3:42

That's when I woke up. Couldn't get back to sleep. This is very unlike my usual insomnia pattern, in which (if I have a problem, which is rare) I struggle to fall asleep but once I'm out, I'll stay out. This waking up at ungodly early hours after nowhere near enough sleep is painful--and the lack of solid sleep is starting to tell on my body again (that sore throat is coming back, dammit). This morning, I gave up at about 4:30, answered some student e-mails, graded a few papers until 6, when my eyes were slamming shut again, so I went back to bed and slept until 8:30. That meant I didn't get to work until 11--and partially as a consequence, I am facing 8 papers to grade by tomorrow at 11 while simultaneously being so tired I could fall over. (The other reason I still have so many to grade is that I keep stopping to run plagiarism checks. Just ran across another paper I have to check--maybe not the whole thing, but at least portions. Fucking hell.)

I honestly don't know quite what to do. The other issue is, even if I were to bag it for tonight (and I think I have to), get up voluntarily at, say, 5:30 tomorrow morning to get those last 8 graded, I'd still be facing the batch I need to have done for Thursday, and--as I said before--I don't know when I'll have time to get those done. Not much time tomorrow, and Thursday is going to be packed as is.

So, again, I have to engage in triage: what to do if I can't get the papers back? I do want to give the students a week to revise, but the postponements up to this point are already cutting seriously into the time in which they should be focusing on their final proposals. But, in the teeth of this current crunch, I tell myself that the vast majority of them wouldn't spend more than a week (and most not even close to that much) on the proposals anyway, so giving them a week should be enough. Right? Oh, hell, I don't know. But if I bought myself that time, I wouldn't have to get up so early--and knowing I don't have to push, perhaps I'll sleep better? OK, perhaps not, as a lot of my sleep disruption has nothing to do with school anxieties, but even if I don't sleep better, it won't matter quite so much, as I'll be able to chip away more slowly.

Hmmmmm, that's starting to feel like a genuine solution. Of course, miscellaneous homework is also stacking up in the meanwhile, but ah well. In five weeks, this will all be departing my life, no matter what happens between now and then.

Somewhere in the back of my head, a little voice is saying, "If I don't sleep well tonight, I'll cancel classes tomorrow." I don't want to, actually. I want to be able to talk with the 102 students about the novel, with the poetry students about--well, anything, actually; they're a kick in the shorts. I have a student coming to see me in my make-up office hour tomorrow (and if I cancel the day, that office hour gets canceled too). By the time I get home tonight, I hope I've made my peace with some solution that feels like it will work for me and for the students. And I hope I sleep. If I don't, well, we'll see.

I did briefly contemplate making the revisions optional, but I am not comfortable with that, as I've been harping on the value of revision all semester. However, I just had a conversation with a student who submitted her paper ridiculously late and told her I wouldn't accept it, therefore she can't do the revision. I'm now thinking, since I haven't graded the damned things anyway, why not give her the zero for the first one (because she did miss the deadline) but still mark it up so she can revise? She'll be happy to have the chance, and as long as I don't have to kill myself to get it done, why not give her the break?

I'm feeling some desperation to hang onto students, especially the pleasant and relatively intelligent ones. Lost both young women to whom I'd offered incompletes (one arrived today and said she figured she should withdraw; since she didn't turn in her paper, yes, that's her best option--but I do wish madly that she'd come to me for help instead of just giving up). Told another student in 101 that she has no hope of passing, so now I'm down to seven in that class. One wasn't there today: he broke his foot, but e-mailed me to ask if he could submit the paper that way. Yes. He's extremely bright; I want him to have every chance possible to get the grade he deserves. Peculiar that the two smartest students in that class both have crappy attendance records. What's that about, do you suppose?

Today's 102 went much better than yesterday's, as I suspected it would. The critical mass has shifted in both classes: the M/W group seemed brighter but less lively at first; now they seem not only less lively but less bright. The T/Th group are much more fun--and much more interesting and interested. They're struggling with the novel, but they are not bitching about it: they're just digging into the struggle. We got into an interesting discussion about gender and gender roles, springing out from the novel and then circling nicely back into it. Love when that happens. It's a relief that they are not bitching about having to read the thing and write papers about it. They're just going "OK, so that's what we need to do...."

I do feel a little funny when someone asks me--as a student did today--how many times I had to read the novel before I got it. Um, once. It really is not hard! But I wasn't quite as brutal about it today: I said that reading the novel required reading skills that college students should possess, but if they didn't we'd just have to work on developing them. Reading skills like, oh, picking up something from context; realizing that the explanation following a word is, in fact, an explanation of the word; making inferences from what is given. I suppose it's too much to ask for some imagination, too. (And I cannot tell you how much it pisses me off when students remark--as they almost always do--that Le Guin must have been on drugs, because of course it is impossible to have a creative imagination without them. Grrrrrr.)

Sigh.

I'm noticing this evening that it is still light--and that when I glance up and out the window, I see green green green. How lovely. I am going to dance class tonight, even though I feel incredibly clumsy and stupid (and even though it will make for a late night, which I shouldn't do, given my sleep problems). I haven't been in a few weeks, and I feel like I need to get out of my head for a while. The madwoman in the attic is making her presence known, and I need to offer her a sedative of some sort. Dance will do.