As ready as I'll ever be, I reckon

The enrollment for SF still isn't settled for certain; it hasn't been changing much or rapidly, but students can potentially add the class all the way through our second class meeting, so there is the possibility that the numbers will increase--either a little or a lot. The class is capped at 32 (which is absurd, but that's a rant for another time), and currently 16 students are enrolled--so potentially the class could double in size. That's highly unlikely, however. This is the first time that I've taught the class and not had it fill in record time, so I can only assume that students are being scared off by RateMyProfessor.com. I wouldn't mind having a few more students--20 is a nice, round number--but if it holds at 16, that's fine. At the moment, I've made 20 copies of the first-week handouts; if more students are registered by the time I walk into the room on Tuesday, at least I won't have to monopolize the copiers for very long.

(And of course, the copiers are starting to break down, as everyone is trying to get their first-day handouts ready, and even though the department has shrunk alarmingly, there are still a lot of us and not only are we academics--who tend to verbosity--we're academics in the English department, so words are what we do. Not everyone is quite as bonkers as I am about ... well, about anything, really, but specifically about trying to cover every possible contingency as fully as possible. I mean, my syllabus for 101 is particularly ridiculous--but man, are my bases ever covered.)

Paul was in the office today, too. He was in an understandable lather about his online course. He's not taught online before, and there is a steep learning curve having to do entirely with the factory work aspects of setting up an online course, never mind the conceptualization angles. One has to know which widget to use for what purpose and where to put it so students can find it easily. He asked me if I'd be willing to show him some of what I'm doing--and of course I was, but as it happened, he wisely went to the Distance Ed "open house," at which the computer folks are available for whoever drops in with a particular question or request for aid. He came back from that much more calm and centered, reassured that what he has in place is enough to start with--and that he'll be able to implement the things he wants to do as he goes along.

I offered to share with him some of the stuff I raided from another colleague, one who does a lot of online teaching and, in fact, who has offered a mock online course that professors could "take" to get a feel for how online pedagogy works from a student perspective. Based on what she showed me and what I've gotten from my DE mentor, I'm building a lot of redundancy into the online Nature in Lit, as I don't want students to say "Oh, I never saw that piece of information." Anything important is everywhere. But we know that I overdo things. Yo, dude, that's just how I roll.

It didn't take me very long to get the copying done, but between making sure I was here if Paul needed to peer over my shoulder while I did some work with my own online course and taking advantage of the fact that, well, I'm here, I did a lot of the organizing that I'd normally do on the first day of classes. I have handouts already in folders, ready to schlep to each class. I've pulled together the next batch of copies to send off to Printing and Publications--who, I hasten to point out, got the last batch of things I sent to them done way before I said I needed it, and beautifully done at that. (Another gift basket may be in order.) I still have more organizing of copying to pull together--especially for the SF class--but I want to be sure I know how many copies I need before I run off any more. I am responsible for the death of enough trees as it is.

Oh, and a nice little moment today: I got an email from a student from one of the 101s, asking for the ISBN for the textbooks for the class. However, her email didn't say which class she is in--and she addressed me as "Miss." I wrote back to ask her what class she was in, and I gently explained that teachers in college should routinely be called "Professor"--and that some may even insist on being called "Doctor." She wrote back, profusely apologetic, and I responded with reassurance (and the information about the book). I haven't heard back again, but I like the cut of her jib already. I hope she sticks.

Now, however, I'm about cooked for the day. My social plans for this evening fell through, so I have time to do a little life maintenance (including getting some office supplies, for both here and home). It will feel very good to have that done. I probably won't post between now and Tuesday, but then we'll be off to the races. I'm happy to report that the dread I was feeling earlier has abated, as I get caught up in the simple doing of the work instead of anticipating it, and that I'm ready to meet my classes with equanimity if not happy enthusiasm. So, stay tuned, faithful readers, for another season in the trenches.

Until Tuesday...

Negative anticipation

I know that, in general, I have a tendency to see the future through grey-colored glasses: when I anticipate something, often the feeling is far from happy. I tend to imagine lots of worst-case scenarios, or at least to imagine that whatever is coming will be difficult and in some way unpleasant. However, for most of my career, I did not feel that way about the onset of a new semester. Instead, I had a Pollyanna-ish sense that this semester, everything would be different, better, wonderful. I looked forward to walking into the classroom the first day, seeing all the new faces, starting with a clean slate as it were.

