Lost day

A migraine took over yesterday: I managed to make it to the assessment meeting--late, but I was there (bearing enough coffee for all committee members to drink themselves into jibbering, hyper-caffeinated wrecks)--but I quickly realized that staying long enough simply to collect papers, give two handouts, and do a quick explanation of what's coming up was more than I could handle. I tried to pull some stuff together in the office before heading home and couldn't even do that. I managed to write a note for the students about where to leave their papers and instructing them to pick up the handouts, but I had to ask Paul to read it to make sure it made sense. (Of course, I have evidence that a number of the students didn't bother to read all of it: I specifically said not to leave papers on my office door, but when I came in today, of course there were about 8 papers sitting there, instead of in my box in the mail room. So it's an open question how many of them picked up the handouts and will be ready with the assignment on Tuesday.) In any event, I left the note and handouts for each class, went home, and spent the rest of the day and well into the night trying to get the railroad spike out of my right temple. No dance, obviously: there are some things that cannot be cured so easily.

The migraine is still lurking today, but it's infinitely better, so I've been chipping away at little niggly bits that need tending to. I ordered the students' books for next semester--and was shocked to find that a new copy of the required style guide for 102 is $90. Used, it's $67.50. And it's just a plastic-spiral-bound paperback. The textbook publishers have a hell of a racket going on, is all I can say. They know they've got a completely captive audience, so, like the airlines, they can pretty much charge whatever the hell they want. I agree with Paul that students should expect to buy books and to make a serious investment in them, but still. It's one thing to spend $150 (or more) for a hardcover complete works of Shakespeare; it's quite another to spend it for a biology textbook that will be replaced by a new edition the next year. And it's yet another to spend $90 for a book that surely cannot cost the publisher much to print and distribute--not at the volume they're dealing with. I know there are a lot of costs to be covered in any book's price--not just printing and distribution but all the salaries and so on for the human beings involved, the upkeep on the buildings, blah blah--but I also know a gouge when I see one.

Consequently, I'm going to give students time to buy their books from online sellers, from whom they can certainly find them much cheaper. I'm going to encourage them to do that, especially because there will be a new edition coming out in the fall (thanks to the new MLA documentation guidelines), so the bookstore won't buy back the current edition. My only concern is that the kids get the correct book: apparently there are a bunch out there, all listed as the 5th edition, and if students get the wrong one, they won't be able to do the assignments. It's maddening--to me and even more to the students.

Anyway.

Since I'm here in the office, I also pulled together the print orders for the photocopied readers I use in 102 and 281. It's always dicey trying to figure out how many to order for 281: if the class fills, I won't have enough. If the class has just enough students to run (which often happens), I'll have too many--and the reader is pretty huge, so I want to try to guesstimate as closely as possible. If I have too many, I'll just hang onto them until next time I teach the class (that's what I did in the spring: I still have 4 left from that run), but I'd rather not have them hanging around.

And even though I've been saying all along that once we hit this part of the semester, it would zoom past, it's still astonishing to me how rapidly we went from "will this never end?" to "yikes, I only have 2 more classes with these students--and there's so much I meant to do!" I'm not entirely happy that I have all the second versions of papers to crank through now and will hand them back just in time to get final papers Thursday and Monday: that's a paper jam of epic proportions, even without marking them. Blech.

I'm already thinking about what I'll have to lug to Montana with me to finish up the grading. Stupidly, there is still a paper form we have to fill out for each class: most of our grade and attendance reporting is electronic, finally, but for some reason they're still holding on to this idiotic paper form that we have to fill out so it can be stored in some way (I think on microfilm; talk about antiquated). I'll express mail those back to the main office. Last year, when I did that, a numbskull student aide saw my name on the return part of the label and, instead of giving the package to the departmental secretary to whom it was addressed, put it in my mailbox, where it sat until I came to campus two weeks after the forms were due. I had to walk them over to the appropriate functionary and grovel about their being late while he scolded me for mailing them (they might have gotten lost in the mail! and then the world would come to an end!!). This year, I'm going to tell the department secretaries to keep an eye open for a package from me--and to watch the students aides closely for similarly moronic mail-sorting.

But now I'm going to trudge through the arctic wind (it really is cold out) across campus to drop off my copy orders at the print shop, then trudge back to put myself and the tote-bag filled with student stuff into the car and head home. Once home I'll probably noodle around with my personal grade forms, which I talked about in an earlier post: it will make me feel like I'm being productive without requiring much in the way of brain. And I'll be back here tomorrow morning for placement reading. And so it goes.