Mother's Day

It came a little early for me this year.

I spent a lot of time with my friend Vikram on my last trip to Nepal.  He's one of those genuinely good guys. He used to get up at 4 every morning to milk the family cow and yak and take the milk to market to sell for the family to make a few dollars rupees to live on.

Then his mother got sick.  Really sick.  They had to sell the cow to treat her.  He came to the hotel to work with my friend Sanjaya to help support the family.  That's where I met him two years ago.

On my December 2012 trip Vikram and I bonded and a lot of it was on discussing our mothers.  Sadly, Vikram's mother had a heart attack last week.  She's still alive after the heart attack and (what had to be) a horribly uncomfortable 8 hour bus ride to Kathmandu, but the hospital bills mounted.

That's a bill my friend Vikram could not pay.  It was a bill I could pay and I knew if I didn't MY mother would come back to haunt me.

A semester of extremes

Fall 2012 was an odd semester.  My female classes were really good.  Excellent attendance, they actually paid attention... In one class there were no D's or F's.  I don't think that has happened in 10+ years of teaching.  The class GPA of 3.3 is high enough that I could actually get in trouble for being too generous.

On the other hand, I had two low scoring male classes.  19 out of 40 received a D or an F.  The overall GPA was 1.9 - a record low.

And I also had a somewhat heartbreaking score:  A student who came to every class on time and failed so badly I couldn't find a way to give him a D.  He never spoke to me so I don't know what happened but here it is almost because of language ability.  Trying to take a college class with a working vocabulary of 500 words is just very unfortunate.