grading

When I was an undergrad, I remember thinking that papers were very helpful.  They force you to sit down and think through a topic in more depth than you would if you only took an exam or something like that.  So now that I am teaching, I think that papers are important for a number of reasons.  I now wish I had different opinions about assigning papers to students.  I really, really don't like reading massive stacks of papers.

Below is me happily holding all of the papers I graded this past semester.  Except for the small stack I found on a different desk (totally thought I lost like 40 or 50 final papers... that would have been unfortunate).  This is also minus the graded papers that students actually came to pick up.  I felt I needed to document this.

Real weekends

Since we had a some-what normal weekend, I thought I'd put a few pictures of it up.  Sara had the whole weekend off, or a two day vacation (she calls any time off - even if counted in hours - a vacation to feel better about it).  She ran the half marathon here in Dallas for the third year this year.  She did pretty good despite it being all cold and rainy out.  Here is is with others from the hospital.  

 They forgot to take a picture of all of them until they were on the train headed back home from the race.

We also we and got a Christmas tree.  Sara was super excited.  I was... well...  Anyways, we decided that it may be easier to just carry the tree home instead of taking the time to awkwardly tie it to the top of our car and drive just a few blocks.  I even almost beat Sara home.

That is about it I think.  Maybe Sara would have had more fun stuff to say.  She is working a lot right now in the little kid ICU and it is finals time of the year for me.  This was an attempt to productively waste time.  Enjoy.