Zippy-quick Friday post...

So, I met with one of my mentees for promotion; the meeting took longer than anticipated but it went well; he understands what he needs to do. And I slogged through the promotion folders I should have had read for last week and those I need to have read for Tuesday--but there are still three pretty hefty ones to go, one of them Cathy's, and as I'm her mentor, I kinda need to get to that one, oh, yesterday. Still, it feels good to have at least some of them done. Maybe Monday night, or Tuesday before class, I can churn through a few more.

Still to do on the promotion folder front: write letters for my mentees--also should have been done already.

I am taking a wodge of homework with me when I leave the office today: homework in two senses, as in that's where the students did it (ostensibly), and I'll be working on it at home, too.

In showing the students in the 5:30 102 how to upload their essays to Turnitin.com (the plagiarism detection thingy), a glitch was revealed--and I'm glad it was, as I now can fix it in advance of their trying to upload their essays. That's another little chore for this weekend.

At some point, I need to write at some length about a student in that class. He's trying very hard--but he admitted to me that his mother has been doing things like handling his registrations, so he had no idea how to log on to the campus system or how to get to Blackboard. I think his mother is helping him with a lot more than simply those logistics: my hunch is that she's writing his homework for him. He is so earnest, it breaks my heart--and I want to strangle his mother, as she is doing him no favors; her "help" is just keeping him stuck in an undeveloped state. But more about that later.

In addition to the student work and glitch fixes I need to get do this weekend, I absolutely must go into the "development course" for the online Nature in Lit and make a few fixes/adjustments/clarifications there: I'm meeting with the VP on Tuesday at 4, and I sure won't have time Monday or Tuesday prior to meeting her to work on it.

I do realize, however, that if I can get the P&B work cleared off before Thursday, I will have a little more elbow room for marking the 102 essays that will be flooding in. I don't quite feel like I can breathe, but I do feel like I might be able to do without oxygen for a while longer, which is decidedly a step in the right direction.

Now, however, the office plants have been watered; student work is in a tote bag--which this week I will actually remember to take with me--and it's about time to face the traffic and head off to violin lesson.

And Monday, I'll face a new week bright eyed and bushy tailed. Or not, but I will continue to turn the crank, as my father would have said.