Grad dinner on Sat. I'll miss these people. La Jolla is beautiful, I should go there more often and explore more places and not just stay at the shores and play with sand and water..

Sunday/ Monday.. beautiful weather after seeing no sun for I don't even remember how long.. I found a baby grand, never knew it's there and the door wasn't locked, ha.. so played with it for a while, nice sound =)

Tuesday. Concert. Funny how I'm hearing the Stravinsky piece which part of the orch played for the first time in my life. Anyway, concert is pretty good, I guess half the Mus4 class was there.. haha, one of the only tonal music concerts that are free and not too long in UCSD. I enjoyed it, though there are many parts where the winds almost broke down. Geoff was literally poking the baton at them and mouthing ONE, 2, 3, 4.. and he was good with the cues.. He was supposed to gesture wildly to cue us in at points cos either we can't count or there are just too many bars of rests, and he gestured wildly gracefully.. One of the shortest concerts that I've played in, felt even shorter than Wasbe, it probably is, only 3 pieces.. Enjoyed myself, will take it again if I have the chance.
Felt super bad for wy. She was trying to help me.. and I just told her to go sleep. Well what's done's done, essay's out of my hands, whatever the grade is, it will be.. John was saying in class that he only wants A essays, if the essay's not an A essay, don't hand it in.. I sure hope I get an A..

Had an extensive discussion on grading today. Should effort be taken into consideration when grading? What's the best way to curve a class? And heard of Dan's many experiments with grades in his classes.. Grading a maths paper on impression, if you give a proof that makes the most sense, but couldn't get to the answer cos you think 2+2 = 7, you can still get more credit than someone who managed to get to the proof through some unconvincing way.. University is so different. And they were amused by the bao's sch method of confidence levels questions..
Talked about how some people feel weird getting a 70% and still getting an A, felt like they only know 3/4 of the work. I still prefer the 70% A thing.. cos it gives teachers a chance to spread the grades out, and I won't be screwed if I make a stupid mistake.. Didn't tell them that I've been struggling to get 70% in JC.
Talked about how unrepresentative grades are of a person's ability, especially CAPE.. I agree that CAPE is pretty rubbishy, and it's the first time that I heard that it affects the lecturer's promotion opportunities.. Unfortunately in this world, we can only use numbers and letters to represent our abilities..
Complained about how I'm always on waitlists.. Somehow conversation got to funding.. The state only provides about 20% of the money the sch needs. And there's an interesting point raised. If you go to a private sch like Princeton, you don't have to pay anything you can't cos of their no-debt policy. So if you're rich and you go to a private sch, you pay more cos you can afford to and FA won't cover what you can pay. If you go to a state sch, you pay less cos sch fees are less. If you're poor, you go to a private sch, you pay less. If you go to a state sch, you end up with lots of debt. So public schs are serving the rich. That's contrary to what they're supposed to be doing.

Last thing, about Hum and other university-level courses. Acc to Dan, it sets a bar that's higher than what people are used to in high school. It teaches people that there are some things in life that you just can't reach or have to work very hard to reach. I'm fine if you want to do that, but don't do it on a compulsory letter grade course. I just want it to serve as an indication that this is not the right field for me to go into, not as an obstacle in my path to a non humanities related career.. Sounds super selfish. Anyway they're looking to see if they should make Hum 3, 4, 5 compulsory to take in UCSD or if they should allow P/NP on Hum 3, 4, 5 cos a lot of people drop out after Hum2. I would gladly welcome P/NP.

Some entertainment
The Lion Sleeps Tonight - Google Video