Already?

I need a reframe, and badly. Right at the moment, I'm feeling hag-ridden by all the work piling up--and with the anticipation of what's going to be coming at me in the next few weeks. I deeply hope that my new method of responding to 102 papers helps, but I also know that this weekend I will have to take work home with me--or come to the office. In addition to all the work I want to try to return tomorrow--or at least by Tuesday--I have to read and respond to all the stories submitted by the Fiction students before that class on Monday. I can't do as my students can, and read some for Monday and the rest for Wednesday, because Tuesday and Wednesday, I'm going to be buried in papers from the 102 class.

True, I only had to meet with one student in Advisement today, so I could mostly just grind away at marking assignments (and was not, I confess, very good about the "no comments" rule). But I still have quite a few to mark for the 102 tomorrow. The Mystery students may have to wait until Tuesday to get their assignments back. I don't want to hold onto those too long--I need to avoid a collision with those 102 papers, plus more work from the Fiction students--but they don't need their work back as urgently as the other classes do.

On top of which, today started with a departmental Assessment meeting--which I'd blissfully forgotten all about, until I got here. I was so proud of myself for arriving on campus at the stroke of 9:00 (literally: the tower bells were ringing); then I opened my calendar to make one appointment before diving into the work--and there it was: "Assessment, 9:30." Sotto voce swearing ensued, and a slight bit of flinging (the calendar flung onto the desk, and a pen, but nothing else thrown, so it wasn't a full-fledged hissy fit). The meeting took a two-hour bite out of my work time. It also silted up my "to-do" list with precisely the kind of tasks I most particularly loathe. Many of our most helpful committee members are on sabbatical, and while I am glad for them, I want more than anything to drag them away from their wonderful projects and get them in just to help us with this mishigas.

The meeting was unusually painful in its own right, too. Assessment is never fun; it's a sort of hostile take over of our process by corporate principles (as if those corporate principles applied to education), and so there is a perpetual clash of ideologies and approaches that we're trying to work through, satisfying the necessary requirements without allowing the tail to shake the dog to palsy. But today it was even worse because we literally were not all on the same page. Pretty much all of us have utterly forgotten the discussions from last year's meetings--and the bits of information we specifically needed were not in the minutes. Further, we had too many pieces of paper, all with slightly different purposes, focuses (foci?), and formats: it was simply chaotic. Herding cats would be a breeze by comparison.

I profoundly hope that by the next meeting we have a better handle on things. Usually Bruce and I can communicate just fine, but in this meeting, I don't think either of us understood what the other was trying to accomplish--and since he chairs the meetings and I have the biggest mouth, that static filled the whole room and affected everyone's thinking. If I can be more clear next time, that should help. But part of that development of clarity means I need to revisit Shitstorm, I'm sorry, I mean Taskstream, to remind myself of its limitations and requirements. We can collect our assessment data in any way that is useful for us, but in terms of reporting the data, we are required to use Taskstream, and it is, no surprise, a corporate product and thus supremely unhelpful and idiotic to navigate. So whatever data we come up with, we have to be sure we have a clear way to put it into a form that Taskstream will accept--and right at the moment, I'm the person not on sabbatical who has the most Taskstream experience.

Oh argh.

In any event, after the hive-inducing experience of that meeting and all that it added to my work load, turning my mind to marking student work was a challenge, added to which was my increased anxiety about the lack of time. However, even with the truncated amount of time I had, I ran into the brain-lock experience (looking at words on a page but nothing is registering in my mind)--and I felt the rising irritation I feel when I spend too much uninterrupted time on one grading task. However, I hope to have a wodge of time in which to complete the work tomorrow morning. I've triple-checked my calendar: I truly do not have a meeting. But I'm in the mode in which I obsessively count how many pieces of paper remain to be marked, how much time I'm spending on each, trying to calculate how many hours I need.

We also got the deadline for submission of applications for sabbatical to our P&B: October 7. Of course, they don't have to be completed by then, but the more I have nailed down by that point, the easier my life will be as the college-wide deadline approaches (that's in December). As a member of P&B, I am grateful that my own application recuses me from having to read anyone else's, which lightens my course load. On the other hand, I'm mentoring two people through promotion (assuming there will be promotions), and there are about six new adjuncts who need to be observed, plus faculty going up for promotion, plus problematic faculty, both full-time and adjunct--and I need to manage the observations of the new faculty, at least find people to help me out if not do them myself. (And I don't even remember who the new adjuncts are: I need to add that to the list of things to do, get the list from Bruce's office aide.)

So why, you might ask, am I spending time blogging? Because I need that reframe. I need to get my mind back into a place of calm and clarity, in order to reduce my stress levels and in order to face all of this in a more relaxed--and thus more productive--manner.

Therefore, what was good today? Well, I walked into a lively conversation in the Fiction class--and they kept right on talking as I got everything organized. I love that. One student was more than a bit pissy about having to read his classmate's stories--too much work, too much time--but he backed down very quickly, and he was very sweet about coming to me at the end of class to talk about the literary elements I had suggested as a place to start when we read fiction to explore the craft. Much more delightful, the pretty cheerleader type--I'll start calling her Tyra, after the character in Friday Night Lights--is over the moon about reading everyone's stories. She can't wait to do it, and she asked if there was a way she could keep the longer stories to finish reading, if she can't read the whole thing before she has to return it to the author. (Most of the stories aren't over the 4-6 page limit anyway--if any are--but since I've told the student they only have to read the first 4-6 pages and respond to those, she's preparing.) It was lovely to see her practically bouncing out of her seat with eagerness to start reading what her classmates have written.

On a more personal level--though it is also part of my reframing process--I am, by God, going to go to yoga tonight. I want to get into that practice regularly, and I feel that the 90 minutes of being focused simply on breathing and moving will be profoundly beneficial in helping me lower the sails and drift into night-time. I can't stay here and work more, and I won't be home until after 8:30, but it will be worth it, I'm quite sure.

And tomorrow is, as we all know, another day. Which is when I'll think about all this again. (You know, "tomorrah, when Ahm strawngah.")