Champion

Simon Wiesenthal is dead.

(Why isn't there a mood icon for this feeling? Melancholy that he died, respect for what he was, hope springing from the fact that there are people like him? Is there even a word for it?)

Reading

It's been a while since I updated my reading list. Since the last time, I've read the following: Georgette Heyer's Lady of Quality; Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers and Doctor Thorne (and reviewed the latter); Roberta MacAvoy's Damiano and Damiano's Lute (I once read, and promptly discarded, the third volume, Raphael, but the first two are quite good); Roger Zelazny's Isle of the Dead; Kristine Smith's Law of Survival; Rosemary Kirstein's The Outskirter's Secret; 1634: The Galileo Affair by Flint and Dennis; and Charles Stross's The Family Trade. I won't review any of them at the moment, but I will comment that Zelazny was a wonderful writer, that I intend to continue with Kirstein's "Steerswoman" series, and that I'm not sure how much I like the Stross. (Introducing modern sensibilities into an essentially medieval setting is tricky; sometimes it works, but often it doesn't. It's easier with humor than with serious work, but Stross is attempting the latter, and I'm not sure that's his forte. On the other hand, my experience with him is limited to the bizarre Singularity Sky, so my judgement is not necessarily well-founded.)

I'm continuing to read Hewitt & Ross, and also Trollope's Framley Parsonage and Barbara Hambly's A Free Man of Color. Arthur Herman's To Rule the Waves and Heyer's The Spanish Bride are sitting in the living room with bookmarks in them, but I haven't looked at either in a week or two.

Mind Games

Classroom tests are supposed to measure students' knowledge, skills, and understanding of the given material. Unfortunately, they'll always try to game the system, looking for patterns that allow them to avoid having to think. For instance, if a test has six True-False questions, they'll expect three True and three False, and use that to leverage such knowledge as they have.

I refuse to let them get away with that. In my test yesterday, question two was in two parts. Part a) described a situation, then asked a question with two possible answers. Part b) modified the situation slightly, and asked the same question again. A lazy student would conclude that the two parts have different answers. A decent but hurried student would, perhaps, be deceived into thinking that the difference between the situations is larger than it actually is (and I worded it so that it looked that way). A good student... well, about fifteen minutes into the test, one of the better students raised his hand. I walked over, and he murmured, "Did you really mean to say 'y-axis'?" I said, "I said 'y-axis', yes." He shook his head and said, "O-kay..."

You can't pull this too often; the idea is to break up patterns, not establish new ones. Probably this could be analyzed game-theoretically to determine the best strategy, but I'm guessing that randomness is the way to go.