On the fly

I've been forgetting that there is a little event to honor those of us who are NCC's nominees for SUNY Chancellor's Awards this year--yours truly among them. It's in about 20 minutes, so I won't really have time to post much. I may have time to say more tomorrow, though I do have an appointment in the evening, so can't noodle endlessly (as is my wont).

The young man who started the semester trying to charm his way out of having to do anything was at it again today, telling me that I should hand him the definition of a word rather than him looking it up--because I'm supposed to "help" him. After a few minutes of back and forth about it, I finally told him that if he didn't stop, I'd throw him out of class. "Seriously?" "Yes. You're derailing an entire conversation for the rest of the class." He stopped--but it took a while to get everyone's attention focused back on the book and the discussion. If I have a chance, I'll talk to him about classroom behavior at some point. I don't think he intends to be a disruptive pain in the ass; he just doesn't know how to behave (and has been allowed to get away with this kind of shit in the past).

I haven't talked much about another young man in that class who has not been disruptive but who is one of the silent resisters: he does as little as he thinks he can get away with and mostly sits in the back of the room, smirking about how clever he is to avoid doing what I require. But today I talked to him after class to let him know that he's racking up zeroes and they're going to kill his grade if he keeps it up. He said he'd get caught up. OK.

The second class was the usual zoo; the conversation tends to get a bit derailed there, too, but somehow it works better--in part because they're all in it together, instead of one asshole dominating the conversation, not even letting me get a word in edgewise. It's strange: they don't tend to use the entire class period, and yet we tend to get into more depth in the conversation. Their written work (logs and glossaries) are not as good, generally speaking, as those from the other class--but the conversation is better. Go figure.

I'm delighted to say that three young women in the earlier class are now getting A's on logs and glossaries. Hooray.

On a less pleasant note, I have to observe an adjunct next Monday--at 8 a.m. (shoot me now). And Tuesday morning Bruce and I have to meet with the adjunct who is the subject of the complaint from the student I met with on Monday--who wrote to tell me that the entire class was planning to skip class tomorrow and mob Bruce. I had to tell her he won't be there tomorrow evening, so they have to make an appointment; it will be interesting to see if they do. At first, Bruce asked me to handle talking to the faculty member by myself, but the more I told him about the complaint, the more he thought maybe we should do it together. I feel better about that, certainly. And yes, partly because I'm a chickenshit about confrontations--even though the interaction need not be confrontational.

Well, that's about all I have time for tonight. Post gets flung into the air and I head off to be serenaded, as it were--and to applaud William, who is also a nominee.