20151128.0841

The Mrs., Ms. 8, and I are back at Sherwood Cottage after a Thanksgiving spent with my father-in-law and a branch of a blended family. It was good to see my step-niece and -nephews, as well as a two-step niece. (It is a thoroughly blended family, indeed.) It was good to eat my fill--and not to go too much past it, in the event. I had the opportunity to deploy some of my older skills and to find them still in place, which pleased me greatly; I like to know things, and I like to still know things. That they were actually useful things to know was an added bonus; it is not something that happens often, what with my line of work being what it is.

I am back at that work now, though; another freelance order came in while I was away, and I am attending to it. Too, there is grading to do; my students had a paper due the Monday before the holiday, and I have not worked on reviewing their submissions yet. There is a fair bit of time left for me to attend to them, though; they are not due back until the Monday of exam week. That is fast approaching, though, and so I have to write the exams my students will be taking. I am lucky that I only have to compile one such thing, to be sure, and I already know the general form that the exercise will take. It remains only to provide the specific details of the exam--and that should prove reasonably easily accomplished.

I say so because of how I have set up the exam this term. I offered the students in my classes the opportunity to vote on the type of exam they would have. Their choices were a letter, written from the perspective of an expert in their field of endeavor, advising me about how to improve the class (and with the note that the class is required, so "don't teach it" is not a viable option); a multiple-choice exam, with the understanding that I write my multiple-choice exams such that the difference between the best answer and others is the tense of the verb, or whether a period or comma appears at a given point in an MLA-style Works Cited entry; and a riddle, the text of which must be proofread and the answer to which must be explained from the clues given in the text. They voted in favor of the third option; I have but to select a riddle, render it in appropriate modern English, and embed proofreading errors into it for the students to find and correct. Easy.

Thus, while work continues after the holiday is done, it continues in a way that seems as if it can be handled easily and well. I look forward to getting a bit more of it done, and in fairly short order. I have to clear the way for more of it to come--and more of it is coming, indeed.