Grinding away

The short story papers are moving through my red-pen mill relatively rapidly, but I've not been very successful at finding as much time as I'd like to work on them. Little annoying bits that must be tended to keep swarming around my head like gnats, and until I can swat them away, I can't focus. I'm also facing the law of diminishing returns: I'm getting tired enough, after cranking all day, that I'm not reading: my eyes are running over the pages, but nothing is getting through the brain barriers. This indicates it's time to pack it in for the night, which will mean a pearly early start to the day tomorrow--but that is nothing particularly new, now, is it.

I'd like to report a piece of good news--or at least a gratifying moment--having nothing whatever to do with me or my work but having to do with the fight against the administration. There was a move afoot to institute a computerized scoring system to read placement essays and determine which students should go into remediation and which were prepared for college-level course work. The particular scoring system has some serious flaws--such as the fact that it would award higher scores to lengthy but meaningless sentences than to those that are pithy and powerful. Other illustrations of problems abound, but the administration was ready to institute this test without ever having met with the Placement Coordinator to get her feedback. In fact, they were ready to institute it without listening to any concerns from anyone--even though a pilot study run over the summer showed that something like 39% of students using the computerized system were misplaced, either too high or too low.

After repeated attempts to get the two administrators in charge of this to listen to concerns, the issue was brought before the Academic Senate today--and all reports are that our Placement Coordinator (my colleague and friend Cathy) and Bruce knocked it out of the park; they utterly crushed the administrators with their presentation of data. Further, the student representative to the Board of Trustees came in with his own crushing response. I'm inventing the words here, but as I understand it (cribbing from Paul's report), the student said, "So, let me get this straight. You thought 39% misplacement--which I think is obscene--was tolerable, but what level of misplacement would have led you to believe that the system was not workable? 50%? 75%?" The administrators huffed and blustered--and then another faculty member got up and said, "I'd actually like to hear your answer to his question." I wasn't even there, and I want to get up and cheer my colleagues, the student, the forces of good and righteousness and education, embattled as we are by the forces of corporatized, stupefying mindlessness.

Of course, who knows what will happen next, but at least for the moment, the administration has had to back down.

I must note, however, that in this particular instance, the thing I find most disturbing is that the two administrators at fault in this particular rhubarb are both women I had worked with as faculty colleagues and liked very much. Now I find I want to spit at the sound of their names. I feel personally betrayed.

Still, they got checked and checked hard on this. Find images from hockey games of guys getting "checked": like that. Thank god.

Class today was generally great. One poor student is really struggling, and I should encourage her to withdraw. If she doesn't show significant improvement on her revision, I'll have to urge her to leave the class. She is sweet as all get out and wants very badly to do well, but she does not get the help that she needs in order to understand what's going on. She keeps saying she needs to get a counselor with the Center for Students with Disabilities--and she does, but I can't make her do that. She needs to take the initiative. And until she does, I'm afraid I have reached the end of my ability to help her see what's needed.

Two of my gang of four--the two young men--were funny today. I think one of their compadres is getting a more than a bit annoyed with them, as both are aggressive about getting attention from me, whereas she tends to be more accommodating of others' needs. I did put the "boys" on hold at one point--the two of them could easily consume the entire class period, asking me to check their work in detail. But I find them charming, and they're working hard--and doing good work--so I actually enjoy devoting the energy to them. On the other hand, I also have to ensure that the other, less aggressive, students also get as much of my time and attention as they want. That said, however, two of the students who needed the most help (apart from the young lady mentioned above) didn't ask me a single question that I can recall--except one of them asked why her paper was considered two days late when one wasn't a day when we have class. (Answer: it's still a day, and if you'd paid any attention to the syllabus, you'd see that the late penalty accrues for each 24 hour period, not class session.) But most of the students asked at least a few questions--or felt that they'd already addressed my comments to the best of their ability. (Fair enough.)

It's an interesting corollary, however: it doesn't hold invariably, but mostly. The better writers want the most time from me; the worst, the least. I hate to say it, but I suspect that reflects the fact that the worst writers feel it's simply hopeless, that they have too much to do so they simply give up. I agonize over that. I want them to keep trying--it's the only way they'll learn--but I don't want to give them a false sense of where they stand in terms of what they need to be able to do. I've never been sure how to handle that paradox.

I do recognize that it is part of my job to help students hang in there and keep trying as long as possible--but sometimes, it's also part of my job to tell someone the hard truth. I just wrote a letter to a student in the short story class, telling him that purely on a sentence level, his writing is too poor to be considered college level. (That's apart from his ideas, which are also woefully deficient, but he could potentially scrape by with a D if he could at least write a sentence that made sense.) He's getting that news from me at this late date because this is the first actual writing assignment (other than a reading journal) that he's submitted: there have been three mini-papers to this point, and he hasn't turned in one. The only formal writing assignment he turned in was his first substantial paper (which was supposed to be 5-7 pages and was 2 1/2)--and I gave him ten points for turning in something, as a mercy. On top of that, 21% of his final grade is a zero, because of all the assignments he's missed. He can't come back from that, unless he is capable of suddenly producing B-level work for every single assignment for the rest of the term. He did get a B in 102. Was he doing something radically different from what he's doing now, or is this--as I suspect it is--an instance of one of my colleagues having no standards to speak of in terms of grading? I confess that in this case, I don't feel too bad for the student. He dug himself into this hole, and he'll find that once one is in a hole, to continue digging simply makes the hole deeper.

Ah well.

On a personal level, I am going to skip my dance class again tonight. The last two weeks it's been easy to miss, not only because of my work load but also because the instructor I like was away. This week he's back, and I'd love to go to class, but I'd get home too late. In order to wake up in the morning with any shred of the intelligence needed to finish those papers, I must head for home now. Or, well, in a little bit: there are a few more of those gnats that I need to swat first.