What are the roots that clutch

I take attendance by having students answer a question. This week's emotionally-dark-poetry theme continues, as I explored my students' ongoing liberal arts education by asking:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?

A couple students answered, "hope."

Several other students answered in a more literal direction:

• a tree!
• BST?
• an AVL tree
• weeds...?
• Evil Trees (of Rowan and Rin)
• the roots of trash trees?
• some kind of moss probably

Most students expressed confusion and lack of understanding, for example "I just don't know", "I'm confused", "I give up.", "I'm a CS major for a reason...", and "Sorry, bad liberal arts student!"

From this I have learned two things. Firstly, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is not as widely recognizable as I assumed, and secondly and less-surprisingly, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land does not make for a good joke setup.

Ah, well.

This post's theme word is lobolly (n), "a thick gruel", or "mire; mudhole," or "an assistant to a ship's surgeon," or "a pine tree with long needles and strong wood (Pinus taeda)," or "an evergreen, loblolly-bay (Gordonia lasianthus)." The lobolly stuck in a lobolly full of lobolly used lobolly branches to climb up to refuge in his lobolly-house, perched on the side of the stony cliff.

Walkout

The students organized a walkout today, coincidentally right in the middle of my lecture. It was fine, as I was well-warned and the walking-out students left respectfully. (I gave them a preplanned lecture-pause in which to pack up their things and exit.) I didn't feel personally disrespected --- how could I? they're taking a political action having to do with the national election. If they had walked out because they didn't like the algorithm I was presenting, that would have been a different matter.

About half the class walked out.

One interesting after-effect of the walkout is that one of the non-walkout students posted complete lecture notes on the course messageboard. (Hooray for students helping each other to study and learn.) This is the first time I've seen the notes taken from one of my lectures, and I was amused to find out how much of my ongoing colorful aloud monologue made it into the notes, interspersed with and surrounding and annotating the mathematics that I wrote on the board.

This post's theme word is epanalepsis (n), "a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is repeated after intervening text. Example: "The king is dead, long live the king!"" The protest was very positive, with pleasant parlance and paucity of epanalepsis.