No longer. "Dread" is too strong a word for what I'm feeling, but what I see on the horizon is far from rosy. And I don't like that feeling at all. I want to recover the sense that the new semester is a bright thing, filled with possibility and promise. I'm not quite sure what kind of reframing I need to do in order to recapture--and hold onto--that feeling, but it's highly important that I figure something out, and soon, so I can walk into the classroom on the first day with a positive and open mind.

I've been sharing this difficulty far and wide (on Facebook, in conversation, wherever I think I have a receptive audience)--and that does help air it out some, get rid of some of the worst of the stink. And I do realize that last year, especially the spring semester, left me a lot more snake-bit than I was fully aware. I felt so utterly, completely discouraged by the students, their work, class discussions, all of it, that I face the new term with a lot of that muck still clinging to my mind.

Of course, I know the standard ways to reframe: focus on the students who actually are prepared to do the work, or the ones who are willing to learn even though they may feel that the challenge is more than they can face. Focus on giving voice to their fears and resistance, and offering support at every possible turn. Focus on the moments of breakthrough. Generally, focus on what works and is good, not what feels unpleasant.

I know that--but somehow it doesn't feel very effective these days. I have brief spells of feeling the uplift that comes from positive thinking, and then I feel myself starting to sink back into the mire.

But the other thing I know for certain is, once I'm in the traces again, I'll just be doing what needs to be done, like the old horse in harness that follows the road even if no one is actually driving the wagon. I've been doing this long enough that I can just recite my lines, hit my marks, and turn in a good enough performance, even if it lacks the fire and dazzle that I'm capable of when things are doing well. It really is a lot like acting--the professorial persona--in a show with a decades-long run. Sometimes the audience will be utterly flat and unresponsive, and the worst thing one can do is amp up one's performance to try to get them to react. The only thing to do is go on with the show as it always is but know that there won't be any need to hold for the laughs. And sometimes, the actor is on automatic pilot but suddenly will realize that the audience--or a few specific members--are lit up. Then one plays to the few who are responding, and sometimes the energy spreads. Even if it doesn't, there's enough satisfaction to playing to the four people in the back who are right there, breathing with the scene.

I also feel some modicum of pleasant anticipation knowing I'll be teaching 101s this term: I'll get them before they've developed the worst habits or mindsets (including the mindset that something is wrong if they actually have to work and try new things--step outside their "comfort zone," a phrase I'm beginning to loathe as it's used far too often by students and has become trite and facile). With 101 students--even the ones who've been through a semester (or more) of remediation before they get to my class--I have a better shot of persuading them that what I'm offering is actually what college is about. It's harder when they have a bunch of semesters of Professor Easy-Peasy's teaching setting their expectations.

So, today I did a little more work on bits and orts around the edges of this semester's classes--though I'm still resisting working on the final essay assignment for the SF class. I may yet do that when I finish this blog post, before I go off to meet the Timid Intellectual for coffee. She heads back up to Amherst next week, and we've been meaning to get together all summer, so at last we'll have a chance to get caught up.

Oh, and speaking of former students: there's a student from a number of semesters ago signed up in the SF class. I'll have to look back at posts from that year, the moniker I gave her then. I remember her vividly: she often would see me privately (often out in the hall before or after class) and cry about how hard things were for her and how she didn't want to drop the class but X, Y, and Z were keeping her from doing the work.... I was very empathetic at first, but eventually I started to feel she was pulling a number, trotting out a "pitiful me" act that had worked for her in the past, and I got increasingly impatient with her. I'm somewhat surprised she's still at NCC; I'd have thought she'd have graduated or otherwise moved on by now. (I just looked at her transcript: she's been going part time since she was in my class--which was in 2013. She's also withdrawn or stopped going to a few of the classes she registered for since then.) Hmmm. Well, it will be interesting. I hope she is ready to actually do well in school now, by which I mean I hope she's ready to actually work hard. I'm very willing to give her every possible benefit of the doubt and believe that the tears and upsets of the previous semester were genuine, not an act. But I'm not going to give her as much rope as I did before. We'll see.

