Fooled You!

Well, maybe not you specifically, gentle reader, but I sure did pull the wool over the eyes of my agriculture students last semester. You see, I finally got up enough nerve to request my student evaluations. Overall, the statistics were fairly average, not phenomenal but also not embarrassing. The students learned neither “a great deal” nor “nothing” from discussion sections; I neither “stimulated great interest” nor “destroyed interest, was boring.” My lowest score, 2.96 out of 5, regarded the amount of criticism of the term papers—only half of which I read. The rest the professor read, so of course that half of the class is going to receive “too little feedback” from me. My highest score, on the other hand, was 4.38, in response to the question, “Was the TA willing to provide help for students who needed it?” ...Not that I had even a single student show up to office hours over the entire semester. But not for lack of letting them know that the opportunity existed, apparently.

The part that made me laugh out loud for a good long time was that my second-highest score, 4.18, belonged to the question, “Did the discussion leader (TA) seem knowledgeable?”, which mean that I was 0.82 points away from “[knowing] the content very well.” I wonder how I managed to give the impression that I actually knew what I was doing? Silly students. Little did they know that I was learning the material right along with them, and in many cases, they had already known vastly more about agriculture by the time they were five than I ever will. Silly students, they make me laugh.

New Jersey Isn't ALL Smelly

I can't speak for Newark, but my olfactory experiences at Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area and in Madison at Drew University, and even at Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, which are where I spent Spring Break this last week, were altogether positive. In fact, the smelliest thing I encountered was a gymfull of ripe fencers, and that certainly isn't endemic to New Jersey.


Before I got to the fencing, I spent a few days on the Appalachian Trail (AT) in Delaware Water Gap NRA, on the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania (and nowhere near Delaware). The AT is a hiking trail on which, if you have a few spare months and an insatiable craving for gorp and pasta, you can walk from Georgia to Maine. I've got about ten miles of it under my belt; to complete the entire trail, I've got 2,090 miles to go. Which means I'm 0.005% of the way done. Almost there!


Unfortunately, the last remnants of winter (and of a cold) made camping inadvisable, so I made two day-trips. Both began at the Gap, a narrows in the Delaware River pinched between Mt. Tammany (above) and Mt. Minsy (where the above picture was taken from). The first day took me north from the river, skirting Mt. Tammany and onto a ridge paralleling the river. Most of the way was wooded and quiet, and the slush underfoot was soft enough to cushion my steps so that the bottoms of my feet didn't feel pounded flat by the end of the day. Despite the snow, the sun was warm, so I only needed a light jacket for the cold wind on the ridgetops. Looking up, the sky was remarkably cloudless and populated by hawks, vultures, and a pair of gliders. Looking out, the river and its ridge was surrounded by relatively flat farmland. My turn-around point was Sunfish Pond, one of the "seven wonders of New Jersey," according to a pondside sign. It's a nice little lake, and I got to scramble over (snow-laden) boulders on one side, and I can imagine that it's a great spot to swim (illegally) in warmer weather... but I'm not sure that those features are unique enough to earn it the title of "wonder." It doesn't bode well for the impressiveness level of the other six "wonders" if qualifications may include "pleasant spot to pump drinking water from" or "doesn't smell like Newark." Still, it is a nice spot for lunch.

The second day took me south up to the summit of Mt. Minsi (1,463 feet) and along a ridge of radio towers. In my dislike of retracing my footsteps, I returned via access roads and country backroads. The houses I passed either were the country homes of well-off residents of New York City (about an hour's drive away), or had collected enough old vehicles to start a used car lot. Some of them looked impressively antique.


Then, it was on to Drew University for the NCAA National Fencing Championships. Still, I had a few afternoons with enough daylight to wander around in the nearby Great Swamp NWR (above). Most of it is off-limits to people as a wilderness, but there are a few boadwalk trails with bird blinds and feeders. I saw my first Ringneck Duck. I think. It was far away. And mostly under water. And didn't have a ring around its neck. But that's okay, because neither did the picture in the bird book.

Back at Drew, even the (tiny) campus was pleasant to walk around, which you could complete over a lunch break. The buildings are modestly sized and conservatively designed--lots of rock and stone, no all-glass monstrosities or Star Wars-esque curiosities, and certainly no "reflecting pools." And no major streets between them. The ample green space between buildings is nearly a forest of silvery, mature trees.

Oh, and the fencing was neat, too. I was put to work as a score- and timekeeper, and in return, I got a front row seat (sometimes a few inches too close for comfort) to some of the best fencing in the country. Most of the others were nonfencing Drew athletes whose coaches made them volunteer, and who had never seen this strange sport before, so I got to practice my "what is fencing in three sentences or less" speech. The ones who came for the morning shift got a comprehensive lesson in how to mark up score sheets, what buttons to push at what times on the scoring machine remote controls, and why the referees keep waving their hands in the air while speaking French. The afternoon shift, though, got brief on-the-job training before the morning shifters ran off to lunch (ideally, assuming the morning shifters hadn't already wandered off between rounds). Some refs had more patience than others... But we survived. Since I actually knew what I was doing, I was asked to scorekeep for the women's championship bouts. So, if anyone out there has forgotten what I look like, you can refresh your memory by tuning into CBS when they televise the gold medal bouts. I believe it's May 5, but I haven't managed to track down the time yet.

Happy Spring!