I'd have been out of here a while ago, but the Shining Star showed up wanting to know her final grade and wanting feedback on her paper (which, I have to say, was brilliant--a little rough in a few places, but truly, brilliant). Instead of writing comments either today or next week (the idea of which made me faintly ill, even for such a terrific paper), I read it aloud to her and talked my comments, writing a few reminder notes in the margins. Cool to see her thinking through her ideas more fully, absorbing the critique, learning, learning. And as usual, we got into a general conversation--which almost lasted long enough to make her late for her final final. Her paper was an A+. Her grade for the semester, an A, even though she'd started with B's. I'm glad it worked out that way; I'd have hated to give her anything less.
And she's the only A of the semester. There is a reasonable crop of B's and C's; only one D--and a huge dollop of F's and W's. Ah well.
But all the grades have been submitted electronically and on paper. It took me more of the day to get all that done than I anticipated--mostly because I also was helping with the year-end Assessment report, which needed some serious work (but I'm sticking with my role as Conceptualizer; the secretary of the committee is stuck with the hateful task of actually putting it all into a document). But I also ended up chatting with a few students, not just Shining Star, but also Wonder Student, working out the preliminary schedule for his fulfillment of the Incomplete--and a surprise visit from a student from last semester. He was one of the more boisterous members of my preferred section of 102 in the fall, a group that was more animated and vigorous than the other section--and he's charming, so it was a nice chat.
I also found a few other little pearls that had been hiding between the floor-boards, but I got them dug out and back on the string. Or however that metaphor makes sense.
In any event, my desk and bookshelves remain Haz-Mat sites, but I'm not going to stay to tidy anything up. If I feel like hanging out after scheduling sessions next week, I'll chip away at it then. Or some other time. Or not. The worst of what's on my desk will get cleaned up eventually, just so I can function at the start of the fall semester, but the rest has spent years in a state of increasing entropy (in the sense in which "improbable order succumbs to more probable chaos"*). I don't see any urgency to stop that process now.
I can't believe the semester is actually over. I know Paul and I celebrated last night, but I feel like something is needed--a ceremony, if you will (since I just spent an hour talking about ideas of ceremonies in Silko's novel). I'll have to think that over. And I will be back next week--maybe even tossing in a blog entry or two--but generally, I'll be in summer mode as of tomorrow morning: few if any posts until August.
Have a wonderful summer, dear readers. I'll write more on the flip side.
*Eric Zencey, "Some Brief Speculations on the Popularity of Entropy as Metaphor," North American Review, 1986; JSTOR
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