Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

One professor I admire confided in me that at the beginning of the semester he already knows who will be the A-grade students and who will be the C-grade students. We discussed this paradigm and at the time, I felt this to be an unfair prejudice towards incoming students. After some time teaching I have decided it is a horrible assumption to have, and yet it still rings (mostly) true semester after semester. Perhaps the reason why I keep seeing this behavior prediction come true is because my courses are very cumulative in structure. Therefore, if a student begins to fall behind early in the semester because -- for whatever reason -- they aren't completing assignments, then I always see these students not catch up by the end of the semester. There are many broken promises on their parts of made-up work and failed 'last minute' attempts. I believe that I'd like to try a different approach to learning which doesn't depend so much on consecutive and consequential units. I attempted something similiar to that at the end of this last semester with a final project which was disconnected from the concrete tools they had learned, but more contingent on synthesizing the theoretical constructs. As a result, some students surprised me with their ability to succeed. However, it also left some very promising students in the dust -- which I didn't like.

Rebecca and the girls mostly got over their coughs. Rebecca still has hers. She had a presentation at work she had to give in a meeting that went WAY over their planned time slot. But her 15 minutes of slides lasted 40 minutes of Q & A, even with a cough.

Last weekend, we promised Paela that we would go swimming. It didn't work out and to resolve our broken promise to our 3-year old, we showed her that we were going to put it on our calendar to do this week. So we snuck out of work early on Thursday (i.e. went in early) to go to the military swimming pool and the girls had lots of fun. Aderyn only stayed in the pool for about an hour before leaving, blue lips and goosebumps being the driving force out of the pool. Paela would have stayed all night if she could.

We also had some little friends visit our house this weekend. Cameron came over for the evening on Saturday so Camilla and Victor could have a date night without the kid. And our friends, the Owen family, came over tonight for dinner and a game. Abby and Paela love playing together, even though she is (almost) a year younger. Sometimes Paela demonstrates the emotional maturity of a 2 1/2 year old, so I'm sure they speak each other's language.