Latin Update!

In the week leading up to the first mid-term exam, I detected a bit of trepidation among my students this time out. This is completely understandable, given that, for many of them, it was to be their very first university exam ever. However, it seemed to me that the worrying was a bit more pronounced this year, so I spent a bit more time than usual preparing the class for the exam itself.

This may, in hindsight, have been unnecessary. My poor, poor, exam...

* Pauses to console exam, which is curled up whimpering on the floor *

Here, by the way, is a photo of the infamous Dalek, as mentioned in this post.

In Which A Student Cracks Up Chunklets

So, to appreciate this, you need to think back to the iconic British sci-fi series Doctor Who, and in particular to the good doctor's implacable nemeses, the Daleks. For those of you unfamiliar with them, they were vaguely conical robotic critters who wandered around killing things and chanting "EX-TER-MI-NATE, EX-TER-MI-NATE" in a gravelly electronic voice. Here's a clip:



Anyway, I was marking my students' first quiz yesterday ("Here are two Latin verbs. Conjugate them in the present active, please"). As is their wont, some of them who had finished quickly had occupied the rest of quiz time by doodling on their test papers. The one that got me was the girl who had drawn, on the back of her paper, a little sketch of Dalek saying "CON-JU-GATE, CON-JU-GATE." It did make me laugh out loud (I took a picture of it, which I will post as soon as I can get it downloaded off the camera), and also seriously consider giving extra marks...