Blah

I'm plugged into my iPod, which is probably a mistake, as the music is a hell of a lot more compelling than my work. I keep telling myself it's a way to keep from drowning in the pabulum of the students' work, but I'm not persuading myself very well.

I've almost got the decks clear to face those first versions of papers, and (as I was just saying to Paul), I realize that for several reasons, I need to significantly reduce the amount of marking I do on those papers. It will be very hard to refrain from the kind of obsessive comment I am famous (notorious?) for, but not only have I gotten myself into a position in which I simply do not have the time for it (not if I want to get the papers back to the students in time for them to revise), I also am once again faced with the futility of that kind of comment. The students appreciate it because it makes them feel they are getting their money's worth, as it were, but they just cannot take it all in, or even a fraction of it. Paul keeps reminding me of the rule of three: give them three concrete things to work on--and one pat on the back. (I remember in my first workshop on being a teacher, one of my grad professors admitting that in one case, the only positive she could come up with was, "Well, you certainly put a lot of words on the page.") I need to focus my comments much more specifically instead of trying to point out everything.

It's spring: the students and professors are rapidly losing focus in the distraction of the beautiful reawakening of the world (green, blooming things, sunshine and warmth, summer palpably approaching...). We all wander off into daydream and mental white noise. And yet, there is still teaching to be done, ostensibly, as well as learning still possible--though neither of those feels very likely. That feeling of bashing myself against a wall of immutable inability grows daily. The students are practically in pain (particularly as the 102s struggle with Left Hand of Darkness, which baffles them completely. I may have been unnecessarily cruel today, but I did say, "You know, honestly, this should not be hard for college students to read. If it is, I'll help you, but you truly need to work on your reading skills.")

Speaking of which, all the work I did with today's 102 to lay groundwork that would help them understand the novel was utterly useless. They are just as baffled as they would have been had I said nothing. I ended up saying it all over again (and will no doubt say it 400 more times before the end of the semester). We were working on the terms they need to put in their glossaries, and you'd have thought they'd never seen any of those terms before--when in fact they have, multiple times, in the first pages of the novel. (I also had to send four students away, as they had not done the reading and did not have their books with them. Sigh.)

Ah, God, why do I bother? Malaise, malaise. I need to gird my loins (grid my lions) and do what I can, little though it may be. I see this lot of students in class 10 more times--but who's counting?

The poetry class was a bit of a circus today (and dammit, one of the plagiarists got out the door before I gave her paper back. Shit.) We actually got into a rather interesting (if chaotic) discussion of race, racism, whether it will always exist, where it comes from, how it is perpetuated, if it's better now than 80 years ago (reading poets of the Harlem Renaissance). I think there is room for that sort of thing (as I think I've said before), that one need not always stick strictly to the slated subject matter of the class. The discussion was pretty wild and woolly (I don't think the part about the milkman still making home deliveries in Hicksville was entirely pertinent), but I just didn't feel like killing the fun. Let 'em blow off some steam, let 'em run around for a while (like recess). We spend more time being serious than not--and they had just killed themselves to get papers done, so what the hell.

I'm rather grateful that 101 will be doing peer review tomorrow: that leaves me a little time to work. Unusually, I'll have an easier day tomorrow than I will on Thursday (observation, norming session, office hour, class class). That means I really have to have the papers for the T/TH 102 graded by end of day Wednesday (yikes). And in turn that means, I really do have to do at least some papers for the M/W 102 today. Tonight. But later. Tomorrow morning I have to review adjunct applications prior to P&B, but tonight I'll do the last of the class feet clearing (so little left and yet so hard to summon the enthusiasm to do it); I'll eat, and then I'll mark some of those 102 papers--at home. I swear. Really. I promise. No matter how tired or out of it I feel. I did wake up, wide awake, at 4:42 this morning, for no apparent reason, finally got up at 5:30, which made for a good, productive morning today but means my energy is truly beginning to flag now. All the more reason to eat soon while it's still relatively early so I can get home and work a little more before it's too late and I'm really cooked.

That being said....