And the crowd thins and he moves up close but he doesn't speak

More stuff for at work: on top of my own teaching style being evaluated (by the way, the writeup of it has not been completed yet, or at least it hasn't been mailed to me), all the sections of one of the two classes I'm teaching are being evaluated. This is distinct from the teaching style and reaches more into making sure that the correct subjects are being covered. I was worried about what form this would take, particularly since I was given early on two pages of what was plainly the setup for some statistics problems and told that questions based on them would follow. I could tell from the data given the sorts of questions likely to arise, and sure enough, one of them would reach into topics I hadn't covered yet.

Well, but, then the list of questions arrived. And while the second does still reach into topics I had figured not to cover, they don't reach deeply into that field. I could include a mention of it this week and then put out the questions later, based on that. I'm also allowed to ask the questions in any way I like --- in-class quiz, homework, making it part of an exam, whatever --- which gives me some flexibility in using them all.

But it also highlights that my course varies from the one they really, really want, the one with the pre-made PowerPoint slides (which are, frankly, better than the textbook) and the pre-recorded videos uploaded to the campus shared files folder. Of course, if someone's just guiding students through PowerPoint slides and pre-recorded videos they don't need me, so, I'm comfortable with how I've been teaching. Besides, it's not like they can fire me.

Trivia: Britain's Ministry of Information banned the publication of George Orwell's Animal Farm until after the war. Source: Why The Allies Won, Richard Overy.

Currently Reading: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June 2012. Editor Stanley Schmitt. I trust some of the Fact writers are not entirely crotchety old men searching for clouds to yell at, but the nonfiction pieces give that impression. Part of this, of course, is the Alternate View guy chuckling about how confident he is that the faster-than-light neutrinos would pan out as a real honest-to-goodness discovery, when all the ... not just the smart money, but all the money not actually severely developmentally disabled, was on ``it's a glitch but we have to figure out where''. Maybe he can find consolation from New Scientist. Another part is the Official Editorial and Schmitt responding to the growing consensus that cities are good for the environment because of how they lower per-capita ecological strains (besides their other benefits to people and economies) with, ``so, what, you're gonna MAKE us all live in cities LIKE IT OR NOT?'' Yes, he warns that he's taking the contrary view because he wants to provoke thought, but he's also provoking thoughts of, ``I bet he's scared the hippies are going to break into his apartment and hold a psychedelic circus right in front of his dear wife Gertrude Esther''.