the first stem), and then from that branch was the second stem, which added "-(c)ation" to bring it back to a noun. But when the teacher pointed at the positioning of "-(c)ation," one of the students said, "But that's a leaf!" *headdesk* I'm sure the other students (and possibly even the teacher herself) think I'm an absolute bitch because I sit there through the whole class with a scowl on my face and what I suspect is a very palpable air of "omg you dumbshits, can we please just move on?" But seriously. Can I please just read the book and take the final and not have to come to the class that makes me want to chokabitch? Perhaps it's a good thing that I won't do much more studying in Linguistics proper until graduate school. I think I would go postal if I were majoring in it now and had to sit through classes like this all day long. Get the non-linguists out of my class plzthnx.

(no subject)

We got the results of our midterms back in Child Development today; I got 86% That's the bad thing about short tests: missing only a few questions (I only missed 5) knocks the score down _fast_. The teacher also told us that the mean for this test in our class was 74%, and her tests usually have a mean of 78%, so she asked what she could do to help us. And it sounds like a few more than half of us say that having more questions, but worth only half a point each - instead of the full point each question was on this test - would work better. It especially makes sense to me for the True/False questions to be worth only half a point, since they require roughly half the thought that the multiple choice questions do.

My Linguistics class is driving me nucking futs. Oh lord, it's so frustrating it makes me want to cry. The semantic hangups of the other students and the teacher's non-native-English-speaker inability to tweak phrasing slightly to better explain concepts like "sometimes words are not words, they're just morphemes," (and the students, with their aforementioned hangups, go "wtf do you mean words are not words?") And OMFG someone asked the difference between a root(word) and a stem, and she tried to explain it by having someone draw a _tree_ on the blackboard! Now, analogies are all well and good, as long as people don't take them literally: We were tracing the construction of "purification" whose root, of course is "pure" (which, for the purposes of the chalkboard demonstration, was actually the trunk of the tree, not the roots, which caused several wtf's around the room already). Then the first branch was "-ify" which turns the noun in to a verb ("purify" being the first stem), and then from that branch was the second stem, which added "-(c)ation" to bring it back to a noun. But when the teacher pointed at the positioning of "-(c)ation," one of the students said, "But that's a leaf!" *headdesk* I'm sure the other students (and possibly even the teacher herself) think I'm an absolute bitch because I sit there through the whole class with a scowl on my face and what I suspect is a very palpable air of "omg you dumbshits, can we please just move on?" But seriously. Can I please just read the book and take the final and not have to come to the class that makes me want to chokabitch? Perhaps it's a good thing that I won't do much more studying in Linguistics proper until graduate school. I think I would go postal if I were majoring in it now and had to sit through classes like this all day long. Get the non-linguists out of my class plzthnx.