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THINGS HAVE CHANGED:

Since I am no longer a professor in the classroom, this blog is changing focus. (I may at some future date change platforms, too, but not yet). I am now (as of May 2019) playing around with the idea of using this blog as a place to talk about the struggles of writing creatively. Those of you who have been following (or dipping in periodically) know that I've already been doing a little of that, but now the change is official. I don't write every day--yet--so I won't post to the blog every day--yet. But please do check in from time to time, if you're interested in this new phase in my life.


Hi! And you are...?

I am interested to see the fluctuation in my readers--but I don't know who is reading the blog, how you found it, and why you find it interesting. I'd love to hear from you! Please feel free to use the "comment" box at the end of any particular post to let me know what brought you to this page--and what keeps you coming back for more (if you do).





Monday, September 20, 2010

This'll be quick

Let me do the math: I have assignments from 41 students to mark for tomorrow's classes. I can do about 5 students' worth per hour. I don't have a meeting tomorrow morning, thank god, and my first class is at 1:00. I can probably squeeze a few into the break between classes. But that still means I've got at least another three hours of work tonight, more if I can stand it.

It's one of those days when I resent the fact that I need to do things like go to the bathroom, never mind eat.

And let's not even look at the stack of stuff I've pulled out of the "to be marked" piles, holding onto it to mark some other day, to return in some future class.

Once again, I remind myself that if I didn't assign it, I wouldn't have to mark it. And I assign it--and mark it the way I do--because I think it's pedagogically important. This job would be sooooo much easier if I didn't care.

Also wanted to make note: I'd decided to try a new reading journal form for the 101 classes this semester, based on some prompts about critical reading in their handbooks. It's a disaster already. It forces them to have answers, instead of allowing them to have questions. Possibly the most important thing I've learned in my years of teaching is how important it is to not only allow students room for their confusions, but to actively encourage them to be aware of and work with confusion--so they can experience the process of working through it to clarity. Doing that creates real learning; looking for answers before the students have actually arrived at them encourages BS, meaningless stuff along the lines of "The author has really proved she cares about her point" (without any indication that the student in fact understands what the point is, or why the author cares). So, I'm ditching the form, using a different one for the rest of the semester. It's also a bit of a test drive: I've not used this specific format for 101 classes before, but it's a pretty close adaptation of journals I've used successfully in other classes (and I think is an improvement on the forms I used to use in 101). So I'm hoping the students can make the switch without too much whiplash and that they'll find the new form more conducive to the kind of questioning I want them to engage in.

We'll see (my new mantra: move over Scarlett O'Hara). But now I'm going to head for home, shove some food in my body, maybe take a brief, restorative nap, and return to marking those assignments, ticking them off as I go along. (That's 40 left, 39, 38, 37....)

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