Tales from my Office

1. I really, really, really want to leave my office to double-check that I remembered to lock my car. Almost every time that I go back to make sure that I've locked my house, car, whatever, it really is locked. However, there was once when I really did forget to lock the car. I believe that there is nothing in the car worth stealing.


2. A student came by to ask questions about calculus. She admitted that she never took College Algebra, coming directly from Intermediate Algebra. Why, why, why can't we have a registration system that catches these students and lets us know? I'm not even asking for it to automatically drop them. Just give us a way to know that they're ignoring the prereqs.


3. Another student was going to come by and talk to me, but he emailed me to let me know that he figured out the difference between factors and mutiples so he doesn't need to come by today. (The material I teach in the gen-ed class is not particularly rigorous.)


4. The temperature in my office is selected by a random number generator that outputs numbers between 50 and 100.


5. I'm tempted to go home and get at least one of my Perl books. I'm trying to write programs that do some nice text-processing on my gradebook (the version that I download from Blackboard has too much crap in the "name" cell) and others that will take my gradebook and output LaTeX source of individualized grade reports. If I can figure out how to make sendmail play nice with the SMTP around here, I could have it email each student an individualized grade report. Maybe I could write something that automatically generates exams and their answer keys. Yes, I'm avoiding the real work that I'm supposed to be doing.