Month: February 2007

The following just a random collection of responses I’d scanned but didn’t use in the article:

I told you the article was complete a while ago, why are you still here?

Well, not really.

So I’ll leave you with one that was particularly useful.

Happy Whateveritisyoucelebrateordont!

This article has concluded, stop clicking!

… they loved me!

Some more than others, yes, but there was much love. And this wasn’t just in the open-ended questionnaires, the “objective” rating schemes hinted at the same thing too!

But, with the sycophantish nature of the exercise, was I really going to get tips to improve?

Oh, the nail-biting suspense builds!

… words thrown out of context.

The sheer number of students involved—well over 200—ensured a wide variety in points of view, and the artificial sense of anonymity they enjoyed resulted in a degree of candidness I was surprised to see; sometimes brutally so. It’s like they’d forgotten I’ve spent a dozen or so hours with them each week, and they’re really not nameless to me. Perhaps, their extremely-alike and hard to discern handwritings,

lured them into this fictitious sense of security. Oh, the poor, misguided young’uns. And, in case you’re wondering, GSI stands for Graduate Student Instructor.

Some of the responses were verbose,

while others were more wordy still,

some were terse,

a few, extremely so,

but the verdict was clear…

Another inopportune pause. Patience is a virtue.

… making sense of the cacophony.

Emanating merely from a fortuitous alignment of the stars—or an assiduously calculated scheme driven by my desperation to pay for grad school (one can never be too sure about this sort of thing)—I had, in the fall of 2006, a most fascinating and enjoyable experience helping teach a junior level material mechanics course: ME 382. The quasi-teacher’s hat that I’d just donned (apart from legitimising my absence from the lab) allowed me to interact with curious, eager young minds full of energy, and it was such a gratifying experience helping mould them in my little way.

(In actuality, the experience mostly involved walking the young’uns through their weekly homework and I was rather engulfed in its soul-destroying monotony, but this is my story and I intend on fully embellishing it. If you have a problem with that, I suggest you write your own story; one that’s filled with your precious facts.)

As is customary here at the university, toward the end of the semester, the students are given an opportunity to provide feedback on (and to) their instructors. Designed to help the teacher improve, this feedback is solicited in the form of a pseudo-objective poll and a more traditional questionnaire. Being that these evaluations were carried out a few months ago, and in the interim I’d moved on to other remarkably fun and stimulating tasks (there are a ton of those going around when you’re camped in graduate school), they had slipped my mind. That is, until I received an innocuous looking e-mail a short while earlier.

The importance placed on this feedback oozes from that last line.

“Who responds to these? I certainly don’t,” I muttered to myself as I began to tear open the large orange envelopes half-expecting them to be nearly empty. Much to my surprise, it turns out everyone responds to these things and don’t just treat filling them out as 15–20 minutes of freedom from their regular lecture. As I began reading through the copious brazen commentary, I decided it’d be a swell idea to offer the world a totally random (yeah, right) sample from this overwhelming pool. Why? I don’t know, I just did.

There is, however, the little matter of this:

Obviously, when questioned, I’m going to inform them that I didn’t know it was to be confidential even after I’d procured the envelope. And, with that out of the way, I think it’s high time we turned to the actual responses.

The amusement will proceed after this disruptive pause.

All the pretty girls I saw around town were walking around with the prettiest of flowers.

Ugly girls didn’t even deserve ugly flowers.

Then I became poorer.

Update: In case you were wondering, I believe that buying the lens will one day allow me to take candid portraits such as the following:

Because, you know, the scrumptiousness of a meal is purely determined by the pots and pans used.

… and it took less time.

A most curious thing happened to me a short while ago. But before I get into that story, I’m going to bore you with a bit of a back-story to set things up a little.

You see, after years of good use, a few days ago I lost my toque-like winter hat. While this might not seem like a big deal to most of you, you have to see it from the perspective of a little boy from a tropical place that’s usually 40° C (104° F) living in a frigid town that’s now -20° C (-4° F). With my torn clothes and my shoes worn sole-less, that little woolen headdress was the only thing standing between me and an icy death during my daily commutes. In its absence, I’ve been forced to chart my routes such that I spend as little time as possible outdoors, because I’m sure I’d look quite hideous if my ears fell off.

Though I’d been pretty meticulous about it (I’m alive-enough to write about it, amn’t I?), things went rather awry today. As I was heading home after a hard-day’s work, I thought it’d be a smart move to detour to my landlord’s office and pay my rent for the month. This wasn’t as bright as I’d imagined, and caused my under-clad self to be out in the cold for a really long time, and nearly resulted in me passing out before I finally reached home. Forestalling this, I stepped into an unlocked university building (after desperately attempting many locked doors) along the way, and rested a bit as I warmed my now-purple-turning body up.

It’s in this situation that the aforementioned “curious thing” occurred.

As I was cosily relaxing, a woman comes up to me rather tentatively and stammered something like, “Oh hello, were you waiting for me?” I looked at her quite puzzled, and nodded no, “No, I’m just trying to get warm, I’m not waiting for anyone.” (In the best homeless guy imitation I could muster.) And, nicely warmed up by now, I slowly rose and began to walk away.

It was then that it happened, her soft, expectant expression changed to one that was so miserable, and she instantly began to weep. I looked at her thoroughly confused as I was, but things started to make more sense a few minutes later. Between the weeping, I gathered that she was on a blind date she’d set up from the Internet, and I was warming myself up around where this guy told her he would meet her… thirty minutes ago. She’d mistaken me to be him, and worse, she thought I got up to leave after I’d seen her.

I explained to her that I would have done no such thing.

I lied. She was hideous.

I bought a hat a few minutes later.