I’ve found that comment codes are useful ways to keep myself sane while grading - if I can just scrawl “E” for “You are making the baby English language cry. If you do not take your next paper to the campus writing center before turning it in you are at serious risk of dictionaries leaping off the shelves to pummel you”, I feel less compulsion to make time-consuming line-by-line edits that my students are very unlikely to ever read. Plus, while no one bothers to pick up their old work after the semester is over, most people will log in to the online gradebook. If I put a brief note there, they might actually read it.

When I prepare the actual comment decoder sheets, I try to be constructive. Sometimes it takes a few drafts to remove all the snark. (Note to any students who might be reading this: sometimes I also put in extra snark, just because it’s funny. Most of your papers were actually pretty good.)
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In other news, my students might be drylabbers and plagiarizers - I have a couple of suspiciously well-written, wildly off-topic papers sitting on my windowsill - but at least they are smart enough to avoid idiot maneuvers like plagiarizing from Wikipedia. I typed quite a few sentence fragments into Google yesterday, to absolutely no avail. Go Bears!

This is the shortest true reason I can think of: I put the “geo” to my “physics” because Caltech had a science breadth requirement. My early earth science education was not very compelling - a 7th-grade class taught mostly out of the textbook, and a vague impression of musty cases filled with minerals and fossils and faded labels. When forced to choose between geology and astronomy for my breadth course, I took geology, because I heard there was a field trip and I knew one of the undergraduate TAs.

Ge 1 was a total fucking crack pipe. I wasn’t the only one who thought so, either. I don’t have numbers, but I know there was a significant increase in the size of the undergraduate programs after the course requirement was introduced.

This is one of the things that makes me excited about teaching an intro-level class. Since we’re drawing mainly from a pool of students who don’t intend to major in the physical sciences, it’s a little more difficult to recruit, but a few of my students from last year have gone on to take other courses in the department.

My sense is that even in California, students don’t get much secondary-level geoscience education and enter college without much understanding of how earth science works as a discipline. That leaves an awful lot of room for college-level intro courses and adult public outreach to make an impression.

My estimates were a little off, though I got the magnitude more or less right (not by using special seismologist tricks, though, just pure small earthquake shaking experience available to anyone who’s lived here long enough). However, I seemed to be the only one who cared; the non-seismologists around me were playing some magnitude guessing games, but they were primarily interested in their own excitement, and describing how it felt to them.

A survey of local news coverage confirms that my initial questions really are different from the general population’s. The stories are littered with man-on-the-street quotes: the city manager of Lafayette (the city nearest the epicenter) said “it didn’t feel like a shake to me, it felt like a jolt”; a restaurant host said “at first it was kind of jolty, then it shook side to side; it felt like it was vibrating beneath you”; and the SF Chronicle reporters used their authorial voice to describe things as a “jolt and rocking motion”. Needless to say, the distinction between a “shake” and a “jolt” has not been given a precise meaning by the scientific community.
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Or actually, I won’t tell them, because this class is graded on a curve. No one on this campus understands about curves. I have had many students come to me, very upset, because their grade was below whatever cutoff percentage their high school teachers used to determine a C; or demand to know what grade they need to get on the final to earn a B, even though they “know the class is curved”.

Anyway, point is, I meet apathy with apathy. What really drives me up a wall is when I get emails to the tune of, “I am really interested in the course material and have learned a lot. What is the minimum I need to do to pass the class?”

Dear students: Please learn to construct more believable sycophantic natterings. Fondly, Your GSI.

But what is seismotology, and how can I become a certified practitioner?

However, my college professor uncle forwarded this year’s list of things that will make college professors feel really old to the family list, and it’s Friday, so I thought I’d play along. Am I too old and farty to relate to my students?
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Taking four proper classes is a reasonable undergrad schedule, but as a grad student there’s this amorphous thing I need to do… I can’t even remember what it’s called, rehashing knowledge? Straightforward application of old theory to new problems and making yourself look clever while doing so? Bullshit data posturing? Or maybe it’s just cleaning up after post-colloquium parties. Something. Whatever it is, I should probably pick a class to audit/drop to make room.

The first-year grad student with ample office space and a Bay view couldn’t last - I’m being kicked down to the first floor, with a nice view of some construction trailers. At least there’s a window. I’ll need a new exercise routine, though, now that I don’t have to climb four flights of stairs two or three times a day.