Tuesdays are tough

I've been home about an hour, long enough to feed cats and respond to a few e-mails. My creative writing group (which meets in Manhattan every 3rd week as a rule) was cancelled tonight, thank god, so when I finished today, (office mate) Paul and I went out for dinner and a drink--ok, two drinks. We talked about personal stuff, scholarly ideas, students, general pedagogy, all the usual. Delightful--and I wish I had more of that, not just with Paul but with various and assorted high-quality and fun colleagues. I truly am blessed that I work with so many people who are cool just as people, in addition to being crackerjack academics.

The reason the drink/talk/decompress session felt urgent tonight was that it's Tuesday, and as a general rule, Tuesdays are going to be my hardest days this semester. I almost always have a meeting during "club hour" (clubs for students--the few who actually participate in clubs--but committee meetings for faculty), then class, then P&B, then class: no breaks, no stopping. I eat lunch in P&B; if I take time to pee, it means I'll be late to the next thing. Meetings also tend to run long, so then I'm racing to class. (It's hard to insist that students be on time if I'm not.) In terms of actual hours, it's about a normal work day: I get to campus at 10, prepping for meetings and classes until that first meeting at 11:30, then straight through until 5:15. Nine-to-fivers usually actually work seven hours (given an hour for lunch) or maybe seven and a half: it's seven and a quarter for me. The exhaustion factor is that it's nonstop--and I have to be "on" the whole time.

OK, I'll stop bitching about that. It is exhausting, but I have to admit it's self-imposed: I chose to be on the committees (either by requesting assignment or by running for election)--and I'm on the scheduling committee, so I can't complain about the lack of break: I picked the days and times. Ah well. The refrain will be: heavy sigh.

I am feeling pretty lousy about my 4-5:15 T/Th comp class: for one reason or another I can't seem to get my shit together to get to that class on time and with every piece of paper I need. Apparently my brain is essentially out of commission on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons after 3. I think I told the stupid saga of last Thursday in a previous post, but today I was late again (P&B ran long), and although I had the folder, somehow I didn't have enough reading journal forms--which everyone in my other classes had last week. These poor kids are seriously not getting the best of me. Today I set them to filling out their information cards (their contact info on one side and attendance and assignment records on the other) while I speed-walked/jogged back to Bradley to get more forms. The students in that class have been very sweet about my addled unpreparedness and dutifully do whatever I ask--including behaving like civilized adults waiting for me to get back from my cross-campus jaunt today. Because I am not enough of an athlete to sprint from S to Bradley and back, my absence meant they didn't have quite as much class time as the other classes did to work on the rjs and discuss the essay--but I think we're pretty much on track now, despite the fact that I've unintentionally been treating them rather like the neglected step-children among my classes.

Of course in the 101 classes I'm running into the usual handful of students who are stunned at the amount of work I assign. ("I have to do the whole thing???" I loved it when another student said, with gentle sarcasm, "No, just do half of it." Nice when students speak my subtext.) The stunned complainers will either butch up or fall by the wayside. The majority, I'm glad to say, just gulp, accept that this is what is required, and set themselves to doing it. I know it's hard. I know it's a lot. I know my reputation as one of the toughest teachers in the department. I also know that if they stick it out with me, they'll learn.

I think I'm starting to sound like a broken record. Wow, that's an old cliche. I wonder if it means much to people born after the vinyl generation. Even changing it to "a scratched CD" may not have meaning much longer. I wonder what the iPod equivalent will be? And while I'm on this tangent, I am simultaneously amused and frustrated by the fact that they have zero clue about many standard turns of phrase. I'll make a list some day of the weird versions we get. Just as an example, however, my personal favorite is, when enumerating a series of points, "firstable...". I know U.S. Americans are notoriously mush-mouthed (some people think I have an accent because I enunciate a little more than most), but because these kids have also never seen stuff written down, they just make up something that makes some kind of sense to them. Refrain: heavy sigh.

And ah well. This is the name of the game, yes? At least I'm working hard on socializing the 101 kids to correct classroom behavior, including making them wait until I say we're done before they start packing and shoving desks around.... Small victories, but we'll take 'em where we can.