Britt's Blog

In Mindless Eating, Brian Wansink describes, with perverse glee, how easily we can be tricked into eating much more than we want, need, or expect to. I was most intrigued by the many examples of the food researchers themselves being tripped up by the exact phenomenon they have just discovered. The moral of these stories is it isn’t enough to be aware of the effect that variety, portion size, environment, etc. have on your eating habits—you can’t outsmart your own psychology.

I’m currently reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, which has a similarly ticklish paradox.

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Writing syllabi is like casting on in knitting, and assigning course grades is like casting off.

First of all, each process is a little tricky—I’d say that casting on and casting off are just slightly more difficult than just knitting along. To an even greater degree, writing a syllabus and computing course grades are just plain hard work.

Secondly, they’re important. A poor cast-on will make an edge that is either too tight and inflexible or else too loose and sloppy, and start your project off on the wrong foot—eerily similar to how your syllabus will determine whether your semester glides along smoothly.

A bad cast-off can ruin an otherwise acceptable garment. But you can always unpick a bad cast-off and try again. Grading is like casting off with a hard deadline.

Lastly, you just don’t cast on or off, or write syllabi or assign final grades as often as you do other stuff.

With most knitting skills, like increasing and decreasing, cabling, short rows, etc. you might start out a garment feeling like a clueless novice, but by the time you are finish, you’ve practiced them over and over again and you get pretty good at them. But I always feel like a beginner every time I have to cast on and cast off, because I do it rarely enough that the skills are never really deeply ingrained.

Similarly, I seem to make “rookie” mistakes every time I write a syllabus, leaving off important information, overwhelming the reader with too much detail in one area and being too vague in others.

Creating assignments and writing exams is hard, but you do that several times a semester. Grading problem sets and exams and essays is also hard, but, you get lots of practice at that, too. Writing and delivering lectures, designing and supervising activities, and the other day-to-day management of a class becomes second nature long before the end of the semester.

But calculating the final grade requires unfamiliar tools and techniques, and it is easy to forget that the fact that you just don’t do it very frequently makes it harder and ramps up the anxiety level.

And of course, unlike knitting, grades affect whether students make the Dean’s list, get on or off academic probation, keep or lose their scholarships—and, since it’s spring, GRADUATE. It’s really no wonder that the whole process is so stressful.

But now I’m done with it, for this semester. I wish that meant that I can just kick back and relax, but I get so stressed out over grades that I feel about two weeks of solid anxiety after the semester ends and I am incapable of just enjoying the fact that I don’t have any deadlines breathing down my neck. There’s not much to do about it but try to put that nervous energy to work on some of the summer projects I’ve been looking forward to.