It's a day straight out of autumn today, in terms of weather: grey, rainy, cool--almost chilly. It's been good to sort of huddle up inside and chip away at work without feeling either pressured or useless. And I find that simply doing some productive work--even just creating the index cards I use to record attendance and grades and that sort of thing--is helping my mood, as did my airing out of the worries. I expect to work on the online Nature in Lit tomorrow; Thursday, I'll go to campus to make photocopies for the SF class, as the enrollment numbers should be relatively close to where they'll be on the first day. And then, I'll enjoy the last few days of "summer off" before I'm all the way back in the trenches.

For now, that final essay is calling to me: it will feel good to get it done. So, off I go.

Whoof ... but with gratitude

I haven't been here very long--got in around 11:30, I think, and it's now almost 4--but my brain feels like I've been at this for millennia. I've done a little more "dust bunny" kind of work, creating the versions of my syllabi that I use to keep myself organized (or sort of organized anyway) during the semester, printing out copies of the articles I gathered for the SF students to use in their second essays, that sort of thing. But I also realized that I have a slew of articles about Oryx and Crake and very few about anything else (and really only one about Frankenstein--but I think that will be OK, as I require that they use at least one thing we've read since the first essay, so they can't focus on Frankenstein alone). I found more essays about Year of the Flood through Google Scholar, so I'm going to request those interlibrary loan, in hope that they'll be good. I didn't have the energy to do further searching on Frankenstein or Androids--and honestly am a bit concerned about being overwhelmed by material, as both have been around long enough to gather quite an accretion of secondary sources. But this is a worry for another day. Or not even a worry; just something to think about later (perhaps when I'm stronger. You know.)

I also had a lovely chat with one of our former colleagues. She's now retired but very active in a professional organization, specifically in working on their annual regional conferences and biennial national conferences. She was encouraging me to submit something--perhaps a pre-conference workshop--for the conference this fall. It's very tempting, and very generous of her to hold that door open for me even though the official deadlines are long since passed, but I really don't think I have any ideas that would work--not unless I can get my colleagues from biology and psychology to join me again and maybe do a more relaxed and freeform version of what we presented a few years ago. Something more like what I originally had in mind, in fact. But pulling anything together would require a lot of conceptualizing on my part, and this is the part of my brain that lately has been feeling completely squeezed dry.

It is a tiny bit upsetting to me to feel so lacking in ideas, or in the mental energy to generate ideas. I'm sure I still can come up with them, if necessary; I just have apparently completely lost any drive to summon the energy generating ideas requires--especially if any kind of follow-through is needed after the initial conceptualization. That lack of energy, or perhaps enthusiasm, is a significant component of my feeling that I really am ready to retire, just as soon as I can manage it financially.

That said, I should go on record, once again with my awareness that, despite my bitching and moaning about students and work load and all that lot, there is a great deal about this job--this place, in fact, these specific students--that I still do love. When I focus on what is good about this work, this career, I am knocked flat with gratitude: what unbelievable, overwhelming good fortune is mine, to be able to do this and get paid for it! Paul and I talked yesterday about how much we have to be grateful for in our lives--starting with absolute, fundamental basics, like that our survival is not imperiled, and tracking all the way up the Maslowian hierarchy of needs, right up to "self-actualization." Yep: we have all of those needs met, fulfilled to the Nth degree.

In fact, I should be grateful about the fact that I can choose when to retire. I'm not being forced out of my career by my employer, nor is my health a factor that would impel me to retirement. I have the overwhelming good fortune to be able to make sure I retire with some certitude of financial comfort and ease. And until that time comes, I am still in the position to do this work, to live every day with this Godsend of livelihood.

So, my hope is to focus on how I can make this campus, this institution, work for me, instead of my feeling enslaved to it. What can I do, at each turn, to adapt my behaviors and expectations so I get the best out of being here? That's what I need to make my priority this year, and every year that I am lucky enough to continue working here.

Among the things I am grateful for is the fact that I can choose to walk out the office door today, any time I like, and am not shirking my responsibilities nor behaving in a way that my employer would find problematic. The fact that I'm here is above and beyond requirements. How many people can say that on any given week day? Unbelievable, overwhelming good fortune, for which I offer thanks and praise, thanks and praise.

