Chaos in a bag

The chaos is marginally contained at the moment. At the end of each class today, I simply shoved things into that class's folder and shoved the folder into my pack. Come Monday morning, I'm going to have a lovely time figuring out what the hell I have in there.

But backing up to before all that: I raced madly to get here in time to do the attendance check, worrying about being late, looking at my watch as I got closer and closer to campus. I drew up to the left turn on to campus (red light) and my cell phone began to ring: the office, saying Bruce didn't need me to do the attendance check. Equal measures of "well, fuck" and "oh, goodie!" in my heart at that news--but "oh, goodie!" triumphed: "Oh, goodie! I can get more work done!"

And I did. Got everything marked and ready to return--and fussed around with other flotsam as well, mostly to do with my potential sabbatical project and ASLE business. There's some "chaos in a bag" feeling about both of those things at the moment--but at least it's in a bag, not spewing all over the place, as often happens.

On the political front, the only news isn't really news: Bruce is going to take to our union executives the workload rationale that Kristin and I, and to a lesser extent two other colleagues, put together last year. It is no secret that the administration has the English department in its sights, wants to increase our teaching load. Kristin, god love her, did a lot of research and found that all the bodies that count say it's a terrible idea if maintaining any quality of education is a concern. (I'm not sure educational quality is a concern to this administration, but set that aside for now.) The feeling has been that the union is damned ready to throw us under the bus to facilitate a contract--and a lot of the campus would cheer, as they think we're spoiled brats. "I mark papers, too; I mark grammar, spelling and punctuation, too." As if that's all we do. I'd absolutely love to show some of the papers I've marked--even my new check list--to those faculty and say, "Yeah? Do you do all this, too? Because I do. On every paper, in every class."

Other faculty simply have no clue what we do--and they are known to say that we just need to teach the students to write better. OK. You first. You try it, see how you do. Just because you know how to write yourself (and many of them actually don't) doesn't mean you can teach someone else how to do it--especially not how to do it well.

OK, I'll get off that hobby horse now. But we're all on tenterhooks about this. If we go to a 5/5 load (five courses each semester), I personally will have to consider whether I can stay here or might need to find another job.

But, but, but. Nothing is known yet, so I'll burn that bridge as I cross it (or some such).

Much more important, today's classes were, once again, a blast. I simply have a whole different demeanor with the students than I've had in the past, and they respond to it, opening up like little happy anemones. A terrific sign in the Mystery class was that even as I took attendance, they were talking to each other with enough animation that I had to raise my voice to get them to listen up.

I did realize that there was some understandable confusion about the assignments, because of terminology I'd used in setting up the assignments. (Similar problem in 102: a number of students think the self-evaluation is their first big essay. Um, no: this is not Naval Gazing for College Students.) I'm rather bending over backward to help them get sorted out--and learning a fair bit myself for how to do it better should I teach the class in the future. I also realized that using only three marks--minus, check, or plus--on some assignments is almost physically painful for me. There are so many shades of grey between a minus ("you turned in something but it's pretty useless") and a plus ("brilliant!"), that lumping them all together under check seems unfair. But Paul assures me that it washes out in the end: that the good students don't suffer and the bad ones aren't given an inordinate boost. I'll take it on trust this semester, see if my experience matches his.

I liked how I marked the reading notes for the Mystery students: I didn't comment much at all, but would simply write something like "This is mostly summary [or your own personal reactions]: do you think that's what you need to prepare for the larger assignments?" I used the term "summation" for a sort of intermediate step--not informal notes but not a formal paper: answers to a series of more in-depth questions about the reading--and of course many of them read that as meaning "summarize." My bad. Maybe in the future I should call those assignments "paper prep" or "focus questions" or something. (Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.) (Really. I mean it. If you have a suggestion, I'd love it.)

I'm very grateful, too, that a student happened to ask a question about the submissions through Turnitin.com (the online plagiarism catcher tool)--and that reminded me that I need to set up the assignments in the program so students can submit their papers that way. And I feel idiotically smug that I figured out how to add the revision steps to the main assignments. I remembered asking in the little workshop I took, completely forgot the answer--and have conveniently lost all the handouts and my notes from the workshop. So that I could figure it out without those things gives me a silly sense of triumph--when all it really means is that the site is well-constructed and user-friendly. It will be interesting to see if I make use of the "comments" function (I reckon I'll try it out), and if so, if I am able to figure out how on my own or if I need to contact the lovely librarian who is our point person for all things turnitin. (She truly is lovely, in every way. I love it when she conducts the library class sessions for my students. She does a great job, and they like her.) I actually do have one question for her about putting a limit on late submissions, but it's not crucial. The students have the information in the assignment sheets, and that is the definitive source for parameters, as far as I'm concerned.

Oh, there's probably more, but I am very hungry and very tired. I know I can't leave without noodling just a little more--it seems a crucial part of the detachment process--but I want to get noodled and out of here as soon as I can. Never mind tomorrow is another day; Monday is another week. Whew.