And thank goodness it is. I don't want to confess this, but I must. When we get a question we need to score students' responses to, obviously we try them out first to see if we get it. We get the answers anyway, but it's good to solve them yourself, you know? Well, of the 50 problems I and the room went through for the project (and these were all math questions), I got the answer wrong, uh, more than my share of times. And although there were some concepts I had forgotten since my studying days, sometimes I just made some dumb mistakes.
Take today, for example. Not to get into it too much, but I had to find the area of an oddly-shaped "room" in order to get the answer. What I did was cut it up into three pieces. But that meant that you had to tweak the original lengths in order to compute each of the three separate pieces correct. I did not do that. Instead I multiplied together the two sides that were already written down. And since these three shapes were basically rectangles and the lengths given were opposite each other, I multiplied the two opposing sides together -- not the way you compute area. That leads to a yes or no question; once I heard the room boss that the answer is supposed to be "no," I had to redo all my work, and that's when I realized my friggin' mistake.
I didn't tell anybody I screwed up, obviously. Didn't have to; if anyone was really paying attention, they could hear me furtively erasing my screw-up. But it is humiliating that I could not answer questions meant for 9- and 10-year-olds without help. And so, in that sense, I'm kind of relieved I'm done and can put this project behind me.
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