Busted!

A lot of my assignments are done through Google Forms, which has the advantage of a wide variety of ways for me to ask questions and auto-grading. I ask the kids to take a screenshot of their score at the end and upload it to Canvas, and then I use Canvas’ SpeedGrader feature to basically just copy the grades and then it syncs them with the grade book. Last year I had to go through student by student (which was still faster than it sounds) and put the grades directly into the grade book so I looked at each individual score report as I was doing it. This year (or, at least, since I started at my new school midway through November) I haven’t interacted with the actual Form all that often because they’ve uploaded the screenshots and I just work with that.

Until today, when I noted that this student had reported a score of 24/24 even though I had screwed up three of the questions. Two of them did not have right answers posted, which means it was literally impossible for any student to have gotten a grade higher than 22/24 on this assignment before I fixed it– and I just fixed it a few minutes ago. Which means my good friend here most certainly did not have the 24/24 he reports here.

I went and looked at his actual score in the Forms document. 0. He’d just gone through and put random letters in as his answers and then– skillfully, I’ll admit– edited his screenshot to show a perfect score. And I’ve zoomed in on that image and that replacement is clean. Part of me is actually proud of him. I’d have noticed this eventually of course but he’s gotten away with it at least a few times.

Tomorrow I shall flay him, and display his skin outside my classroom as a warning to future miscreants.

But not until he shows me exactly how he’s doing this.

On letting idiots make decisions for me

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Perhaps the sound of a million baby-men all wailing at once alerted you; there is to be a new Doctor Who, or maybe a new Doctor, hell, I don’t watch the show, I don’t think “Doctor Who” is actually the character’s name, but maybe it is– and at any rate, the Doctor is to be played by a Person of Feminine Aspect, a Vagina-Haver, a Breasted-American, except she’s not American and Breasted-Brit sounds like some sort of snack food.  A girl!  Playing a character who used to be played by a man with a penis!

I assume Peter Capaldi has a penis. And all the others, whatever their names are.  Steve or James or Bonbon or something else British.  I’m only assuming they all had penises.  I’ve never seen any of their penises.  But apparently they were really important to all this Time Lord business.

So, yeah, there’s a girl in a show now and oh so many judgment-challenged sillymen are oh so very upset.  And here’s the thing: I’ve kinda been jonesing for a new Nerd Thing lately that I could pay attention to?  I’m tired of Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones has worn very very thin and I was never into the TV series anyway, and I’m not actually certain that the new Star Trek is actually watchable by regular people who don’t have some sort of arcane CBS subscription that I refuse to find out anything about.  But I can watch this new Doctor Who thing, right?  And knowing that me watching it is a tiny thorn in the ample sides of some very horrible people brings me pleasure, so there’s that.

I have actually tried to get into Doctor Who on a few occasions and failed.  With the notable exception of Monty Python, British entertainment does tend to bounce off of me a bit, and every previous episode of the program I’ve tried to watch really didn’t get anywhere with me.  But for some reason I downloaded the two-part season finale of Season 10, which was Capaldi’s final season (although I understand there’s some sort of Christmas special thing coming, where he’ll actually end his run?) and damn if I wasn’t well and hooked despite not really having the vaguest idea what the fuck was going on or who any of the non-Capaldi characters were.  The Cybermen should have been Power Rangers-level cheesy nonsense but somehow they worked, and I was suitably creeped out by them.

And so: I shall be partaking of this new LadyWho person, and hopefully I will enjoy it.  And if not, meh.  At least I annoyed some idiots.  That’s always worth something, right?

PS: Is “Dr. Who” some sort of faux pas?  I keep wanting to spell it that way and changing it back to eliminate the abbreviation.  Is it like Spider-Man, where if you don’t include the hyphen you die in seven days?

On Mike Pence…

…might be the title of the post I would write about Mike Pence joining Donald Trump’s ticket, were I able to do anything other than laugh hysterically at the idea.

Bye, Mike.  Your ignorant, bigoted ass won’t be missed at all.