Thank you thank you thank you, John Golden. John commented on my last blog post and gave me some important wisdom regarding my frustration with my own decisions and the decisions that my students had made last week. As expected, the quizzes were subpar. In the class where I had chosen not to explain the permutation notation I made the following grading decision. I graded the last problem as if it were a 10 point problem as advertised. However, when calculating their grade, I counted it as a 5 point problem. So, the students who had learned the notation earned some bonus points while those who had not were not stung quite as severely. Not a perfect solution, but it did open the door to a public conversation about my frustration and about how we might avoid their frustration AND my frustration moving forward. Don’t know yet how that will sink in, but at least it was received as a good will gesture on my part and no one complained out loud that it was unreasonable for me to have expected them to read that definition. We’ll see what happens in the next week or so as we have two more opportunities for showing some learning here.