So, not too terribly long ago, I took a midterm exam in my 19th century american architecture class.  I really felt that it pretty much bent me over and violated me in a very misfortunate way.  Well, Tuesday during class, the professor (who wrote this fantastic book) gave us a 3-5 point extra credit opportunity.  In order to get this credit, we had to write a question that didn’t appear on the test and tell him why we felt it was important to know.  That’s all.  Incredibly generous of him to do.  

Now, there are two sections to the test, a short answer portion consisting of selecting a question from each of 4 catagories and writing a 1-2 page essay in a blue book for each.  I knew that I knew nothing about the emigre architects, so when that was one of the topics I laid the bs on pretty thick.  However, I had the wrong emigre architect, so I figured that I’d be out of luck there.  I guess that he must have taken into account that no one had a strong grasp on this topic and therefore as long as your response correctly portrayed some aspect of the topic you were awarded partial credit.  He hadn’t finished grading the other half of the test for those of us that are grad students (mostly historic preservation grads like myself) but he said the ones he had graded were much stronger than the in-class exam.  He also rebalanced the point load on the exam.  

Talk about a professor who really cares what his students learn.  Its the one class I actually enjoy this term, and I’m planning on taking as many classes from him as possible in my time here.  Besides, he looks a little like Colonel Sanders and wears a bow-tie every day.  Today, the bow-tie was black.  When someone asked him about it, he said he’s in mourning.  I think he’s the cutest ever, plus he’s extremely fair and somday I want to grow up to be just like him if I’m ever a teacher.