the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy blogger

Bullet points. My apologies.

• I gave my first pop quiz yesterday. Ever. I had never given a pop quiz before. I wish people would just write, "Yeah, I didn't read the assignment, so I have no idea," instead of using the strategy of writing as many smart-sounding words as possible and hoping that something is right. In response to the question, "How do experiments enable a researcher to focus on the possible effects of one or more factors?" one student answered, "Experiments can help the researcher(s) to see any possible effects that they have observed. These effects can show what caused the experiment to turn out the way it did." Nice try, young Skywalker, but your Jedi mind tricks do not work on me. I especially like how he included the (s) at the end of researcher to try to convince me that the answer was correct.
• One of the international students I work with (he's from Japan) was wearing a great jacket/shirt thingy today. It was black and had passants on the shoulders. Passants! The fabric was pinstriped and had patches of snakeskin print and crazy zippers with cut-out crosses on the zipper pulls. If the US male students would show this kind of innovative fashion sense, I might be able to remember them as individuals rather than referring to all of them as "Kyle."
• When I am not in class, I'm in my office. This is fine with me because I don't like people much (present company excluded). But this also means I do not keep up on the personal lives of people in my department (or anywhere else), and I don't know the latest institutional political goings-on, so if you ask me about them, it's likely that I will give you a blank stare.
• Clementines are delightful. Dried out clementines are not.
• I possess a deep hatred of teaching two sections of our intro class all spread out with one in the wee hours of the morning and one at the groggy post-lunch hour. I'd rather do them both in the morning, three and a half hours of back-to-back intro-level excitement. This is really bothering me this semester. Probably more than it should.
• When I have back-to-back meetings with students, the little bits of time in between can be used to write a blog entry. They probably also could be used to grade papers, prepare for the next day's class, work on a manuscript, etc., but I only know about the blog writing.
• It is 450 degrees in my office. You could bake a frozen pizza in here. Thus, I have my window open. There's a guy whose office is down the hall from me who is using a space heater because his office is cold.
• Mr. Banality and I choose pseudonyms when we play Scrabble. Last night, Morgan Freeman was kicking Cynthia's ass. I was Morgan Freeman.
• I would like to spend less time in my office, not only because of the sweat lodge atmosphere, but because I would like to die without people saying, "Wow, she worked a lot." And also, while I am alive, I would like to do more than just work a lot.