Shot out of a cannon

Happy New Year, y'all, and here I am, back at the blog, first post of the new year and new semester.

Even before I returned to campus for a few days last week to help Bruce with adjunct scheduling, I'd actually been doing a fair amount of work at home, chipping away at the article I want to get published (which, of course, turned out to need a lot more work than I thought, once I started reading it with actual attention), chipping away at other bits of work stuff. I'm still unsure what my schedule is going to be. The miracle that would make Nature in Lit fly looks increasingly unlikely: it only has 8 students registered right now, and it needs at least 13 to be allowed to run--and even that would be a fight. And there's one more day for students to register. Native American Lit is also a bit dicey: we'd hit the magic number, but then two students dropped out (or were disenrolled because they hadn't paid their tuition in time)--but I'm choosing to believe that class will, in fact, be allowed to proceed, even with the low numbers. And I've not stopped praying for that miracle on Nature in Lit.

Ostensibly I was supposed to help Bruce today, in the last flurry before contracts are signed, but I ended up having to help schedule the full-time faculty (one of the full members of that committee couldn't make it today, so I stepped in as alternate). We got schedules built for everyone with amazingly little tearing out of hair, and tomorrow the full committee members will check everything over and with luck find at least most of the mistakes. So I'll be on tap for Bruce again, if he needs me (and he may, to resolve my schedule at least)--and whenever he doesn't need me, I'll be up here in the office, trying to get everything typed up, printed out, and photocopied for the next few weeks.

I've gone back and forth about 40 times about how to structure assignments for Native American Lit, how to weight the grades and how to handle the mini-papers, and as I lay awake this morning at 5:30 a.m., I decided to stop fussing with it and essentially do exactly what I've done the past few semesters. I did reword the mini-paper assignment slightly, to try to emphasize the role of those papers in working toward the larger essays (I did the same with the reading journal/idea log form), but I had contemplated a much more in-depth reconfiguration. I decided against it because even I thought it sounded too hard. I'd rather give the students more freedom in their early assignments, as I think they need opportunities to try out things that don't work without feeling too horrified by the ensuing crash and burn.

But having been back and forth on all of that so many times, I now feel I need to proofread every handout extremely carefully to be sure I haven't made any howling blunders. And I can't do that on four hours of sleep and at the end of a relatively manic day. So that's for tomorrow.

I'll spend a lot of tomorrow and part of Friday at the copiers, no doubt. I hope it's a good sign that the repair guy was in today, that he's got everything tuned up so I can get my licks in before the machines go south again. (They are getting old and over-used, and so they break down far too frequently for one to feel sanguine about last-second copying.) How reliant we've become on such technology! Remember ditto-masters? Mimeographs? (Are those the same thing? One would check on Wikipedia, but because of the legislative bruhaha, one can't....)

I also already have some student stories for this semester, before things have even begun. One is a student in one of my 102s, who contacted me I think almost two weeks ago to ask about the textbooks for the class. Clearly an eager beaver, but I've had mixed results with that sort. Some come through and do well; more fall apart when the pressure hits. We'll see. The other is the Bright Young Man from last semester. He's been e-mailing me regularly--for a while there, virtually daily--to keep me up to speed on his thoughts regarding transfer. He's got top-notch schools in mind (and rightly so), and he just got accepted into the Honors program here, which should help his applications. He was in Nature in Lit but (wisely) decided to take an Honors English course instead, one that is at least somewhat more likely to run. I'd rather hoped I could snag him for Native American Lit, if Nature in Lit fell apart, but I applaud and support his decision to do what's right for him. It's been interesting to hear what he's thinking, and to watch a young man's intelligent indecisions. I do like it when students want me for a mentor: that makes me more proud than just about anything else I do.

In any event, I'm now fading relatively quickly. I'll need to noodle around here a little longer, just to sort my brains out enough that I know whether I'm heading home or out to dinner from here. I may blog again tomorrow, depending on how the day goes. And maybe Friday, if there's anything of interest to report. And then next week, it all begins. Ay-yi-yi.