Still scattered

This post also may lack a clear through-line, organization--proofreading. I have been crossing little "oh shit" tasks off my to-do list: making sure I have video equipment ordered for the days I'm showing films in the Native American Lit class, contacting the people I'm to guide through the process of year-end-evaluations (part of my P&B duties; I also have to do an evaluation myself, and I just spent a moment making sure my list of publications was up-to-date), that sort of thing. I did mark a few assignments for tomorrow's classes--and if I'm a very good girl, I may do a few more before I get to dance class. Well, if I'm a very good girl, and if I don't spend too long writing this blog post.

This morning, I spent longer than I should have writing a response to the responses I've been getting about my request for sample papers and grading criteria. I may post what I wrote: I sent if off in rougher form than I'd usually like--and I wasn't sure whether I should send it at all, so I hit "send" before I could talk myself out of it--but it's helpful for me to write my way through my own dilemma about grading a number of different ways. I also realized that I need to be more careful not only to share grading criteria with my students (which I do), but to remind them of those criteria--and to show them a classic bell-curve as it would apply to grade distribution. As one of my ASLE correspondents pointed out, students are trained to see a C as saying "you're a fucking dumb-ass loser," not "this is average: not terrible but not stellar; it's OK." I really could spend the entire semester just working to unteach them what they've scrupulously been taught: they need lots of iterations of the same lessons in order to incorporate them--in order to replace the old lessons that have been hammered into them for 13 years (and I have 15 weeks).

Very heavy sigh.

I do realize how much I love that I have the Native American Lit class to break things up for me--and that it's the note I end my weeks on. There are only seven students plus the senior observer left (assuming that my previous student hangs in for the mercy D and that Mr. Enthusiasm doesn't implode), but they're delightful. They know each other, are talking to each other directly more often (instead of focusing conversation through me), are happy to ride out the occasional tangent with me. Since today is gorgeous, a day straight out of late May, I asked them if they'd like to have class outside, and they were thrilled. One student in particular was over the moon: astonished and tickled to her toes. She said, "I've never had a professor do this before"--but I told her that I'm happy to do it any time the weather is nice enough. They found a table with benches around it for us to sit at: it was a bit hot (no shade), and today was very windy, which made managing papers a bit interesting, but we all could crowd around the table, making for a lovely, intimate conversation, rather like when I held classes in the conference room: senior seminar-type classes.

Of course, I'm having a bit of a hard time getting them to button up the writing of papers. Not only are they missing deadlines left, right, and center, they're also falling back into bad old habits of gross generalization rather than specific analysis. Shit. But I'm giving them multiple chances to revise--until they get it right, or until they run out of time. If all goes as planned, the grade distribution will be one A, two B's, two C's (though one of them could either go up to a B or down to a D, depending on what he does with revisions--and whether he gets his act together with the remaining logs), and two D's. Not at all a bell-curve, but I like the distribution. And the two D's are going to be gifts, pretty much, but that's OK. I just want them to stay and get what they can out of the term.

I started reading a book of critical essays about Ceremony that I stumbled across when I was ordering the deluxe edition of the novel (because sometimes students get that edition, and it helps to be able to give them the page numbers). I want to check our databases to see if the articles are available through that medium. If they are, I'll recommend that the students specifically search them out for their final papers. Most of them are written at a level that is accessible to undergraduates, as well as being sophisticated enough to ask the students to stretch a bit. (One has a pretty major mistake in terms of the relationship between two characters, but I'll talk to the students about what to do with that.)

Getting back to the grading thing: Paul and I have decided to have a little unofficial norming session of our own. We're going to select a few papers from our 102s to cross-read, then discuss what grades we'd give and why. It will be interesting to see where we agree and where we differ. I do find that I'm shying away from looking at those papers: I don't want to face the disappointment. But they do need to be graded, and soon. Now that I've realized where my resistance to grading them comes from, it's easier for me to move past it and gear up for the process. I don't have to mark much, or comment much--but the students need them back, and I need them out of my hair.

I was thinking about noodling around and submitting another poem to the "poem a day" thing, but I think I won't today. I'll get back to marking stuff. I have time, and I have the impulse, and that's not a combination to be wasted.