orichalcum

Jordanian cat adopts 7 baby chicks. Your daily dose of cuteness.

In honor, a bit late, of Mother's Day. I had a sweet and quiet Mother's Day. Mac made Norman muffins and bacon for brunch, with some assistance from his sous chef A. Then we went to the Dog Beach and Eowyn ran madly into the water and in chase of balls, while Mac mostly slept. Then home for a dinner of smoked lamb, corn and avocado salad, and the sour cream chocolate layer cake with chocolate sour cream icing. I am overall disappointed in one of my first attempts at a layer cake. Largely, it has the problem I typically associate with layer cakes, which is that the actual cake part is not terribly interesting. I think this is why I prefer mousse cakes or very dark chocolate layers or generally cakes that don't have that blah section in between the frosting. Still, it was yummy. Mac and A. got me the M. Chabon collection of short stories, which should prove interesting.

Now to prep a lecture on early Christianity without offending 100+ people.

Hey, other teachers out there...it appears that my T.A. (as far as I can tell) may have lost 4 midterms. What is the solution? The midterm is worth 35% of their final grade.

So, my students created the roughdraft of their Wikipedia articles last Friday and sent the links to me and to three fellow students for review. The student comments are due tomorrow, and the final version is due Friday. This seemed fairly straightforward.

However, Wikipedia does not, of course, exist in a vacuum. A number of random Internet people have been editing and revising my students' articles, which I thought would go largely ignored for a week since, after all, they are on rather obscure topics like Babatha and L. Caecilius Iucundus. So the question becomes, how do I grade fairly given those revisions? My current plan is to check the history links, but that will be cumbersome and take much longer than expected. I could just give them credit for creating the article.

All in all, it's a good thing, but rather inconvenient at the moment.