Noodling

I got a bunch of homework marked this weekend and it actually went pretty quickly, so I haven't pushed myself to finish up the stuff for the Tuesday/Thursday classes yet. I've got a jump on it, but I think I can get most of it done before my first class tomorrow. Students are also doing peer review of papers tomorrow, so I can chip away during class while they work, and finish (I hope) in the break in between--and still have time for lunch. Because I wasn't feeling time crunched, I did a fair amount of noodling today: silly housekeeping things that require very little in the way of mental lifting but still make me feel as if I'm accomplishing something, not just reading fluff and (metaphorically) eating bon-bons. I did get the first batch of the next round of 101 papers today (oh argh), but I'm hoping madly I can get a good whallop of those done on Wednesday so I don't have to chain myself to the office this weekend in order to get them back in time for the students to revise. I have a relatively full calendar this weekend too (symposium Friday a.m., placement reading Saturday a.m., long-overdue double birthday celebration with a friend Saturday p.m.; laundry in there somewhere), so any window of time I find in which to crank out papers, I'll have to take advantage. (I'm saying this mostly to myself, to gird my loins, so to speak.)

Among my housekeeping chores was to make a list of the little bits and shreds of things I have to prep for later this week and next--even slightly beyond (trying to get a fraction ahead of the curve before all hell breaks loose again). I didn't actually do any of those bits, mind you: noodling means making a list instead of simply getting something done. But in all honesty, I need the list: while I'm accomplishing one thing, much will vanish from my mind, and then I'll have another of those "oh shit" moments. Taking a breath to jot 'em down gives me something concrete to refer to--and the gratification of crossing things off later as I do them. Assuming I don't lose the list, or bury it under a pile of other things I need to attend to, which seems to be happening a lot this semester. I think about vast and complex cultures without written language and the consequent feats of memory they are capable of that seem so impossible to us. Writing stuff down has led to memory atrophy (imagine having to remember the entire Odyssey and your shopping list, at the same time). But here we are, and that's what's happened to our brains. Funny that we're so dependent on the written word and yet so many are scarcely able to decipher a marginally complex sentence. A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha). (Any Gilbert & Sullivan fans out there? Sing along...)

I did the last of my observations today, most interesting. At one point, the students were working away in their groups, and my colleague came over to chat with me for a moment. I told him our 200-level classes are pretty much interchangeable: same kinds of students (good and bad), same struggles with their writing (and their insistence that we are wrong to find any problems in what has always been good enough before), and so on. When he sent an e-mail last night to give me a little context about the class, I was enormously comforted to see how similar our experiences have been. I'm relieved to discover yet another colleague who shares my views on the standard to which we must hold our students. Many don't (witness the lack of preparedness among so many students), but enough do that I can feel secure in my position. I'm not the only one in this trench, facing the bombardments from all sides--including some "friendly" fire.

Just noticing how quiet the building gets at this hour. Not as quiet as it is on Saturdays, but still. The little dust-pan thingy that the maintenance staff uses makes a distinctive noise--and the slight reverberation of that sound down the hall is evidence of how little other noise there is to interfere. Very quiet walking across campus at this hour, too; little traffic, few students, occasionally the avian calls of geese or (at certain seasons) plovers on the quad. A breath, a small peaceful moment at the end of the day.