Clearing out the mental dust-bunnies

Paul and I were talking about how sometimes a certain amount of futzing--organizing paper-clips, as he put it--is necessary just to clear out enough brain space to attend to the stuff that requires more thought. The way my mind works, there are several levels of brain attention and organization, ranging from the organizing paper-clips level up to high-order thinking about pedagogic goals and how to elicit the kind of thinking (and academic product) I want.

Today, I was somewhere in the middle, though I confess that one of the things I did just a bit ago takes my ridiculous meticulousness to new heights (or depths, depending on point of view). For years I've created a version of the assignment schedule just for me, so I have a quick reminder of what I need to hand out on certain dates as well as what I need to collect. (Otherwise, not gonna happen, my friends.) Today, I made a little table for myself of dates and what handouts I would need on those dates (the first day of classes is really overwhelming, and I probably have to seriously rethink what the students can handle--though handing out everything I have certainly would reduce the enrollment in my classes rather drastically). I just spent some time getting the forms ready to send a number of things off to Printing and Publications, in the hope/faith that they can turn them around by the end of the first week of classes. What I have shouldn't be a problem--on their big machines, even the longest of the jobs would take mere minutes--unless there are 5,000 other jobs from other professors (and various campus entities) lined up before mine. But the good people in Printing have always managed to get things to me super-fast, so... as I said, hope/faith. All I need is to ask Cathy whether I should forge her signature (or have one of the office staff sign for her or what), then send off the forms tomorrow.

I did a humongous load of copying today myself (emptied out the copier of paper twice--though I wasn't the only one using it, I hasten to say). I think I have all the first-day handouts for the 101s ready to put into the appropriate folders (the big, plastic accordion folders I use for class materials). I was very confident in how many copies I would need because (drum roll) both my sections of 101 are filled to capacity. Ka-boom.

I'll hold off on copying anything for SF until next week, when I see whether the numbers come up a little further. Right now, it's still at twelve--which is enough that it will run, but I expect a few more will enter the class, either because they're registering late or because something else got canceled and they need a Plan B.

Meanwhile, Cathy found someone to teach the one class we didn't have covered--and found not only a room but an instructor so we can open a new section of 100 (on the request of our dean). Paul was pissed off about us having to open new sections of things, as two electives were canceled under his feet, but I explained that what we're opening are comps, not electives: we're still canceling electives. Why the imbalance? Could be multiple factors, but the simple fact is, we do need more seats for the lower-level comps and fewer for each level above them (the departmental equivalent of a trophic chain).

Shifting gears--but tangentially connected, through the specific needs of the students in remedial or first-semester credit bearing comps: I had a brain flash earlier that came from the memory that, when teaching 101s, I invariably have to explain that when the assignment schedule says something is due, that means the student needs to walk in the door having done it, not that the student will begin the assignment on that date. And I suddenly thought, "Right! These are kids who haven't learned that there is a significant difference between the homophones 'do' and 'due.'" They often use one when they mean the other, clearly seeing them as interchangeable--so are they supposed to "do" something on x date or is it "due"? Opacity reigns. I hope I remember (twice: once for each section) to point out the difference between the words....

(Oh, and that reminds me: I need to add the "Static" handout to the list of things I need to provide. For those of you who may have missed the explanation--or have forgotten (and who could blame you?)--"static" is my word for the little, stupid but weirdly important errors that haven't mattered in the past but will now. They're what Paul calls "grave" errors (pun intended); I used to call them "bozo" errors--and have a lovely stamp that Paul had made for me, to save time marking them--but too many students believed that they personally were being called bozos, rather than believing that the error was bozonic. (I don't take specific points off for those errors any more, either: lots of them just lead to a general down-grade.) Paul and I have selected different errors to go on our personal lists (he's not driven as bonkers by homophone misuse as I am; I'm not driven as bonkers by incorrect use of block-format quotation as he is), but the principle is the same.)

