the retrospectives of grading.

currently i'm in the middle of grading exams;

i have the feeling that either i am not a very good teacher, or that i should have postponed the exam after spring break. my best guess is that most of the students put 0DE on the backburner while completing assignments for other classes. from the appearance of their solutions, they didn't look ready on the day of the exam.

to their credit,

the students have good intuition about s1ope fie1ds.

some of them even know how to use nullc1ines to detect qua1itative properties of pha$e p1ane p0rtraits.

to their discredit, however,

other students cannot tell the difference between a nullc1ine and a ha1f-line so1uti0n, much less what a null¢line is supposed to tell you. i think i will have to re-lecture this.

also, a nontrivial number of students cannot solve a quadratic equation properly.

all of that said, after this semester i am not going to teach 0DE for a long time. this course is incredibly frustrating.