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My brains are jumping all over the place: this will be a blog post without a clear through-line.

First, just read this article in the NYTimes--yet another article about computerized "grading" of student writing: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/science/new-test-for-computers-grading-essays-at-college-level.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&nl=afternoonupdate&emc=edit_au_20130404. Since I've been driving myself batshit over how I grade, this kicks right into my current kerfuffle. I've also gotten a bunch of responses to my post on the ASLE list serve--many of which didn't read my whole message. I'm guilty of that all too often myself, so I can't complain, but as a consequence a lot of them are responding about work in upper-level electives, not in comp, or think I'm trying to get on a kind of collegiate "no child left behind" bandwagon (not), and so aren't helping answer my genuine question but stirring things up even further. Gack. I'm trying to decide whether to respond and keep the conversation started or whether to try to get the worms back in the can.

I'm very diligently not doing any work that I need to do. I did the same thing this weekend: I took home a bunch of work and very diligently didn't do any of it. I managed to get the logs/glossaries marked and back to students today, mostly in Advisement, but I did have to finish up at the start of the second 102 section. That class is getting pretty wild: we started with a whole lot of tangential conversation: a student asked if he had to do a huge folder for the research paper, the way he'd been taught in high school. I said "no," and he was relieved--but then he said (and other students agreed) that they're perpetually told "you're going to have to do this in college," yet find that in college, they're not asked to do it at all. That got me into the rant about what we'd found out in the department meeting (just to make them happy, I used the word "fucking": they were thrilled: Prof. TLP swears!!). Even with all that distraction at the beginning, they felt they were done before the end of the period, so, OK. The earlier section caught things students have NEVER caught before--and were unfazed by the infamous Chapter 7, which is all about the strange biology of the humans on the planet Gethen. Every other time I've taught the book, students have spent most of the period--of weeks, in fact--talking about chapter 7, but these students said, "It just told me what I already knew." They did rather miss the social/psychological implications in the chapter, but just the fact that they've already wrapped their brains around Gethenian sexuality is brilliant. I know most of the students who are left are the best of the bunch (all the dead wood--and some of the living--has dropped by the wayside), but I'm still delighted with how well most of them are doing with the reading.

One poor young man came to me after the second section and asked if he should withdraw. I almost never give a flat yes or no answer to that, and I didn't this time--even though my honest opinion is that he should have withdrawn weeks ago. I told him that my main concern is that he seems to have given up: he's not getting help, not asking questions, not working to get caught up. We talked about it at some length, and then I said he needs to be honest with himself: how much time does he have, and what is the best use he can make of the time he has. He said, "I don't want to quit," and I said, "You wouldn't be: you'd be prioritizing. There's a difference." I did tell him that if he stays, he's going to have to do the hard work to get on track, and it will be very hard work and take more time than he's already putting in. I also said he simply may not have that time, given his school and work schedules. We'll see what he does. But the student in the earlier section that I had essentially the same talk with is doing the work, getting caught up. I had a stronger feeling about that young man's ability to pull it out; the student from the later section has never shown that he has what it takes in terms of work ethic or ability.

I had to deal with a student complaint this evening, too. A young woman is in class with one of our adjuncts and is having a terrible experience. If what she reports is accurate, Bruce and I need to do something about it: it's pretty horrific. But unfortunately, there is little I can do right now to help this young woman: her only real option is to withdraw, much as she hates to do it. I did tell her that Bruce and I would do what we can to help her get into a better section when she tries again, so she has a better experience, but that's about all I can suggest. She was happy to be heard, however, and happy to be reassured that she was right to come to me with the complaint. In any event, I need to talk to Bruce about it tomorrow.

Instead of doing any work (after I met with the unhappy student), I put together another submission for Poem a Day. That's fun. I shouldn't be resisting marking the logs for the Native American Lit students. For one thing, there are so few of them, it's ridiculous. For another, they're not at all bad. But I resist. Wildly. And I also know that those revised papers for the 102s are yet to be graded: hell, I haven't even glanced at them yet. And since I'm in a sort of perpetual cycle of marking logs and so on, I will need to get over this "I don't want to" whiney stage I'm in. But not today. I just don't want to.