Living in the present(ation)
May. 17th, 2005 13:50![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillWell, the near-sleepless night notwithstanding -- memories of CMEA Band Festivals managed to combine with my projections about the presentations due this morning -- the presentation came, and went, and apparently went well. Even for The Other Thomas, who was certain the presentation was Thursday, and was dismayed to discover that not only was he totally unprepared to speak, but that the final is two days away. He did all right, though, stammering through hastily gathered data (thank goodness my laptop could pick up the cafeteria hotspot from inside the tomb that is lab) and managing to handle a minute or two on the ecology of streams which cut through the redwood forests.
The powerpoint presentation went smoothly, I got up and babbled until I ran out of slides and hit about half of my prepared material, and as a group we did better than some... even despite the fact that this was the first day the entire group had actually assembled. We didn't a) get bogged down in statistics (the reading of millimeters of rainfall in seven representative grassland areas was excruciating) b) have a runaway picture show (trying to concentrate with a picture a second flickering past on the overhead...) or c) read huge blocks of text off the powerpoint slides, which contained so many large and confusing words that the teacher had to tell one group repeatedly, "If you can't tell me what the word means, don't use it". I had never heard the word "physiognomy" (misspelled physiognony) used in quite that way before.
I also got some praise for the pictures I took, and helped people get the laptops to speak to the projector. Not a bad morning.
One group did wetlands, almost saw a river otter (just missed it) and collected a small, non-native Red-Eared Slider turtle which they showed off in a terrarium. It was cute, with a shell about the size of a quarter -- from what I understand, they can grow to about 10 inches. Hey, it was an introduced species, no harm in taking it out of the ecosystem. :)
I got a look at my second exam after the presentations. Jerry apparently never hands them back ("the grades haven't been recorded yet" seems to be his mantra) so I grabbed my calculator and added up the points. Oh, but that was after four of us told Kathy about the fact that the key was wrong on three scantron questions... sigh. Add three points to my total, and I got a 96. No complaints there; I had said I nailed that exam. It was the third one I was worried about...
So... bio lecture and chem review tomorrow. Pretty easy going, I think.
The powerpoint presentation went smoothly, I got up and babbled until I ran out of slides and hit about half of my prepared material, and as a group we did better than some... even despite the fact that this was the first day the entire group had actually assembled. We didn't a) get bogged down in statistics (the reading of millimeters of rainfall in seven representative grassland areas was excruciating) b) have a runaway picture show (trying to concentrate with a picture a second flickering past on the overhead...) or c) read huge blocks of text off the powerpoint slides, which contained so many large and confusing words that the teacher had to tell one group repeatedly, "If you can't tell me what the word means, don't use it". I had never heard the word "physiognomy" (misspelled physiognony) used in quite that way before.
I also got some praise for the pictures I took, and helped people get the laptops to speak to the projector. Not a bad morning.
One group did wetlands, almost saw a river otter (just missed it) and collected a small, non-native Red-Eared Slider turtle which they showed off in a terrarium. It was cute, with a shell about the size of a quarter -- from what I understand, they can grow to about 10 inches. Hey, it was an introduced species, no harm in taking it out of the ecosystem. :)
I got a look at my second exam after the presentations. Jerry apparently never hands them back ("the grades haven't been recorded yet" seems to be his mantra) so I grabbed my calculator and added up the points. Oh, but that was after four of us told Kathy about the fact that the key was wrong on three scantron questions... sigh. Add three points to my total, and I got a 96. No complaints there; I had said I nailed that exam. It was the third one I was worried about...
So... bio lecture and chem review tomorrow. Pretty easy going, I think.
