Kindle

by Dr Davis on May 10, 2009

My husband received a Kindle 2.0 for his birthday this year. For Mother’s Day, I was given one as well. The Kindle is a lightweight reader, which can store up to 200 books.

Not all books are available for the Kindle. However, Princeton UP will be publishing textbooks for the Kindle DX. (The DX is about the size of a magazine.)

I am looking forward to the Norton Anthology of Literature being on the Kindle so that I can carry a lightweight book reader instead of a multipound book.

I love books, but I also like the ease of reading on the Kindle. If the book is available for Kindle, I can be reading it a minute after I pay for it. It sure beats shipping charges and waiting when you’ve got a paper due and a book that turns out to be essential for it.

There are negatives to the Kindle. It’s not open source. It’s owned by Amazon and they pay piddling amounts to the publishers. Amazon jipped my husband out of $500.

But compared to the benefits, the Kindle is the next generation of reading. I can imagine a day when paper books will be just as unusual as vinyl records are now.

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Grading

by Dr Davis on May 10, 2009

Final grades are due tomorrow at noon. I am finished with my grading, even though I had five sets of essays to grade.

The most common grade in my courses was a B, with 43% of my students receiving a B.

But 3/8s of the students dropped out of the classes. That was the most eye-opening number I saw with the number crunching.

3/8s of the students in freshman and sophomore classes dropped out. And they dropped out after paying at least part of their tuition.

The percentages of dropouts at the SLAC was less than at the CC, but significantly higher than I lost last semester there. Last semester I lost 1/10 of the students in developmental English. This semester I lost 1/5 in a second semester freshman course and a sophomore required writing course.

It’s amazing to me how many students drop out.

As a plus, I can tell my students next semester that 68% of my students make As and Bs. (Not counting the ones who drop out.)

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