Students,
Please be aware of what you are writing when you write the answers to your questions in your lab. As there is low point value to the entire assignment, each question counts significantly into the grade. You cannot afford to just rely on previous knowledge and intuition. These labs are designed to be critical thinking exercises that require you to do some reading (of your book) and prediction based on the knowledge that you were to gain from your book.
I remind you that your written answers are the only things I have to assess your level of knowledge. In more common terms, “If you write like an idiot, I’m going to have to assume that you haven’t learned anything.” Please avoid personifying the air (it does not want, eat, sweat, try, gather, etc.). Furthermore, please avoid things that your intuition should tell you aren’t true:
A basement does not gather air over the winter. A basement does not store up water over the winter, either.
There is no sun located in a basement.
The water cycle does not take a year to complete.
Heat does not make moisture. Increased heat does not necessarily lead to to increased moisture/humidity/etc.
A high relative humidity in the winter does not mean that it has just snowed.
Summer is not always more humid. If summer means humid air, and humid air means dampness, then everything should be damp, not just a basement.
If cold air sinks, then why isn’t there a level of damp along the ground?
Some hints to do better in the future in all of your classes:
1. Finish all of your sentences and words. If you trail off in the middle of a word then no one knows what you were goin
(I did that on purpose.)
2. If an activity has a title that has a concept in it (ie “Measuring Humidity”) or comes from a textbook (ie “Chapter 22.1 Assessment”), then chances are the answers to the questions are related to the concepts referenced in the activity title. Ignoring that blatant hint essentially guarantees that you are going to get the question wrong.
3. If you don’t know what a word or phrase means (ie saturated, relative humidity, damp), then don’t use it. Better yet, utilize your textbook’s glossary or a dictionary to find out what that term means.
4. If you don’t understand what a question is asking, ask your teacher.
5. If you understand what a question is asking, but don’t know the answer, avoid at all costs a core dump of everything you ever knew about the subject from day one. This makes it very hard to locate any possible partial credit and most teachers (remember, these are hints for the future as you are about to exit my class) will just give up and not be bothered. Instead, try asking your teacher. If it is too late for that or your teacher is not around, then try reading your textbook. Rare is the teacher who asks a question when the material to answer that question is not readily available to the student.
6. Whenever you are asked to explain a “principle” of something, that does not equate to usage instructions. The question is asking for the reason behind why that object works. For example:
Question: Explain the principle behind a pencil.
Usage Instructions: Apply to paper and move in a horizontal or vertical fashion parallel to the paper.
Principle: As the graphite pencil “lead” travels over the paper, the paper scrapes away thin layers of this lead and leaves it attached to the paper. This is a record of where the pencil has been located, and leads to marks known as writing or drawing.
See the difference? One tells you how to use it (wrong for the question) and the other tells you why it works (right for the question).
7. You know those naked pronouns I’ve been getting on you about all semester? They really do matter. A sentence full of naked pronouns and no defined subject is automatically wrong.
8. Please make sure that you don’t contradict yourself within the same sentence. Answers such as, “Cookiedough is clearly a color and not a flavor because it tastes good, so it must be a flavor and not a color,” serve only to make you look like an indecisive student who doesn’t want to admit that they don’t know what they are writing about.
9. It is never the right answer to respond to a question with, “I cannot answer this question because I can’t tell whether it is [insert esoteric (look this word up, kids, it will help you on the SAT) variable that doesn't matter anyway, here] or [insert another esoteric variable that has little, if anything, to do with the first one].” This is especially the case if the question is a “true or false,” or “yes or no,” question.
10. Learn how to cite your sources properly. When I taught at UNC, we’d often take delight in kicking students out/sending students to honor court (threat of being kicked out) for plagarism. If you use someone else’s words (that includes a textbook) and do not give them credit, you have committed an academic sin. General rule of thumb: if there are two words in a row that came from somewhere else, you are safe. But the instant you add that third word in a row to the other two, you’ve got to cite your source.
11. Just because it exists on the internet, does not make it fact. Wikipedia can be edited by ANYONE (yes, including you) so it contains as many untruths as truths. Various news agencies have done stories about all the untruths of wikipedia. This is why your teachers won’t accept it.
12. Please learn what the word “other” means.
13. Some teachers might not say it, but you should always compare and contrast, even if all that the assignment says is “compare” or “contrast”.
14. Unless otherwise noted, you should always write in complete sentences. No teacher complains about a grammatically correct, complete sentence. But it will save you points in the future when you didn’t realize that it had to be in a complete sentence.
15. Always do your assigned reading. Even if you skim. Don’t blow it off. That’s just dumb. Someone went through all the effort to figure out which pages aligned to what they wanted to talk about for a reason. And yes, it is effort.
16. Data tables should look like tables, not like lists.
17. Learn to love thy planner. If you use it correctly, you will always know what is coming in the future, school-wise.
18. A picture may be worth 1000 words, but you should at least caption it so the art-illiterate teacher has some idea what you’ve just drawn.
19. Always double check your teacher’s math.
20. At least once in your life, you will be convinced that a teacher hates you, specifically. If you talk to that teacher (I recommend after you are out of their class) in a mature fashion, you might find that this is not the case. Usually, it is a perception problem on your end. For example:
Anne had a teacher who seemed like he hated all women. She struggled and struggled in his class, but he seemed to always call on her when she didn’t know the answer. He even pulled her aside once, and suggested that she switch her area of concentration in college. She heard, “Some people can do chemistry and others are women.” What he’d actually said was, “Some people can do chemistry, and others might be better suited elsewhere.”
Later on, after she’d been accepted to Med School, she went back and asked him why he hated women so much. It turns out that when he’d asked a question that she did not know the answer to, she’d make eye contact with him. So he’d call on her due to the eye contact. He wasn’t trying to be mean.
Think about it.
21. Don’t let grades define you. You are each amazing people in your own way, even if a piece of paper from a school doesn’t put the “A”s on it that you think should show that. School measures only one aspect of a person, and that aspect has everything to do with getting a good paying job, but little to do with your value as a human being.
Shoot for the moon. If you miss, at least you will be among the stars.
The big picture: You are in school to get a good paying job. What does any class have to do with you? It will prevent or aid you in getting a good paying job, even if the subject itself does not. If you keep the big picture in mind, it helps you through the tough times.
