Shows what they know. I’d only be worried if you said you were moving to Camden, West Bend or Saginaw.
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There’s a town in Oregon named Saginaw. Every time I passed it on the freeway, even if I was driving alone, I’d yell, “Sagin-AW-YEAH!!”
Edit
That’s a lie. Sometimes I’d whisper to my passengers, “sa-Gine-uh”.
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I’m sure it’s significantly safer to drive through than it’s namesake here in Michigan. 
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I have a friend who started to develop an idea to buy farmland in Michigan to create a farming camp for inner city girls. (Her work history made this a realistic venture.) She asked if I would come look at properties with her, because I have some knowledge in this area. Before we’d even get to the properties, I would point out how much gang graffiti was on garages, etc. that we would pass going down the various farm roads. She finally realized that taking girls from the south side of Chicago to an area with even more gang presence was probably not the right move.
Rural Michigan is a scarier place than most people realize.
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Which overpass?
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I drove over the Ben Franklin into Camden by accident - missed the exit - with my grandparents, and couldn’t figure out how to get back in the other direction. My grandmother was unflappable as she was far enough along with dementia that nothing flapped her, I don’t recall my grandfather’s reaction but I was scared shitless at being in the only car on the street with wheels.
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The bagels in EPA are much better.
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Far better baklava and pierogies here.
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Going to a funeral right now, for someone who died at 97, lived a good life, made everyone feel welcome in his presence, and his loved ones will miss him (including people like me, who are not related to him).
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So… remember how I was certain I flunked a class?
Turns out I didn’t flunk it. After taking a deep breath, resigning myself to my fate, and looking at my grade, I got a C+. I never keep track of my grade during the semester. To me, it makes no sense beyond the drop date, and I usually don’t worry about dropping anyway because of the way it often affects financial aid. I don’t understand students who endlessly calculate their grade and figure out minimum scores and grade cut-offs. My personal philosophy is basically:
If I do my best, then that’s literally all I can do. I don’t always do my best (because if I did, I wouldn’t be worried about this grade in the first place) but I don’t see the benefit of adding anxiety to the process. So I never really know my grade until the end.
Still, I don’t get it. That’s not a on a straight curve. After calculating it, there is no mathematical way I made the passing grade unless my instructor scaled it. I’m feeling a little split. On the one hand: Whoo-hoo, I passed. On the other hand the grade is inflated. On the one hand, I feel like I didn’t master the material. On the other hand, I don’t have to, I was taking the course for my own edification…
Either way, I think I might prefer a straight scale. I don’t know that I accept the philosophy behind scaling or curving grades. Still. I didn’t fail. Goes in the “win” column.
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Well, it depends on the type of class and your school’s philosophy of grading. If “C” means “average” then doing a statistical curve makes perfect sense. If instead the letters are supposed to be objective measures of mastery of the material, then rescaling (but not statistical rescaling) again makes sense, since it is practically impossible to craft an exam and grading scheme where the point totals follow some predetermined set of cutoffs. Moreover, if you somehow magically create a 100-point exam where, say, 90 points is an A, 80 a B, and so on, then the 60% of the exam that everyone should get is wasted as an evaluation tool. Much better to write an exam that spreads the students as widely as possible across the 0-100 scale, so it is easier to disambiguate various levels of mastery.
Of course, this is all highly field-dependent, and so you’re more likely to find exams written this way in math or physics than you are in English or sociology.
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I never thought of it like that.
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I’ve started dreaming again lately. Awesome epic detailed dreams full of joy and sorrow. Dreams that process some of my past, dreams that offer insight into futures. Literally had no dreams for >15 years. None that I remember at least.
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Oh, I’ve gotten into deep, heated arguments about this :D. And it always comes down to the definition of a grade. I’ll spare you the witty riparte, but if you got a C+ own that shit.
Side bar:
Math students are the worst when it comes to grading. I just want to scream, “no, a bell curve does not apply to you and your classmates in this point in time!”
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At GCSE we were put into sets for high, medium, low levels of ability, and there were separate exams for each level.
No grading on a curve. You had to get a certain percentage to pass, and then each 10% of score was an increase in grade. IIRC, 80% was the highest grade, 70% was the next one…
The weird bit was that if you were taking the low level maths exam, the highest grade you could get was a D. Bit of a pisser if you wanted to go on to A-Levels, because you needed a C in Maths and English at GCSE to do that.
This was also in the year they introduced an A* grade above A, rather than setting the exam correctly for an A.
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This is a spillover from the Fuck Today thread, but getting a diagnosis and reading articles about different issues to do with high functioning autism really helped me to build up a coherent picture of who I am and about growing up, which was a confusing experience - why can’t I connect with people? Why am I failing when I try so hard and everyone thinks I should be able to do it? Why do I keep getting in trouble when I mean well? Why don’t my parents seem to understand me or listen to me, even though I know they care about me? Why do they keep hitting me? Or when I got older - why aren’t I growing out of this?
I was able to get a clear picture and explain my whole childhood to my parents from my own perspective for the first time (in a completely non-judgemental way, pointing out the things I did and didn’t understand, along with the many good things I learned from them and am grateful for, then talking them through the reasons I acted in odd ways at different points growing up). They got it. This may not seem like much, but to be told by my parents that I was understood and that my reactions now made sense to them, that they accept my principle of not using physical discipline and that they would have responded very differently to me if they had the chance with the information they now have was huge. I was also able to explain why the dramatic and lasting conversion experience I had (to Evangelical Christianity, at age 4) wasn’t necessarily a miracle, and could be explained from other perspectives. They didn’t quite agree there, but they do think that it makes more sense now!
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I could certainly craft an exam like that, but would only do so it if was meant to test shallow understanding of many topics, perhaps using short answer questions.
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Hey Doctor Who nerds! Go buy this Doctor Who ebook which has an essay contributed by yours truly included! It might be nice to get paid for once for all this writing I’m doing, so please share it far and wide!
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YES!
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Have you read Look Me In The Eye?
It’s pretty good, and his back story is interesting, and then even more interesting. And personally, I had met the guy many years ago, well before he figured it out. Just thought he was one weird mechanic. But he is behind a few cool details of the world around us.
ETA: He is the older brother of the Running With Scissors guy - a whole other level of WTF, really.
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