[Short rants.]

Today, company barbeque which is nice, despite being the hottest day of the year. So, we're all waiting outside as the food is half an hour late. As it arrives, a fire alarm goes off and we have to all leave the picnic area and wait for the fire trucks.

Why did the alarm go off? Because some idiot upstairs decided to have a hot dog cookout, on a propane grill, in his office!

[Why (and When) did You Become an Oriole Fan ???]

I've lived my whole life in various parts of NY state.

I grew up in Rochester, going to Red Wings games when Cal Ripken, Mike Boddicker, Storm Davis, were all playing in AAA. One day, one player gets removed from the game and an announcement is made he's been called up. I ask my dad what that means, and he tells me that player is joing the Baltimore Orioles. I've been an O's fan ever since. This happened in the early 80s, when I was 6-7 years old.

And, I loved the yearly Orioles-Red Wings exhibition in Rochester. I used to go to that game every year as a kid, collecting autographs.

[Short rants.]

For a short rant:

Yesterday, my two kids (4 and 2 both with Aspergers) look outside and see a 13ish year old smashing their snowmen and rolling the pieces into the street. What was this kid thinking?

He ran like heck when I came outside.

He lives 2 doors up the street from me, but when I was waiting for him at his house as he tried to sneak in without me seeing him, he denied he lived there.

[Short rants.]

My older brother is a TA for an AI class at MIT. I think he has more leeway than the specific criteria that you described for physics, but it is MIT so it is going to be hard. I'm not sure how merciful he is as compared to other TAs, but he doesn't give out a lot of A's.

It may have to do with the number of students in his class. TAs in the non-calculus physics were allowed to have some leeway, they had around 30 students. Calculus physics had about 500, so any leeway given to one would have to be given to all.

[Short rants.]

Bio labs were graded by a TA last term, and I kept getting middle B's on them no matter what I did. It's like he changed the point values of various minutiae so I would always wind up with an 87. I didn't say anything until the last day, when we got our final labs back and I realized he'd taken off 2 points for failing to write the species name in the graph caption. For 3 graphs. That's 6 points off on a 100-point assignment, or over half a letter grade, for failing to write the Latin name for "garden tomato" in the caption. I HATE double jeopardy grading. If I make the same mistake over and over, don't keep taking off points until suddenly I have a wildly disproportionate amount of points missing for something completely stupid. Like taking off a point on a two-point problem because I mislabelled units. Are the units really worth 50% of the problem? Because next time I'm just going to write "micromoles per litre," and you'd better give me a point!

Anyway, on the last day, I decided, "What the hell, the course is over anyway" and took my lab up the chain of command directly to the professor and complained. He agreed that the grading was "excessive" and gave me my 6 points back. I pulled an A- in the class. Who knows what it might have been if I'd complained earlier? I know other students were having similar problems, and I feel bad that I didn't speak up and maybe gotten him to lighten up a little, because it obviously wasn't how the professor intended the labs to be graded.

We were required on many problems to deduct 1/2 a point (often on 1 point problems) every time units were left off. I had students fail my class because of that, but I was not allowed to do anything about it. Sadly, for me it was how the professor intended labs to be graded. In fact, he kept them all at the end of the year to make sure we were grading them the right way.

[Short rants.]

-Anal-retentive grading of chemistry problem sets and biology lab reports, especially when they're graded by TA's. You guys were in my boat 2 years ago. Show a little mercy.

As a former Physics TA, most of the time the anal-retentive grading was required. We were handed a solution and given very exact directions as to how we could give points to the students. So, there was little we were allowed to do to show mercy.