Overdue Report

I was supposed to tell you about the calculus exam, I think? Not really much to say. Covered the first few sections of sequences and series, and the class average was a B. Unlike my previous bimodal distributions, this time the exam scores really were centered at a B. And the results were pretty much what you would expect. Students who did just fine on the sequence homework screwed up the sequence questions because they got them mixed up with series (they tried to apply the p-series test to the sequence 1/sqrt(n)). And the converse was true, too. A lot of the students decided that if the limit of the nth term exists, then the series must converge. Well, I'm saying "a lot of students", but with the average being a B probably I mean "more than I would hope."

When we get back from spring break, we'll talk about absolute convergence and the ratio test and then dive into power series. Lets hope that the low end of my curve spends the week studying.

Spent the past day or so preparing the laptop to go inpatient at the Apple Store. She's having problems with charging her battery. It's not the power adapter, as I borrowed one from someone else with a well-behaving black MacBook, and it didn't help my problem. It's been long hours of backing things up, of sanitizing my hard drive of sensitive data, and of pruning my collection of saved passwords. (Also learned that keychain access can have its own menulet at the right edge of the menu bar!)

I'm hoping that while the computer is in the shop that I can spend this week (spring break!) catching up on knitting, sewing, and grading. As I have two other Macs (home desktop, office desktop), I probably won't be too far out of touch. Just I probably won't be wasting my evenings sitting on the couch simultaneously watching TV and fussing on the laptop. I had the brilliant idea to copy my Documents folder onto my iPod, so I'll be able to access my most important stuff no matter which machine I'm on.