That's My Firebird

Look! That's my silver Firebird, at my Sherman Hall parking lot, in Champaign. You've got to look really hard to find it, in this "Christmas Card City" -- as the News-Gazette editors so aptly captioned the picture. I've always treasured it.

This is back to the future stuff; a blast from the past -- from the last millennium, even. You can see that there's practically no one in the sidewalks this Friday morning, and little evidence of vehicular traffic. There were no selfies then. No email. No Twitter. No Google search. The millennials were not yet born. I think they were waiting for my return to Kenya.

At this time, in early 1978, Obama hadn't even come to Illinois, let alone Kenya. Little Michelle, where was she, there in Chicago, that Windy City, that particular morning?

It was a really cold morning, brrrrr! But I was in my room, and I remember it with as much warmth as my room provided me. 

You see, somewhere there inside Sherman Hall that morning was a Kenyan thinking about school work, and perhaps about home. I had been happily back to Kenya just months earlier, in the summer of 1977.

The future was all ahead of me here. It's been a magical thing to come upon it in steps, along the winding way. But much of it is, for me, still is. You'll see.

CLICK: Images of Firebird

READ MORE: About Pontiac Firebird

LISTEN: Igor Stravinsky's Ballet Score, The Firebird,  conducted by Valery Gergiev:

Past Papers

Past Papers is a powerful meme in student circles. The drive to lay one's hands on past examination papers has been around for decades, as I remember. Having them was, so it was presumed, a legitimate way to reduce the vagaries of chance in the examination room; a way to read the examiner's mind ahead of time and to 'prosper'. That is, a way to level the playing field, and thus to optimize the probable score. Did it ever work? It did, I think, for many, over the years. But it required a certain capacity for predictive deduction, a method of dealing with fuzzy or 'big' data and seeing the future that we used without knowing the term that stood for it. Let me restate that, just to stay on the point a moment longer: we practised predictive deduction long, long before we were to know that we had been engaged in it. I suppose that there are many such moments, such abductions, in all our pasts. The room for error and anxiety was always considerable, for just as many -- despite the method.

You will find more discussion of predictive deduction applications in this text. 

Lecturers at the UoN make available to their students past papers and/or other material related to their courses via one or more of the following ways: (1) selectively giving out excess originals, (2) making photocopies at their own expense for use by class (usually small classes), (3) temporarily placing scarce 'originals' in on-campus photocopy kiosks, (4) lending copies directly to class reps to enable class members to make and pay for their own copies at places of their choice, (5) distributing copies as email attachments.

The university library system is supposed to be depository of past papers from all faculties, but the service is far from satisfactory because the system simply isn't working. It won't until all the material is properly gathered at the end of each examination period, meticulously collated and classified, serialized and -- above all -- posted online. Until then, I am happy to make my past papers available on my blog, having installed my own scanning equipment at home. There is none at the office.

Still, the pressure to update sets of papers in a timely manner remains a 'clerical' challenge, what with all the other stuff that one must simultaneously do. I still send by email a good number of sets, more particularly the most recent papers.