Mid-term is bearing down on my students like a runaway semi full of cargo. For some of my students, the semi is loaded with soft, fluffy pillows while for others it is filled with anvils. Big anvils. Big, hard, iron anvils like the ones Wile E. Coyote always seemed to be ordering from the Acme company to squash the Roadrunner with that always seems to boomerrang on him after he fell off the cliff into a batch of cacti and land on his head. These are the anvils in the semi driven by Agent Smith from the Matrix that is headed for some of my students. It's gonna leave a mark.
For my Physical Science class today the anvils come in the form of their mid-term exam. Things haven't really improved much since my last update on this class. One bright spot is two of my students actually came to my office with question indicating they had actually studied the material. There was great rejoicing. Still I expect this to be a massacre (which is more than decimation but less than annihilation...I used to have an instructor in grad school who referred to his tests as annihilation operators; he wasn't too far off in his description). Not enough studying for some students and too much studying at the last minute for others. I expect very few took my in-class advice to study some every day for the week before the test. That having been said, there will be those who are prepared and will do well.
My physics classes went through their first round of exams and they are now smaller. My good early section all made it through pretty unscathed. The interesting thing is that most have B's right now. My later section of algebra-based physics didn't fare so well and I'm now down to 11 out of the original 22 with a couple more that need to drop. The engineering physics class did well, which was to be expected. The biggest obstacle in that class is a bit of laziness where a student will ace one thing and then put the next off for too long and not have enough time to really nail down the ideas and so do poorly. That's something I'll have to fight to break over the course of the year.
I'm off the bike for the next few weeks. The season has finally just caught up with me and I can't go any more. I had hoped to make it through November but all the signs pointed to chronic overtraining so I'm taking 3-4 weeks off to let my body heal. Once I finish with that it'll be back to base training and light weight training to rebalance things before I start into the heavier work.
