Wednesday afternoon things

* One good thing: I finished my mom's fingerless mitts while I was proctoring the exams today. In fact, I made the second one in its entirety in about three hours (the students didn't require the *full* two hours for each exam)

So those are done. The pattern is Striped Love Fingerless Mitts by Dixie Lee - free on Ravelry. It's a simple pattern that works up nicely. It's for worsted-weight yarn

Also, the yarn I ordered myself as a small Christmas gift came:

The yarn is called Pinkmas and was apparently inspired by the Barbie movie. I have a pattern I bought recently from Burke House Crafts that claims it'll break up pooling a little in yarns like this. This might be one of my over-break projects.

I guess I get to start planning that now that my exams are done.

Oh, I still have to figure up final grades, and the two people with extra-time accommodations are taking their exams tomorrow, and I have the last few* litter bags to sort if I can, but I'm essentially done

(*I went and retrieved them yesterday. There were supposed to be nine in each habitat but I only found eight in one and seven in the other, but given the problems I had with critters (probably armadillos) digging in the area where I buried them, I guess that's not too bad. Also the previous set of bags had very little in them so I suspect the season's run out)

Other than that, it's been a tiny bit upsetting this week:

- on the way out to the field yesterday, as I was proceeding through the green light, a woman pulled into my lane from the side street (had the red light, so no right of way, though right-on-red is legal here, you are supposed to LOOK and make sure traffic is clear). I didn't hit her - though she was perilously close to my front passenger fender - and I laid HARD on the horn, partly because I was scared and partly to alert the guy behind me (he slowed down; I had to essentially brake). I hate that though. Makes me feel like I'm just an "NPC" to people, and that I don't matter. People have become worse drivers since the pandemic.

- I have been visited by the AI paper fairy. A paper I gave an ill-advised extension on (really no reason, I think, the person needed it) came in today, and it seemed fishy. It was an article critique and the article they linked........was not what the paper was about. Yes, there's a potentially innocent explanation EXCEPT the topic of the article is not a class the student is taking, and when I tried to find the article they were talking about, it seems not to exist. A colleague ran it through their AI detector and it pinged at 69%.

I took off the requisite "not enough detail" points and the "did not hand in an article" points. I could have taken off more but this student also made a big grievance stink with a colleague about a similar thing, and I just DO NOT HAVE THE ENERGY. It won't change their grade; they will receive the same letter grade whether they got a 0 or the few points the paper would earn if it were "real", so I feel like it's a hill not worth dying on.

Tomorrow I will e-mail them and note something like, "you know, it's a VERY curious thing, the paper didn't match what you were writing about" and see what they respond. If they IMMEDIATELY send the correct paper with an explanation, I'll reconsider, but I really think they tried to pull a fast one. 

Also I changed my syllabi for next semester: now all papers must be handed in electronically and will be subject to being tested by a plagiarism detector. I've resisted it up to this point, listening to the arguments against it (things like 'oooooh people got false positives and it made them suicidal!" but you know? the wear and tear of trying to figure out if a paper is echt or AI generated is too much for me at this point. And I can't NOT assign writing assignments, and they are not the sort that could be done in a class period handwritten in a blue book)., And gradually EVERYTHING enpoopifies, and I wish I felt like something was getting better. 

And I have Board Meeting tonight, despite being very tired and wishing I could skip. (I am head Elder, so I have to be there, unless I'm actually, you know, sick)