Shifting gears yet again: I'll be back in tomorrow, doing more organizing and sorting out of what needs to be copied, and so on and so forth, so I'm going to wrap things up for tonight and toddle off. I was slated to meet the Timid Intellectual for dinner tonight--we've meant to get together all summer, and we rescheduled to next week (I want to hear more about her life at Amherst and the friends she's made in Massachusetts)--but now I have the evening to do whatever I want. Or whatever I feel is important in my non-work life. (Go straight home to practice fiddle and feed the cat? Or take myself out for dinner--maybe even a drink?) I'll figure that out as I pack up my little bags and waddle out to the car. And believe it or not, tomorrow will, in fact, be another day. Maybe everything will be easier to think about because I'll be stronger? We'll see.

Syllabus version 4,687

Well, slight exaggeration--but I have uploaded "complete, final" syllabi to the 101s at least six times now. And printed them nearly as often. (The wasted paper! The squandered printer toner!) This latest version wasn't even really necessary, I suppose, if it weren't for the fact that I am very picky about pagination and can't stand widows or orphans, and somehow the most recent version had some, so out it went, replaced by a new version that not only is free of sad and lonely, neglected lines but also includes the date/time stamp.

Ye gods and little fishes. (An expression I really think we need to use more often.)

Cathy and I engaged in yet another tussle with schedules, making sure we had someone to teach every class--including potential coverage if a full-time faculty member doesn't need a class we're now holding for him/her. There is only one class that is currently going begging for someone to teach it, but I'm sure we'll find someone somewhere.

And, as I intimated yesterday, we have next week in which to try to find the howling blunders and fix them.

Paul was back in the office today, getting his "sea legs" as the new assistant chair--and William was here as well, working to ensure that MDC courses all get enough students in them to run. So we had a full office, though we didn't really have a chance to celebrate the fact. Paul and I are going to have dinner together tonight, however, which will be lovely, and soon we'll plan a dinner in the City with William and Kristin--who is on a year-long sabbatical, the lucky woman.

Let me remind myself: one of the reasons this job continues to be a very good thing indeed is that I work with such marvelous people, a number of whom I am fortunate to count among my real, dear, close friends.

In terms of work flow, I didn't get much done on my own classes today (apart from interrupting myself in the midst of trying to do some organization so I could fix that syllabus). But that's OK. I will roll in at some point tomorrow and grind away at organization and the beginnings of photocopying. That will also involve figuring out what I can send to Printing and Publications, handouts that I already have but won't need for a while.

The prioritizing of tasks to be done on this semester's classes is still more than a little unclear to me; I'm bumbling around, doing whatever I happen to trip over, instead of having an actual plan. (I am, however, beginning to accumulate lists.) Perhaps tomorrow I can construct an actual triage list; that might be helpful.

I also will work a little on the online Nature in Lit--in part because Paul wants to watch me in action, so he gets more ideas for the class he's teaching online this semester but also because I did a little reading over lunch and have some ideas I want to be sure to include.

Ach, it's kind of endless, actually--as I say all too often. The work will consume as much time as I allow it to consume, and I'm not very good at limiting that, despite my best intentions to manage my exhaustion and stress levels more diligently. I suspect that I will make only incremental improvements in that area--I realize more and more that this is just who I am, for better or worse--or perhaps I need to simply accept that this is how I roll, as the saying goes.

Now, however, it's about time to figure out what needs to go in a bag to travel home with me, as well as to be sure I know what needs to come from home to the office with me tomorrow. (I've already left myself one voice-mail reminder; we'll see how many more I leave myself before I actually get home.) Dinner with Paul awaits. And truly, all bitching aside, life--including what I do for a living--is very good indeed.

Super-quick

I have about 12 minutes in which to post, so:

Cathy and I have covered all the FT faculty contingencies--I think. One of our colleagues has abruptly decided to retire--which is good for her, as her health is a serious concern, and not bad for us, as it gave us a few extra courses to distribute. (I didn't ask Cathy about the classes from our colleague who passed away (a euphemism I generally dislike, but the gentleness of it seems appropriate in this instance).) My SF class just hit the minimum mark: if it stays there or, better, continues to gain ground, that will be great. The later 101, which had low numbers, is now climbing rapidly: it will fill, I'm sure. And I bet next week we suddenly have to open more sections and find adjuncts to teach them. Fun and frolic.

