I'm baaaaack (ugh)

The transition out of break mode and back into teaching mode is turning out to be unusually difficult this semester. It's difficult for the students, too, in large measure because the weather is spectacularly gorgeous. We always tend to lose bodies in the seats when the weather is nice, especially after a gray winter, as this one was, but I wonder if the students are having somewhat the same emotional reaction I am: the weeks to come will be our longest push of the semester, and it doesn't seem fair that now--after a few weeks and a break, a few weeks and a break--we have to put our heads down and slog for seven weeks. I know that pretty soon I'll be in the "hang onto the lap bar and squeal" end of things, but it's hard to hold onto the fact that the last weeks always go faster than seems possible at this stage, when everything requires Sisyphean effort.

None of this is helped by the fact that I've been feeling a sore throat/incipient cold or something creeping up on me the last few days. All I want to do is go home and go to bed, but I do have student assignments to mark (only a few, but I don't want to fall behind again just yet) and photocopying to do, and and and.... Once I embark on the "To Do" list, I feel that boulder starting to roll back downhill. Argh.

I postponed the paper for 102 so I'd have a chance to go over the unassigned (but possible for paper topic) poems with the students--and I didn't even try. I could tell that, bodily presence notwithstanding, they weren't really in the room, and honestly, neither was I. Instead, I gave them a reminder about title formats (and why they matter), about quoting poetry, about the requirements for the paper--and then I just sat, tailor fashion, on the desk and gave them some background on The Left Hand of Darkness so they have at least a small spar to hang onto in the ocean they're about to find themselves floundering through. Time was, I pretty much refused to give them any set up, just flung them in the deep end (mixing watery metaphors)--and pedagogically, I still think that's a sound approach. But I have also learned that they feel better about their massive confusion if I give them at least a little something first, and if I reassure them that it is natural and normal for them to be confused. And when they feel better, I don't have to work so hard. It's self-preservation and self-protection, actually, not pedagogy.

Of course, I am more than a little tetchy about the fact that the novel is so hard for them. It really is not a hard read at all. I grant you, not everyone's cuppa tea--and I also grant you that Le Guin generally takes a long time winding up a plot before she turns it loose. I personally like that, but it also arises from the fact that she has to set up an entire world (and in the case of LHoD, an entire and entirely unusual race of human beings). But the woman is skilled as a writer, and nothing is given without the context--or a direct explanation--making it clear. Yet somehow students are so rattled by the new/strange words that they utterly miss the definition that follows directly after. They also don't know what to ignore, what to just let wash over them, "OK, this is just there for verisimilitude, nothing to try to remember or understand any better, next?"

I did trot out "verisimilitude" for them today and told them they can now fling it about at cocktail parties to impress their friends. (OK, my warped sense of humor, that these kids would go to cocktail parties and that their friends would be impressed by a fifty dollar word.)

Modern poetry was equally difficult, akin not merely to pulling teeth but to doing an impacted wisdom-tooth removal. Gawd. I let them go half an hour early--but ended up having a nice conversation with a lovely student (I'm sure I've talked about her before) who is struggling to find focus but who has all the chops to do well, if she would just do period.

And I'm here blogging instead of cranking through the stuff I need to return to students tomorrow. (Whining and complaining about it, looking for any distraction: sometimes I feel like I'm six years old.) But it is rather nice to get back to the blog. The more I can do the routine things, the more the muscle memory will take over and I'll get back into the head space of "Oh, right, this is what I do, I remember how this goes." And seven weeks is not really all that long, in the grand scheme of things (she says, hoping madly to convince herself that it is not, in fact, an eternity or two).