Oy

Today felt like a much longer day than it actually was. I got in about 9, graded a couple of papers before heading over to Advisement; graded a few more at Advisement--and actually did advise a few students, as well as doing some other stuff (including a little flat-out noodling). Earlier I had had one of those "oh shit" moments, when I thought I'd forgotten to update a set of study questions that my 102 class needs for next week, so I took my flash drive with me to Advisement--and discovered that I had updated the questions (I have no idea when; I didn't check the document date, simply being relieved that I'd done it). I fixed a few little bits and now I've uploaded the questions to my home page, so any eager beavers can get an early start on the questions; I'll pass out the handout in class on Monday.

Now I just have to remember to make the photocopies.

Another "Oh shit" moment: my Native American Lit students said they'd like to workshop a mini-paper or two, if we get the chance, so I need to photocopy the volunteer papers before tomorrow's class. I've got plenty of time to do that; I just need not to forget. And I need to mark their journals and mini-papers, so they have them before they have to write their big papers, due next week. I'm on the fence about whether to swap assignments (as I will have to do for the Nature in Lit students), moving their journal/logs to Tuesday and the papers to Thursday. We'll see how tomorrow goes, I reckon.

My desk is madly silting up with a thousand other things I have to pay attention to. I tend to blissfully forget that this will happen and am shocked when it does. There is a kind of amnesia I experience, which I realize is a form of self-protection. If I carried with me at all times the memory of how hairy things can get, I wouldn't be able to face this job at all.

Today's class was OK. They're not the most scintillating bunch, I have to say, but they seemed to be doing better work on the poems than they were on Monday. One student interaction I missed, but it's cause for concern: Kayla told me that one student snapped at his group and made everyone defensive. One of his group-mates was struggling to understand the poem under discussion, and he said something along the lines of "the interpretation would be obvious to anyone who had done the homework." Kayla gently said that there are multiple interpretations possible, and that just because someone has a different interpretation, it doesn't mean he or she hasn't done the homework. This young man is a potential problem in terms of the social structure of the class. He is more than a little arrogant--and also deeply insecure (how often the two go hand in hand)--so he tends to dismiss a lot of what's going on as "obvious," frequently missing something that isn't so obvious in the process. I'm interested that he has yet to "misbehave" with his peers while I'm around; Kayla has seen his thorny behavior in groups several times. I can manage his arrogance in the whole-class discussion, but it's more important to keep him from infuriating his classmates--and I've not been there to address it directly.

Returning to the topic of grading their papers, Ms. Chip--as in has one on her shoulder--got the gloves-off treatment from me on hers: "As a first version, this could have given you something to work on. As a final version, it meets none of the required parameters for college-level writing. This is clearly unconsidered and thrown together, as if tossed off, casual work will suffice. It will not." Grade: F. I foresee several possible outcomes from that harsh a response. 1) She'll be angry and flounce about--and possibly drop the class. 2) She'll shrug it off: "See? I'm no good at English" or "See? The professor is an unreasonable bitch." 3) She'll get a wake-up call and will put some effort into her work from now on. The order of those possibilities reflects where I'd place my bets. I can't get a read on her. Today, she made a couple of reasonable contributions to the class discussion. They weren't terrific, but they weren't terrible--and she got some encouragement from me for them. But her written work is clearly thrown together with as little energy expended as possible. Her efforts are simply too sporadic, haphazard, inconsistent. If she wants to talk to me, I'll say precisely that. Essentially, she has to choose where she wants to put her energy--and if she doesn't choose to put it into class, she'll have to take her lumps.

There's also a charmingly energetic student in that class who is clearly struggling--she of the utterly missed first paper. She didn't have her journal/logs in class today (she was the one who set Mr. Arrogance off), and she seems determined to believe she cannot understand poetry. (We talk something over with the class as a whole, and she sits there shaking her head "no, no, no.") But she was brave enough to admit she was confused, and when I worked through an image that she asked about, she said she was still confused--and asked the rest of the class to be honest about whether they were. They were. So I talked them through what I'd done, working on connotations, associations, drawing inferences--and said that the process is the same even when readers come up with different interpretations. It's no more complicated than that, I said. But that doesn't mean it's easy; it just isn't complicated. (That idea always blows their minds: that something can be simple but difficult. True fact, as my father would have said.) There is no arcane mystery to it: one "simply" works through the language of the text.

But I'm now practically reeling, and need to get myself home. I'll see how early I can get myself in tomorrow, how much I can accomplish. I have a meeting, dammit, which puts a crimp in my day, but I just need to have everything for tomorrow's classes taken care of. Any grading of 102 papers that I accomplish on top of that is a bonus, that much less to do over the weekend.