I got out to look at the partial eclipse. I thought it was extremely cool to see (both through the shielded telescope and--even better--through a pair of eclipse glasses that I borrowed from a colleague). Interesting that many people seemed quite underwhelmed (including a lot of the kids who were there). But congrats to our colleagues in the Physical Sciences for putting on a whizz-bang event.

I think (I hesitate to say this, but I do think) that apart from the final essay for the SF class, I have all the handouts not only ready but printed and set to be copied. Of course, I had to print the syllabi again; I not only had made some changes over the weekend but I forgot that I'd decided to put the date/time footer on them. I am appalled at the amount of paper in the recycling bin, but at least we have a recycling bin, not just a garbage can.

I started working on making sure I have copies of all the essays the students in the 101s will read--and I need to think about the critical material I'll be providing for the students in the SF class for their second essay. I already did a bunch of research, so I don't need to reinvent that particular wheel; I just need to decide which of the essays I'm actually going to make available to the students and how I'll set that up. Thinking, thinking.

There are still a few classes that are not yet staffed, mostly those with low numbers (so they may yet get canceled)--but I'm really worried about the increasing possibility of howling errors in schedules. I hope to take some time after contract signing to work carefully with Lori, our most amazing office administrator (not sure of her actual title, but it should be empress, I think). I know she has ten thousand other things to deal with, but since we have some time (a lot of time, actually) between contract signing and start of classes, I'd like to use it to quadruple check everything and fix any problems before Labor Day.

One final note: I need a bigger desk. In fact, I need a desk about the size of this room. I'll talk to Paul tomorrow about whether we can put a file cabinet next to the computer table where I'm working right now. I think he said he has one at home he'd like to bring in, but if not, I think I'll buy one; there's plenty of space, and having a little additional surface area on which to spread stuff out would be terrific. Plus Paul could use the file-drawer space. Win-win.

Now, however, my 12 minutes are just about up, so I'll sign off, shut down the computer, and be back blogging on the morrow. The sky monster did not, in fact, eat the sun permanently, and all portents of doom are averted. Clearly the proper rites were observed. Whew.

Working on a Sunday...

Not working very hard, I assure you, though I have actually had to engage in a little thinking, as I've been working on the online Nature in Lit. I'm up to week 5 (out of 15)--and I'm realizing how much of the (rather pricey) textbook I'm leaving out of what students have to read. Many of the texts I think are important or that I particularly like are not in the book but are available on the web (Emerson's Nature, for instance, or Whitman's "Song of Myself"). I hope that as I get past the 19th century, I will rely more heavily on the textbook. No: let me rephrase that. I will rely more heavily on the textbook--even if that means slight disappointment that I can't assign something I really love because it isn't in the book. The selection in the textbook is wide-ranging and wonderful, and in fact it can expand my horizons (as there are works in it that I have not read but would like to know at least a little bit). But I'm up to Thoreau's "Walking," which is in the anthology--and rather than using my diminishing mental faculties to try to figure out what to say in the overall set-up for the reading and for the discussion boards (not to mention finding images, which is fun but dangerous in terms of gobbling up time), I've decided to set it aside for now. Again.

I did, however, have another realization about the week by week schedule for that class, and how many weeks of actual content I have to produce: not only can we discount the first and last weeks, there are at least two weeks in the middle of the semester when students will be writing essays. I do have to monkey around with the assignments for the essays, but it will be a process of tinkering with assignments I've used in the past, not anything I have to create from scratch. So, well, that's good.

I'm also bracing myself for tomorrow, when Cathy and I dive back into scheduling. There are still a number of courses assigned to FT faculty that have alarmingly low numbers. Some are just under the mark: we've been using 12 students registered as the line at which a course is considered full enough to run, and some are at 10 or 11 students (including both Paul's elective and mine). But one elective assigned to a full-time faculty member only has 5 students in it at this point--and it's been holding there for a long, long time. Cathy and I are baffled by that: it's a section of American Short Story, and usually the word "short" in the class title is sufficient inducement to get students to sign up. (When I've taught it in the past, my first question to students is, "How many of you signed up because of the word 'short'?" and usually a majority of the hands go up.)

