Class on 19 March 09

Class was pretty typical today. We had a little bit of a small group glitch but it worked itself out quickly enough. Good thing Dr. Schmidt is so adept at using the software; she was able to create small break out groups pretty quickly. It's still amazing to me how many people do not want to speak with their microphones. In face to face situations, I can somewhat understand a reticent person; online reticence still catches me off guard.

I'm a little worried about the quiz we had this past weekend. Some of the concepts I felt I had in hand, but then little pieces of the quiz caused doubt. For example, the small differentiation of labels on the quiz's tree diagrams made me a little uneasy. Also, matching the tree diagrams to the sentences seemed easy enough until I saw the pattern (or at least what I thought was a pattern) in the answers. I hate when there isn't a random pattern of answers on a quiz or test. I think this was the case with the quiz. The Fijian work also made me a little uneasy. Some of this linguistics information is difficult enough to understand when dealing with English. When it has to be applied to another language, it can be that much more of a challenge. I get why we're doing it, but it does create a sense of doubt in my mind.