Being human

Now that the semester is over and I’ve recovered from marking, I’m trying to catch up with life.  Canon Musiime went to India again for more cancer treatment, and I marked one of his exams in addition to my two.

Before the exams, one of my students beseeched me to “be as human while marking as I had been during the semester.”  I suppose that it was his way of saying that I had been kind during the semester (which I find comical, given the number of assignments I asked to be redone), and he wanted me to be kind while marking.

It must have worked; no retakes (failures) from me!  As I always tell my students, marks are earned, not given, and it was gratifying to see what they had picked up.  Of course, there were a few who flirted with earning a retake, and a couple who made me wonder whether they attended the same lectures I did, but such is the nature of the Bell Curve.