Whee-hawken!

(Title is a Pogo reference. If you don't know Pogo, you should.)

I've actually been advising today, which is great, as the time has gone much more quickly than usual, but of course I was really hoping I'd have time to grade papers. I've promised my short story class that I'll have their papers back to them by Wednesday--and I've not started marking yet. Yikes, and likewise zoiks. But I will say that grading their papers is a hellova lot easier than marking papers for the comp sections, as I don't have to be as detailed about the mechanics of writing in my feedback. Their papers are not necessarily any better--in fact, often worse--but I can simply say "You need to get help on this" without being the person to help. There also aren't many of them left. There were 13 in class today; one more may still be hanging on by the skin of his teeth, but really, I think I'm down to 12 in that class, when all is said and done.

That's more than 50% attrition. But I hasten to say that I'm not alone in that category. Many of my colleagues have the same experience: it seems to be a common occurrence at any community college. In fact, I recall, when I was at La Guardia, we had a column on our final grade rosters for last date of attendance, and students who simply stopped coming prior to a specific cut off date were considered to have withdrawn.

So far, I'm hanging on to more of my students in the comp sections. Of course, they haven't embarked on The Left Hand of Darkness yet, and the process of reading that novel can be the hurdle that some of them simply cannot get over. The problem is partly that some simply cannot make sense of a world so strange and unfamiliar--or make sense of the sophistication of Le Guin's prose. But part of the problem is simply that some of them have never had to sustain awareness of anything for that length of time: reading a novel (I am realizing for the first time) requires being able to keep characters, places, plot points in one's mind over an extended period of time--days, weeks, months. Many of them have never had to keep something in mind anywhere near that long. Even in a class, in which certain information must be retained, students can return to notes or a text-book and continually refresh their memories. With a novel, one cannot perpetually start from the beginning and reread up to the current point in the narrative.

Last night, as I was thinking about it, I was half tempted to tell my Tuesday/Thursday class that they can skip the chapters that do not deal directly with the narrative. (Le Guin intersperses "hearth tales," ethnographic reports, myths and legends, with the "actual" story.) The only reason to do that is because I only see them once next week, and I'm worried about how much we can cover in that one class so they feel confident moving on. The other option is to postpone their proposals by a day--but then that puts them in a crunch in terms of their final papers.

I just now thought, maybe I could hold a study session outside of class, open to any student who can make it. I rather like that idea, actually. I'll take a look at my schedule and see when I have any time next week (other than Tuesday: for a split second I thought, "Oh, I could do it on Tuesday, which follows a Friday schedule" but then my saner mind intervened and said, "No, dammit, I need the day off.") Hmmmm.

Today's 102 went well: students were getting the hang of what they need to do. One student is going to be disappointed, however. I'm very happy with her new thesis; she's done good work--but she thinks she has a shot at an A, and I'm afraid she doesn't. I don't know how to make students understand that "very good" is not the same as "excellent," and only excellence earns an A--from this professor, anyway. To a certain extent, A's are born, not made: there is a certain kind of intelligence that has to be innate in order for a student to break that barrier. Notice I say a kind of intelligence, not an amount: students can be utterly brilliant in some areas and simply not be wired for certain kinds of thinking or expression. I have a pretty damned good brain, but no matter how hard I might try, there are certain levels of math (or physics, or who knows what else) that would always be opaque to me: I'd never be able to crack into the higher echelons. I know the stakes are different when one is an undergraduate--the ambitious ones are still trying to become straight A students--but not everyone has a brain that can do equally well in all areas.

As I was writing that, I had a moment of panic--and I was right to. I suddenly thought, "Did I have any observations this week?" And I did: today. I missed it. I just was on automatic pilot and came right over to Advisement like I always do, and completely forgot until just now that I was supposed to observe a colleague at 2:00. I just sent her an e-mail, apologizing all over the place, but now I have to reschedule that observation, dammit. And suddenly I'm thinking about all the other things I have to do: not just grade those papers, but look at promotion folders and write letters of recommendation, and write up last week's observations, and and and.

Shit. I mean it. Shit. But oh well. What can I do but keep on doing? I was going to cancel my evening office hour tonight, but no: I'm going to stay in the office and get as much work done as I can before the roof caves in.

I feel so unbearably stupid about missing that observation. I wonder how long I'll kick myself about that? Damn and blast and hell and oh well, but... repeat ad infinitum.