"Any two for elevennis?" - from Victor Borge's "Inflationary Language"

The link from which the title comes from is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY6kElOYcd8. VERY HILARIOUS! :) :)

Anywho, sorry about writing so late this week. It's all my fault. Brittany has been badgering me about it since Sunday, but I've just been crazy busy (more like crazy lazy).

The weekdays never really are very exciting. Mostly just class, work, class, and more work. Oh, and add in a little homework there too. We did have some reprieve over the week, though, because Lanie was in town for recruiting for Exxon. Brittany, on one of the days, went to one of her class/lecture/things and got a bunch of free pizza. lol. We invited Lanie over for dinner, where we made ratatouille (recipe to follow), and then went to the creamery for ice cream. We had lots of fun! We love you Lanie! Thanks for having work in Provo! :)

Friday night we went and spent the night at Leslie's house again. Mike flew in for the weekend to see everyone, again, and we all hung out and stayed up until crazy o'clock playing games. That was lots of fun. We really enjoy going up there. So much, in fact, that I left some clothes up there so that we would have a reason to come up again. More on that later, though.

Saturday, we woke up and had a lazy morning, and then left so that Brittany could go to work. Saturday ended just like that. Lots of work, both homework and the other kind.

Last night (Tuesday) the marching band performed at a high school competition as the exhibition band. We were really pumped, because this is the one show a year that we get to perform for people who actually appreciate what we're doing on the field. It was a very very exciting show, and we performed really well.

I don't know how many of you heard about the American Fork High School marching band, but on the way back from a competition last week one of their buses rolled over, and a few students were injured and one of the directors was killed. Only a week later, they decided to participate in this in spite of what happened. It was a very brave thing for them to do. Lots of the other bands wore American Fork colored arm bands to show support, and the BYU band performed Amazing Grace at the end of our show for them. It was a very sweet moment.

Anyway, Brittany wants to vent some about her STUPID biology teacher/test, and then the recipe. Hope yall have a great week.

Loves,

Christian

____________

So when I signed up for biology at the beginning of the year, I looked on ratemyprofessors.com and figured out the best biology teacher. Students were raving about how easy it was to get an easy A in his class, that the tests were super easy, that he was interesting and fun and had a good personality. So I said, "Great!" and I signed up for his class. It seemed great until I took the first midterm exam. I thought I knew mostly everything he'd talked about in class (at least enough to get a score in the low 90's). But the test was ridiculous. There were at least 3 questions whose answer choices were designed in this format:

A. the answer we talked about in class, that we decided together was the answer to this exact question

B. an answer we never mentioned in class but is true if you look at it the right way

C. an answer we also never mentioned in class but is true

D. only A and C

E. all of the above

I'm not exaggerating. Is that not ridiculous? I knew which statements were true and which ones weren't. I knew the material, which is what the test is SUPPOSED to test you on. The hard part about the question was figuring out whether he was the type of teacher that would choose A or E as the correct answer - you could argue for both. This is a biology test, not a psychology test. If I had known the exam would be like this, I would have spent more time studying the teacher than the material.

So after I received a grade on the test that didn't accurately reflect how well I knew the material, I went to dispute some questions with the teacher (as did pretty much the entire class). Come to find out, this teacher had a hard time understanding why I wanted an A. He considered a C a good grade. And apparently he had purposely designed the test questions to be "tricky" (aka ridiculous) because the biology department had yelled at him last year for having his class average on exams be too high (aka making his tests too easy). I understand that you can't give "easy" exams, but you can give FAIR ones! If a student knows the material, they should be able to get a grade on the exam reflecting that. If they don't know the material, they should get a grade on the exam reflecting that as well. I explained to him why I wanted an A out of the class, and he agreed to give me credit for two of the 3 unfair test questions, which bumped my class average up to barely an A.

Apparently the testing center gives teachers feedback on how "good" their test questions are, based on how well students did on the question: if students with a low score on the rest of the exam got the question wrong, and students with a high score on the rest of the exam got the question right, it was considered a good question because those who know their stuff can get it right, and those who didn't know their stuff can't. My teacher revealed that the testing center rated 90% of his questions as "Poor" questions. If he was taking an exam-question-making test, he would have gotten a 10% on it.

Anyway, I'm done ranting now, so here's the recipe for ratatouille.

Ratatouille

Ingredients:

1 medium sized onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 medium or large eggplant, diced

1 can stewed tomatoes

2 medium zucchini diced into large chunks

herbs as desired (try basil)

olive oil (enough to saute onion/garlic)

Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Saute the onion and garlic till tender. Add eggplant and tomatoes, bring to simmer. Simmer, covered, for 15 minutes. Add zucchini. Simmer for 10-15 more minutes until vegetables are suitably soft. Remove from heat, stir in herbs, and season to taste. Serve over rice, egg noodles, pasta, or boiled cubed potatoes.

Our Alterations:

We thought shredded cheese on top would have been great. Also, I think we chopped our zucchini a little tooo large, because it came out a little underdone while the eggplant was just right. We served it over egg noodles and we loved it.

Enjoy!

Love you all!

Brittany