Starting the week off

Pretty good day today in Modern Poetry. We sat in a circle (15 students plus me) and talked about Prufrock. Everyone contributed--even the previously silent students. Hooray! Something about being in a circle and seeing each other's faces (and my set-up that I was going to be sure to get something from everyone, but then I didn't go around the circle, I just opened it up, asking anyone to start us off--and then everyone jumped in). I'm not sure we got to any deeply intelligent read of the poem, but the students were picking up on some important points and paying nice attention to specific details. I am content with that.

I returned their mini-papers to them at the end of class: I didn't want them to see the papers at the beginning because I knew then that they would spend the class period miserable about the grades instead of paying attention to the poem. Not all of them would have been miserable, of course: some of them did pretty well--certainly in my universe, in which an A is a signal honor and mighty hard to achieve. And I reminded them they can revise. I know they won't often get that chance when they move to 4-year schools, but they're still learning, especially still learning what I want in particular (every professor wants something different, and that can be a tough learning curve). Since I'm ferociously demanding, I figure it's only fair to give them more than one whack at it.

A couple of students hung around after class to talk to me about ideas for papers, or missing assignments, or what went wrong on the mini-papers. The last of them--the young woman who wanted to get a jump-start on the semester before the semester even started--walked back to Bradley with me so we could talk about how she can avoid misreads. (She got hung up on the "cheap hotels" bit at the beginning of Prufrock and so saw everything in terms of prostitution or a sexual mistress... oops.) She is a terrific student so far: the mistakes she makes are for good reasons, and she works to correct them so she won't make them again. I'm very happy to have her in the class. By contrast, another student who was certain she could get caught up seems to have vanished: she turned in a wad of work all at once and I haven't seen her since. Not to mention the student in 102 who simply refused to try to make sense of "Ile Forest" in her reading journal. (I ranted about that to Paul earlier; I won't get into it now, but I slapped her down hard in my comments. I do hope she understands how absolutely verboten her response was.)

Speaking of vanishing students: against my better judgment, I allowed a young man into my M/W 102 very very late--mostly because he is the friend of a student I had several semesters ago, and I liked her very much (she wasn't a great brain but a very earnest student). This young man seems to be quite intelligent, but he registered late, missed a class, came, and then vanished again. He turned up again today, but he has already missed five classes--at least. (I never got a card from him, so I haven't been able to track his attendance.) He wanted to give me a doctor's note, but I told him that the reason for the absences doesn't matter, only the fact of them. (Side note: my nephew's girlfriend was on Facebook the other day, complaining about mandatory attendance. She had a good argument, and if I were at a school like the University of Montana, I'm not sure I'd be so draconian in my policies. Every now and then I even wonder if it's worth the policy here, or if I should just let 'em sink or swim. On the other hand, I know that a lot of the learning process actually happens in class, so.... hmmm. Dilemma for another day.) In any event, again against my better judgment, I have told the student he can stay in the class, but I also told him he was responsible for figuring out what handouts he needs, what he's missed, and what he needs to do to get caught up. And that if he is absent again, he'll have only two options: withdraw or fail. I'm not interested in taking up the slack for him--or anyone else at this point. We're too far along in the semester.

It was another lecture-laden day in 102, which I felt bad about: I know it's very hard for them to handle the "chalk and talk" stuff, and it's not the best learning experience. However, I had to lay some groundwork for them: quick reminder about quotation versus paraphrase, discussion of the need to integrate quotations and paraphrase (what Paul and I call ICE: introduce, cite, explicate), the need for in-text citations plus a works cited page... and how to avoid the bozo errors. I did my little fourth-grade lesson on plurals and possessives, which students are often stunned by: why didn't anyone teach them this before, they wonder? (I wonder, too.) I also told them about a mysterious thing I've noticed about plurals: no one, ever, confuses "man" and "men," but students routinely confuse "woman" and "women," using the wrong one. Why?? Why can they do it right with man/men but not woman/women? I find that very strange. I might bring it up with Bruce, our resident linguist, to see if he has a theory.

But back to 102, I am exceeding glad I did the draft thesis thing--and I told the students so--because it helped me to catch them in the usual thesis errors before the papers were finalized. The few students who have started on their papers can now go back and work for a tighter focus. The rest can try to do it right period. I'm hoping madly that I'll see a difference in their papers themselves. But even the students who had not turned in the assignment came up after class to run a thesis past me--and they had the same problems, which I helped them to see (I hope).

I still have to finish marking the draft theses for the T/Th 102, but I'll do that tomorrow (and with luck will have brain and time left to churn through review sheets for the Wednesday classes before those meet). I have an 8:45 a.m. meeting (not going to be pretty), but then I don't have a club-hour meeting (hooray!) so theoretically I'll have from 10 to 1 to crank away. That chunk of time is especially important because I won't be doing anything Wednesday morning: I have a 9:30 meeting that day, so I'll go straight from meeting to 102. I might also be able to grind through some work during 101 tomorrow, as the students will be doing peer review of their papers. They'll probably have questions for me, so I can't count on doing much, but anything will help. And then I'll have a little time after 102 and before dance (and I'm not missing dance tomorrow, dagnabbit). Assuming I have any brains left at that point. Much will depend on tonight's sleep, so I need to start my wind-down as of ... (ready, set) ... now.