Well, it’s that time of semester again. I have to think of things to put on the midterm exams. I started this process last night (Sunday) for my Physics 151 class. It was a sort of finishing-off of a weekend (filled with gardening and house cleaning), before another busy work week began. So rather than do this at home (where I’d get distracted by a million and one other “pressing” things) I decided to spend a couple of hours down at my “local”, the Cat and Fiddle, 
which is a rather successful approximation of an English pub, with the bonus of being in an old-Los Angeles hacienda-style setting with a lovely large courtyard with fountain, while still having your standard pub-style interior complete with dartboards, and fish and chips, bangers and mash, and steak-and-kidney pie on the menu. Excellent! (My only complaint is that the wait staff are not stroppy enough…. way too uniformly cheerful to be authentic…. and not wearing nearly enough black. Sigh.)
Sitting in a quiet corner with a little notebook thinking up exam questions with a (surprisingly well-poured) pint of guinness is actually a nice way of spending a couple of hours on a Sunday evening. There was the added …. bonus …. that there was some live Jazz music (of dubious quality) in the courtyard, which was a pleasant enough backdrop.
The process of preparing exams for the freshman level is very different from the sort of exam preparation I spoke about earlier. Here, the students are still learning a lot of the language of expressing themselves coherently in properly formed mathematical statements, and still developing intuition for how the physical world works…. crucially they are learning (I hope) to abandon a lot of the dreadfully confusing phrases that pervade our language, which they hold onto, which then pollutes their physics….. And most importantly they are still learning to be confident about making the physics -and the processes I have taught them- work for them consistently, so it is a delicate time, and they’re easily confused at this stage. So one must prepare very straightforward questions, with extra clear instructions, and no clever sting in the tail. Sadly, I think we’ve been erring more on the side of caution in this area every year (it does not matter at which institution I’ve taught), and things get simpler and simpler to the point that it is difficult to go back. (But I understand that this is what is called “progress”, and so onwards and upwards we go…..)
Anyway, it was a nice time, and I wrote all my questions. The full moon was shining down on the courtyard as I scribbled and computed the outcomes of little mechanics scenarios (most of which were too complicated to use – the exam is only an hour long) with lots of people chatting around me about relationships and the like, and with the jazz quintet playing in the far corner. I’d have taken a picture of the scene for you, but I decided not to for the following reason: Normally I can whip out the camera and snap a scene before anyone is aware of what I’m doing, but the challenging (but picturesque) low-lighting conditions would have meant me fiddling a bit to get it right, and I’d have attracted some attention to myself. The last time I accidentally did that in one of my haunts one lunchtime (actually at the Alcove, a pleasant cafe not a million miles away), some celebrity (or celebrity wannabe) at the table next to me got up in a huff, picked up her kid and left, apparently thinking I was some member of the paparazzi taking a picture of them. I’ve still no idea who it was, but it was sort of annoying. The Cat is rather well known for being a place for spotting those types (the real celebrities and the ones who think they are) – if this interests you – and so I erred on the side of caution, as I just wanted to drink my pint in peace. It’s just so hazardous hanging out in Hollywood sometimes.
-cvj
February 14th, 2006 at 12:45 am
My problem with the Cat and the Fiddle when I visited a few years ago was the absolute ignorance of the no-smoking rules in California. Smoking inside, smoking outside–while it may have been authentic, it wasn’t what I was looking for in a California restaurant.
February 14th, 2006 at 12:48 am
That has changed now. The rules are enforced. I must say, however, that it is not really a restaurant. It is a really pub that also serves food….. a bit of cigarette smoke is not so bad from that perspective….. especially since the courtyard is so spacious.
Give it another try…
Cheers,
-cvj
February 14th, 2006 at 12:56 am
Excellent! The food was good, so hearing this makes it that I will visit again.
February 14th, 2006 at 8:44 am
Smoke hopefully won’t be authentic for too much longer – anti-smoking legislation is to be voted on today!
February 14th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
Yeah, been listening to that on the news…. those guys are really deadly serious aren’t they? Wow! I’d no idea it had got that far in legislation…..
-cvj
February 17th, 2006 at 12:46 am
[...] I am supposed to be at a recital here on campus of songs by Purcell, Haydn, Beethoven, Vaughan Williams, and others, sung by the baritone Peter Lightfoot, a colleague from USC’s Thornton School of Music faculty, who I met when new here. He was a neighbour in the excellent faculty complex you can rent a house in when you’re new to the city. The TAs are working hard on grading the midterm we set earlier today (see here) and so as I have to stay on campus until they’re done (we try to get everything done immediately after the exam has been taken, and finish it all and announce the grades the same night) it was an opportunity to relax for a while and listen to some wonderful singing, before coming back to work on entering and analyzing the grades, etc. Well, I went to the recital hall and found that it was cancelled. Drat. So I’ve come back here and thought I would blog for a bit instead, since it is so much more attractive than having to write my Annual Activity Report, which is due tomorrow…. [...]
February 22nd, 2006 at 9:52 pm
[...] …. I gave the midterm for my Electromagnetism class today. Stayed up until 1:30am putting the finishing touches on it, and then up again four and a half hours later to go in and get it set up to give to them at 8:45am in class. They had one hour of furious computing -and a bit of thinking- to do. These ones are hard to get right since you’ve got to gauge their ability to do enough in the time required. Get it wrong (like I did with the equivalent mid term last year) and they just can require way longer to do it than they have time for. It is really important to recall that they are still young and don’t take all the same computational shortcuts that one does later in life. And recall that for upper-level courses I like to have a bit of fun new stuff in there too, so I had to think carefully about how to do that in one hour too. (The plan was to do this all with the aid of the atmostphere at the Cat and Fiddle, like last week’s midterm prep session, but in the end I got sucked in by tons of incredibly campy Queen videos -how come we never saw that aspect so clearly as kids?- on You Tube…., which made for a background which is more relevant than you think… more on that later.) [...]
April 26th, 2006 at 9:15 pm
[...] I have to design them a final exam very soon. Time for a trip to the Cat and Fiddle then, some evening soon. I’m going to see if I can get in a “fun” question at the end again, like last year. During the exam last year, one student (Lauren Schenkman) raised her hand to ask a question. I thought there was a typo or something on the exam. No, there wasn’t. Her question – asked cautiously and respectfully, was, “Are you serious?”. I love that. Here was the question: [...]