It ain't over...

Dear blog followers, sorry about the long silence on this end. Many of you may have given up, not anticipating more until fall--and I do suspect that postings will be relatively few and far between until things start to ramp up again in late August. But here's the state of things as of now:

I'm still not completely finished with the semester, though I submitted final grades on May 20. Two students belatedly asked to get their papers back marked, and I have been carrying them around with me since. I spent some time saying, "I should have it done early next week." I've given up trying to project when I'll have them marked and ready for pick up. I am always happy to provide yet another teaching moment to any student who wants it, so I don't feel any resentment about having to mark the papers, but I do feel a ferocious resistance. I just don't want to haul my brain back into that place: the battery has not begun to recharge yet; I'm still scraping off the burned bits (in a toast metaphor); I just am feeling petulant and whiny about it. However, next week I am supposed to get at least one paper that finishes up a student's incomplete, so I'll have to get my brain back into the right posture for that in any event: maybe that will create the impetus to get the other two marked.

I'm also meeting with another of the students who received an incomplete on Monday: she's coming over to the house, as she will also be cat-sitting for me, so we'll do a combination of professor-student interacting and changing the footing as she becomes an ex-student. I'll be meeting next week with another former student (from the dream Nature in Lit of spring 2009); very much looking forward to that--and thinking of her makes me think of the young man from that class with whom I exchanged a flurry of e-mails over the spring, trying to set up a time to meet, never with any success. I reckon I'll float him a message and see what his summer looks like.

But back to this just-finished semester, one task I put off for a long while and finally finished off last week was contacting the students who had e-mailed about grade "problems." One young woman corrected some pretty shabby record-keeping on my part, so I did submit a grade change for her. The outcome was still not great: she was capable of getting a B, had she turned in all the work and turned it in on time. Instead, unfortunately, she got a D+. If she wants to transfer, she'll have to take the course over, but it's not as big a hit to her GPA as the F I originally--and incorrectly--gave her. Another student tried to persuade me that his D+ was really a C (NCC doesn't give minus grades, which drives me bats: if we can give a plus, we need to be able to give a minus as well--or neither). He simply needed to check the math: I didn't make any mistakes on that one. A third had written shocked to have received an F, but he will have since received a letter from me in the mail, explaining that having been warned about plagiarism in his proposal, when he continued to plagiarize in his final paper ... blah blah blah. Yet one more had been very unhappy about her final grade in the class and especially about her final grade on the in-class presentation. I sent her the detail of why she got the grade she did, explained again why she got the grade she did on the presentation, and told her that even if she'd gotten a better grade on that, her other grades would have kept her from getting the B she wanted. And the final e-mailing student was understandably distraught that he did not get the grade he needed in order to avoid being disenrolled for having failed the conditions of his academic probation. I empathized, reminded him that my class alone was not the reason he was in trouble, showed him why he got the grade he did, and suggested he petition to be re-enrolled. I've known students to do that successfully in the past--including one student who shouldn't have been allowed to, as he is sweet as pie but simply not (or not yet) college material--so I think this young man has a pretty good chance of a successful petition. If not, there are other schools that will surely be willing to take a chance on him.

But all traffic on those fronts seems to have ceased (touch wood: one never knows when something will belatedly boomerang). Funny thing: Ed was with me in the office as I was finishing up the grading and saw one student come in, be told she'd gotten a D, and become so happy that she had to give me a hug. She'd been petrified she'd fail, so the fact that she hadn't was manna and roses to her. He was charmed by her reaction, and it was indeed pretty sweet.

So, now I'm trying to keep my time on campus focused to two or thee days only. I've been hired to read annual departmental assessment reports and to provide feedback: it's very interesting work, but requires a kind of deep, careful attention. I usually also do placement readings on the same days I'm in the assessment office, and if I am meeting with students, I try to coordinate that as well. Eventually the assessment work will be complete, and then I'll use some of the days when I'm in for placement readings to clean out files, organize my bookshelves (which apparently were arranged by tornado), and start reading/prepping for fall. Yep, already. Since I'm teaching a whole new course and using a whole new style guide, I need to have read things enough in advance that when it's time to start constructing syllabi, I know what the heck I want to assign.

And some of the "Oh, yes, and I'm a scholar, too" stuff can finally be tended to. I was tapped to do another book review for Green Theory and Praxis, a very cool online journal (check it out at http://greentheoryandpraxis.org/journal/index.php/journal), so I'm chipping away at reading the book, which sat on my shelves for months. And, in the "wow, super cool" category, I wrote to Ursula Le Guin about an idea for a publication and heard back from her, expressing interest in and support for the project, so now I get to start moving forward with that (forthcoming sabbatical application? you betcha).

Now, what was all that about teachers having the summer "off"? I grant you, however, that it is complete and utter bliss, and genuinely enviable, and something to be deeply grateful for, that I have many days now in which I don't have to follow any schedule at all but can get up in the morning and wonder what to do with myself for the day. Deep, contented sigh.