Philosophy

I'm sitting here in my room (not finishing my English storyboard), trying to calculate my interim marks. Most subjects are simple to do – math, English, science (although it's only based on the Critter project and two homework checks), careers (they're all online), that sort of stuff. There are only two marks that I cannot calculate – business, which I will explain another day, and philosophy. Now back at the start of September, philosophy seemed like an interesting course to take – for the first week or so, all we would do during classes is debate topics ranging from religion to politics to life. I remember thinking that the teacher – Mr. Khamis – seemed pretty interesting, and that I would enjoy the course throughout the year. Our first assignment was to create a short little personal reflection every week or so, the first being about what philosophy means to us and how we are all philosophers to some degree. Easy marks.

Then we got our first project: a culminating project based on the first "unit" – 'What is a Person?' Okay, it wasn't that bad... we had to make a collage, story, poem, reflection, and cartoon, which turns out to be about 8ish hours of work. After presentations and everything, you would think that we would get a break from projects while we work on our next unit, right?

Wrong. Next class we got our next culminating project based on the second unit, one which we still haven't even started. This time, we have to make a video essay, yet he refuses to tell us what the hell he means by that. Here is the vague description that he gives us on the top of our rubric:

"The culminating activity for [this] unit is a visual essay that is captured on videotape."

Okay, what the hell does that mean? I keep asking him, and all he says is "we'll get to that." If you're not going to tell everybody what the hell you want, then why did you give us the assignment? Instead of telling us what he wants, he continues on with his mixed up lesson plans... a few classes ago we had a class debate about whether we would want to live a life of meaning or live a life of ignorance. Why the hell are we doing this, and not clarifying what you want from us on our project?

And that brings us to last class and our little "quiz" on the whole year's work. His description of the quiz from the class before: "...Just know some of the main points... the branches of philosophy, some philosophers, only the stuff that we covered in class..." The quiz, out of 20 marks, was nothing like he said it would be. 10 questions were on branches of philosophy and the different philosophers (like he said), and the remainder of the questions were on things that we did not cover/cover in the last 5 minutes of class. A sample question:

Who wrote Organon?

1. Plato
   
2. Aristotle
   
3. Descartes
   
4. Socrates
   
5. Berkeley
   

The answer: Aristotle. Where is this information found? At the very bottom of one of the notes copied down from the projector at the start of the year. Is this a "main point?" Hell no.

Class average on the test: 6/20. My mark: 13/20. Yay... 65%. X_X

I love what he said afterwards, though. While discussing the marks, he comments... "Yeah, they were really bad. Like, really bad. Should I count them on the report card? What do you think? ... Yeah, I will. [I will] put them under [Knowledge/Understanding]. So it'll be about 20% of your mark..."

Yup, that quiz is weighted the same on our report card as last year's science exam. That quiz that we had to know all those "main points."

So let's get back to my dilemma... I'm trying to calculate my approximate mark in philosophy for this term. Let's see what marks Mr. Khamis has so far...

• Level grades (1, 2, 3, 4) from the personal reflections and the culminating activity for the first unit
  
• Completion marks (done/not done) from a notebook check done a few weeks ago
  
• Scores (out of 20) from the "quiz"
  

I'm very interested in finding out how Mr. Khamis mixes/weighs all these marks in order to get a final interim mark for each student. This the dialogue that took place with him while I was trying to find out what percentage of our mark the quiz will take. Remember that the four categories K/U, T/I, C and A are all worth 25%.

Me: "So, about what percentage of our mark will this quiz be worth?"

Mr. Khamis: "25%, minus 5 marks from the first project."

Me: "So, 20%?"

Mr. Khamis: "No, 25% minus 5 marks."

Yeah. Okay...