I finished grading today and posted my grades. I told people they had to have work to me by the time I arrived at work, but I waited until the last possible minute to finalize the grades, print them out, and post them. One student came at 11:40 to submit a final draft of a paper, but it was otherwise quiet. I don't like grading much, but I've also been reassured that my grading schemes nearly always end up categorizing people about where I would expect. Although the system doesn't work when people don't submit a paper -- that always skews their grade a lot more than it "ought" to. Similarly, I'm occasionally suprised by students who do lackluster work on their graded projects, but who carefully meet the letter of the requirements for journal writing and participation and score higher than I might have expected.

I had a meeting at noon and walked home at 2pm for lunch. After lunch, I decided to work from home and hung out in the dining room with my laptop. I hacked together a page for ESNE that will build PDF versions of salut-leteroj on the fly. At the Jarkunveno, we decided to start having the organization send salut-leteroj to Esperanto kongresoj and konferencoj. Our koresponda sekretario drafted the letter, but I wasn't happy with some aspects and was worried about having to post the files and create links to them. So I built a system where you post a text file and the page reads the directory to build a year-by-year list of links and then can read in any text file and build a PDF file, suitable for printing, on the fly. Unfortunately, the free version of PDFLIB (which is what appears to be installed) can't do unicode, which means that there isn't a simple way to deal with the diacritical marks. I'm still working on it. I don't know if we'll end up using it or not, but it was a good way to learn about using the pdflib stuff.


StevenBrewer