an exciting day. whoop.

Much of today was given over to a department retreat: the other three computer science faculty in my department came over to my house and we spent six hours discussing various courses, what they're supposed to achieve, and "learning outcomes assessment", i.e. how we're going to tell whether the students have actually learned what we said we wanted them to learn. This is not quite the same thing as grading. First, grades in one course are affected not only by learning in that course but by learning in other courses. Second, a student who has achieved B-level command of all the topics in a course gets the same letter grade as one who has achieved A-level mastery in some topics and C-level competence in others. Third, in learning outcomes assessment we usually don't care what individual students have achieved (to draw conclusions about the student), but rather what the mean or median student has achieved (to draw conclusions about the curriculum and the teaching). A letter grade is too specific in the temporal and student dimensions and too broad in the subject dimension.

Anyway, assessment (particularly of student work this year) was the top item on the agenda for today. We didn't actually get to any of it, as we spent the entire six hours coming up with general goals, a few words each, for each course, goals that in many cases could have been found in the existing course descriptions. What a waste of time. Not that the outcomes-assessment was likely to be any more pleasant or productive, but we're supposed to produce a report about it in the next month.

On the bright side, shalmestere and I got the house cleaner than it's been in months, in preparation for my colleagues coming over. So at least the living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and upstairs hallway are more pleasant places to be.

Alumni news

In today's mail was a quarterly alumni magazine from my undergraduate institution. Classic junk mail, of course; don't even bother opening it. Except that my undergraduate institution is Virginia Tech, and this was the first alumni magazine since April 16. The cover was black, with a small maroon-and-orange ribbon and the words "We will prevail." The magazine was devoted to photos and biographies of the fallen, addresses by the University President, the Governor, and Dubya at the memorial convocation, photos of candlelight vigils and shows of sympathy from around the world, etc.

I didn't know any of the 33 people murdered in Blacksburg that day, but I took classes there twenty years ago, and I currently work at another University. For that matter, I didn't know any of the 3000 people killed in the 9/11 attacks, but most of them lived, worked, and died within fifteen miles of my home, and several people I know should have been there -- one missed her usual train, another skipped work to visit the DMV, another's alarm didn't go off, etc. In both cases, it's purely the luck of the draw that neither I nor anyone I know were among the victims. Every one of those people had loves, hates, memories, talents, plans, etc. all irrelevant now because one person (or a few people) had both hatred and weaponry.

And there but for the grace of god....