This just doesn't help.

So one of the blogs that I've been reading is by an “angry” professor and there is an interesting subtitle to the blog: The world needs ditch-diggers, too. It's a statement that I'm beginning to understand applies even to those do make it into institutions of higher learning.

The reason this has come to have more meaning for me is because I've just managed to struggle my way through grading the last midterm I gave my students. See, I learned something very exciting while grading the "creative" calculations they came up with, the price of gas will certainly go down if any of them every work at a gas station. You see, they cannot deal with the simplest calculations, things that they should have been taught in high school; I checked with my 16 year old brother-in-law, he knows how to do these calculations. The key one they fucked up (16% of them made this error) was in finding the number of moles in a solution of a given volume and concentration. This is why I want them to work at gas stations, because concentration is expressed in moles/liter, just like gas is priced $3.60/gallon. So according to my students if I wanted to buy six gallons of gas I just take the price and divide it by the volume; 6 gallons would cost $0.60, sweet!

Is it any wonder I get this awful tension headache whenever I grade? Incidentally it disappeared over spring break when I decided it wasn't worth my time to grade the exams then. Only about five or six more weeks of classes, I haven't looked forward to the end of classes since I was about 12.