Sleepy is happy
The course I’m teaching has three problem sets throughout the quarter that make up the bulk of students’ grades. The one went kind of badly, gradewise. Rather than assigning blame for this, it’s time to assign Problem Set 2, on some basics of modeling word and sentence meaning.
As it stands, the main characters of the problem set are a partial cast of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Since I really, really want to fail as few people as possible, I have been trying to avoid making the problems needlessly confusing. This is involves lots of redundant instructions, providing extra examples, and breaking down questions into several steps.
But it also involves having a lot less fun. To wit:
- Sneezy and Dopey didn’t make the cut, as s and d were already being used to refer to Sleepy and Doc, and using another letter would have confused people.
- Similarly, I don’t do anything that would contradict students’ intuitions about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. For instance, I couldn’t make Snow White a dwarf, and had to make Sleepy sleep.
- I couldn’t use any dwarf names as adjectives. This was the saddest concession. Because without it, I could do fun things like If Grumpy is happy, then Happy and Sleepy are sleepy and grumpy. Instead, I have boring things like: If Grumpy whistles, then Doc is hungry.
- The fact that there are no unicorns in the real world is a standard pedagogical tool in semantics. But I think it’s very plausible that there could be a unicorn in the world of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Sadly, because I’ve been drilling no unicorns into their heads, I cannot talk about unicorns.
- I very badly would like to include a question regarding this Ragbag masterwork. The question would be about translations of words having equal reference, but I am nearly certain it would go badly.
