anyone know Pittsburgh? I hav a friend/coworker that will be there for a few weeks and is looking for good restaurants ( she is interested in all kinds of food ) and interesting tombs and graveyards - profile is good if you have any ideas

and in more important thoughts - sending you love and steadying thoughts askye.

Will store gift cards let you do Christmas and other gift giving for you family? you might need the visa gift cards, but sometimes being able to give presents helps you too

Beth, the latest issue of Bon Appetit has a feature on Pittsburgh dining.

I am sick of dealing with students who are freaking out over losing one point on one homework assignment. There are about 40 assignments throughout the semester. I drop the three lowest grades for each student. Each assignment is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 points. All of the assignments together are worth 10% of the final grade. One point on one assignment will make NO difference in the final grade.

I'm starting to feel like I might just give them the points, because the irritating system for manually adding points to online homework might actually take less time than dealing with the whining.

Tell them you'll give them the point if they calculate how much difference it'll actually make (and show their work, of course)

heh

The way that some of the questions on this assignment are set up is totally wrong and confusing, and I can understand students getting frustrated when they do a problem in what they think is the right way, and the computer tells them they're wrong, but I am just so done with arguing over points.

Or if they can make a valid case for why they did it that way and came to the conclusion they did, give them the point. Then you're the cool, reasonable teacher who understands that the assignment was a pain and are validating their effort.

I get what you're saying about it not making a difference in the big picture, but I very much fear that I would be one of the students arguing with you - I can't deal with being told I'm wrong if to the best of my ability and available information I'm right.

If it were just a few, I would. But I just don't have the time (or patience) to go through that with 170 students.

Then you can be the ultra-cool teacher who sends out the mass email saying, "Due to the fact that problem # blah-de-blah was so poorly written/reasoned/explained/whatever, I've decided to throw it out and give everyone that point." So what you said, but with extra "Ms. R is an awesome teacher" points.