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September 26, 2005
Winning Ugly -- for now
In my ACC 455 class, we're broken up into three-person teams for in-class quizzes. The professor turns us loose with three copies of the quiz, we scribble furiously for a few minutes, come up with (what we think is) one good answer, then get it graded on the spot, with all three team members receiving the same grade. My teammates are a couple of good sports who work hard and generally have a pretty good understanding of what we've been studying.
So far, my team has managed 100% on every group quiz, sometimes without being an artistic success. We've been winning ugly, sort of like the Milwaukee Brewers during the era of Gorman Thomas, Paul Molitor, Robin Yount, and Charlie Moore.
But today's was the ugliest win yet. It had to do with minimum pension liability, a concept I've wrestled with for some time but have yet to grasp fully. After several minutes of scribbling, head-scratching, muttering, and resigned shrugging, my teammates and I pretty much gave up.... I certainly did, since I had the poorest grasp of minimum liability of any of the three of us. Only when the others had thrown up their hands and capitulated did I haltingly suggest a figure that I'd been toying with on my worksheet but was not at all sure of... As it turned out, although it was a shot in the dark, it turned out to be right -- and with a few more minutes of scribbling, we managed to come up with the correct answers to the quiz questions.
We have one guy who usually bails us out -- he's our Gorman Thomas -- other times, my other teammate comes through; today, I happened to be the one to break the mental logjam and get us going. This is why, on the peer-evaluation form we were given (to let the instructor know what we think of our teammates' performance so far), I evaluated us as follows (the form includes a space for self-eval):
Urb: "I'm pedaling as fast as I can."
Teammate 1: "She's pedaling as fast as she can."
Teammate 2: "He's a sharp guy."
At the end of class, though, our instructor observed that "There's going to have to be some serious studying between now and tomorrow night." Well, obviously, there will be -- but with all due respect, what does she think we've been doing all along?
Posted by Urbie at September 26, 2005 12:13 PM