Back to business as usual

It was very interesting to spend most of the break working on my own scholarship for a change. I felt exceeding rusty and slow--and am not utterly thrilled with the end result--but it had to be done (the deadline was yesterday), so off it went. I was writing again about Le Guin, so I e-mailed a copy of the piece to her (she always likes to know what we critics are up to): her response was immediate, thought-provoking, and made me dearly wish I could snatch the thing back and have another week to work on it. She is ferociously smart, clear--and generous, in taking the time to read the piece so quickly and get back to me promptly with a genuine, considered response. I'm in her debt, always.

And now, back cranking away at the same old clunky machine of the semester, I find it's difficult to adjust my mind back into this work mode (and certainly difficult to get my body back into this sleep schedule). But in collecting revisions from 102 students the last two days, I am again touched by how earnest many of them are, how much they want to please me (us--adults generally, faculty in specific in this instance). It's good to remember that about the students, as I am significantly pissed off with the administration these days: their goals are so frequently utterly antithetical to the presumed goal of a college--actually educating individuals--that it's crazy-making.

Case in point, we're once again having to battle to have placement essays evaluated by human beings instead of computers. Despite the approaching singularity, computers are still not smart enough to know if a sentence actually means anything--certainly not if it means anything of value or interest. But using the computer to score placement essays means that students can have instant results: they know their placement immediately, without having to wait for some poky, out-moded, imprecise human to actually evaluate whether they're capable of thought. Why why why do the students need to be "served" so immediately? Well, because if they have to wait 24 hours to find out their placement, they might change their minds and not come to NCC at all! Qu'elle catastrophe! We want them, we lust for them, we yearn for them and we must please them at all costs to keep them with us--at least long enough to collect their tuition. Then we don't give a rat's petite patoot what happens.

Breathing, breathing, in with the good air, out with the evil thoughts.

I'd rather think about my students. How's that for a nice change? Today's 102 was especially good for my morale. We embarked on poetry, and though at first there was the usual resistance (and misunderstanding about how to approach a poem), once I encouraged them to simply notice words without trying to figure out meaning, and then encouraged them to move from the words to questions, the discussion took off. This class did the best of the three in getting involved and excited. (Maybe I should always teach on 4 hours of sleep and after six plus hours of other work.) In addition, one student brought me a box of chocolates to thank me for having left her a voice mail about where to pick up her marked paper so she could do her revision; I'm happy with the chocolate but more touched that she recognized I had done something for her that I didn't need to do. And one talked to me after class about his revision: he'll be late with it, but he said, "This is the stuff I need to learn." That's one of the happiest sentences a professor can hear a student say. And he was in utter earnest about it, too. Nice.

However, given the above-mentioned lack of sleep (and long day), I haven't got it in me even to try to organize the chaos I've created on my desk since 8:30 this morning. I was very gratified that I was able to mark everything to return to the students in 229 today (I now have a few late assignments, but it's minor). I'll be collecting reading journals from them on Thursday, but really, I can turn my attention now to getting through the backlog for the 102 classes--and beginning to mark their revisions. I also need to select a few more poems for 229: we're doing a little selection of traditional poems and chants (in translation, of course), and we got through almost everything I'd selected for the week. I'll bring in a few more and we'll just do them on the fly in class: no reading journals required, just to give us something to do. Heaven knows there are only about a zillion possible poems I could choose from to add to the selection. In a minute I'll sit down with the one anthology I have here and see if anything strikes me as particularly fun.

I'm doing my evening office hour now, but I'm also killing time until dance class tonight--which is why I'm still here, noodling around, instead of in the car on my way home. I want to shake this body up a little before I put it to bed, hoping that tonight I can sleep like I've been hit with a hammer. Tomorrow will be another busy day but should be a good one: some time in the morning to organize and chip away at assignments, then class, then observation of another faculty member (part of P&B business and always fascinating), then a meeting of Women's Studies--and then home again... and around we go.