What to do, what to do...

I know I should start looking at student papers, slapping those grades on them, but I want to be sure, first, that truly, no one wants comments--and I've made a sign-up sheet, so if anyone wants to know his or her grade on the final paper or for the course, I know to be ready for that student to show up in my office on Monday. For the students in Native American Lit, I told them they could simply send me e-mails on Monday, asking for their paper grades. They all want to know, and I don't know that I want to have read them all by Thursday.

I've just spent a little time tying up some loose ends in terms of those dratted year-end evaluations. I love P&B: the consensus was that the faculty member who simply sort of waved his dick over this evaluation and figured that would be good enough gets a "needs improvement" rating. I wrote it up and e-mailed it to him, in lieu of an actual face-to-face conference. If he really wants to see me, I told him I'd be "happy" to do that (lies, lies), but I don't think he gives a rat's petite patoot, honestly. I could be wrong, but I'm trusting that the thing is out of my hair. Now there's just the matter of the one faculty member who made such a bollix of hers that I had to simply hand it right back and tell her to do it over and do it properly. I've not heard boo from her about it since, so I sent an e-mail prod, saying that it needs to be taken care of and asking her to tell me when she thinks she'll have it done.

It was nice meeting with the Native American Lit students today. The one young woman who has tried so hard was beaming. She's nervous as hell about her paper, naturally, but she said that she now feels she can write a long paper without panic. (Hooray! We win!) They all were happy to have had the chance to work on their final papers in successive drafts, which makes me think that maybe I'll do that instead of the mini-paper thing for the first two papers, too. Students don't seem to understand what mini-papers are for until it's too late.

We also talked about how I might get students to understand what I'm looking for on the idea logs--and why idea logs are beneficial to the students. They had the same thought I've had before, which is that I could sit with a computer, projecting the image on the screen for everyone to see, and type in various responses (especially to the same passage) so they can see what summary looks like, and how to engage in the process of questioning. I described the questioning process to the Native American Lit students, and Ms. Hard Worker said that she suddenly understood what I meant about it, and saw how it could be useful. I'm glad she got it, but damn, it's a shame she didn't get it 15 weeks ago.

It seems the main thing they all agreed they got out of the class was a better understanding of how to write a paper. More than anything about Native American literature or cultures, that stood out. But they did get an understanding of the Native stuff, too. In fact, one student is also taking American Short Story, and she said that class read a story by a Native author (she thought maybe Alexie, but she couldn't remember the title of the story exactly, nor who wrote it). In any event, she said that the rest of the class was just looking at it as a story like any other, but she was able to bring information about the specifically Native elements to the class discussion--and apparently impressed the hell out of her professor. Cool beans.

I've told those students that they can bring me revisions on any of their previous papers on Thursday; I'll be interested to see if anyone does. I hope so: they all could improve their grades if they were to revise some of their earlier work. However, I also know that it's the ass-end of the semester, and chances are damned good that, having finished their final papers, they don't want to do another lick of work for my class. And I don't blame them.

I'll miss them. They were great.

But now, I have a little time to whack out something for Paul's and my working dinner tomorrow. I didn't think I'd have anything done for the project (though I did read the papers from his students, for our informal "norming" session)--but I think I can take a little time now to write something up. He wants my thing about "panic earlier," so I'll see what I can do about that. And then I'll have dinner. And then I'll go dancing. And tomorrow is another day. Mercifully. Groundhog Day had it wrong: if tomorrow were not another day, then there would be no chance to change anything, to have any different kind of experience. Could be better, could be worse, could be about the same--but it will be different. It's another day.