However, I texted Cathy about my concerns today and she seems very calm about it all, so ... fair enough. If she isn't worried, I won't be. She may have inside info that I lack about what our dean will allow, given the fact that students still have two weeks in which to register. I'd feel more sanguine if all the other electives were filled to capacity, but there are a lot of seats out there. (Using 12 students as the benchmark still leaves a lot of room in a class that's capped at 31.) I'll be interested to hear what Cathy's thinking is. Maybe she just has genius plans for how to shift things around. I wouldn't be surprised: she's like that.

I was, in fact, surprised to see that apparently she took rapid action on the sad news that one of our faculty died last week. We've been very concerned about his health for a long while (I may have mentioned this in an earlier post): he took a few very serious falls simply walking across campus. But he loved teaching and wouldn't consider retiring. We're all sad to lose him--but I have to be honest and say that my second thought was "Oh, we have to find someone to teach his classes." I went on Banner to see what was assigned to him--and found nothing. Apparently Cathy had already taken his name off the classes (and may have reassigned them, for all I know). She's nothing if not on top of things, always.

In fact, I worry about the fact that--in my estimation--she doesn't delegate enough. She did most of the adjunct scheduling while I was at the dermatologist's, instead of leaving it for me to work on the next day (and I know damned well she has about 10 zillion other things she has to do at the same time). The office staff and I are trying to get her to hand over more stuff that we can do for her, but I have to say, I completely understand her M.O., as I'm very much the same. 1. I will worry about something until I know it's done, so I usually feel I might as well do it and 2. I am enough of a control freak that I don't really believe anyone will do anything as well as I would.

But I'm working on letting both of those tendencies go.

Shifting gears: Cathy recently found the old faculty web pages (I didn't even know they were still accessible), and when she saw the link to my blog, she raised alarm bells. She's concerned that I might be charged with violating confidentiality regarding personnel issues--even though I don't use names. And I understand her concern, but I refuse to take the blog down, even though I was perfectly happy to remove the link from my faculty web page. I'm sure someone determined enough could still make the connections (I don't hide the name of the campus all the time, after all, and there's enough information available with first names that someone who really wanted to follow the clues could easily figure out who's being talked about), but in my estimation, this is a freedom of speech issue. I don't think I'm doing anything that really violates any necessary confidentiality concerns, now that there is no explicit link between the blog and my presence as a faculty member on campus. I do post to the blog using the computer at work, so I know the administration could easily nail me about it, if the issue were to arise. I may be stupid or naive, but I don't think I have to worry. I understand why Cathy urges caution, and she may be right. But for now, I'll just keep on as I've been doing.

But speaking of the blog, where it is, and all that, for a long while now I've considered migrating it to another platform, one that's a little more user-friendly in allowing followers in particular. I won't do that, however, unless I can sit down with my Montana-based computer guru and work with him on getting it all set up so my followers can still find me and so on.

Which is an issue for so far down the road it's practically invisible. For now, I'm going to switch my brain off for the rest of today and lapse into drooling torpor. It's a gorgeous summer day out there, perfect for doing bugger-all nothing. So, that's what I'm going to do.

Change of plan

I decided not to go in to campus today, opting to work on the online Nature in Lit instead of on photocopies for my classes. Part of the decision was sheer laziness, but part of it was the sense that I will feel better, psychologically, if I at least dip my toes back into the online course, get a sense for what I have and haven't done, and what I want to do. I will say, there is a truly daunting amount of work to be done, and not just scut work either, but real thinking. If it were just cut-and-paste organizing, that would be challenging enough (making sure all the right links are in the right places and so on), but I actually have to write out some ideas I want students to consider as they read, provide the kind of guidance that would normally arise out of my responses to whatever they bring in to class. I did a little of that kind of written guidance for the SF class this fall (and god, do I ever hope it works), but this is a bit more complex--because the students in the Nature in Lit class will be reading something new/different almost every week (instead of an entire book taking up several weeks of class time). So--leaving out the first and final weeks, when no reading will take place--that means 13 written "lectures." I have to decide what I'm going to have them read first; then I have to figure out what I want them to notice in particular as they read, or what background I think will help them, or (usually) some combination of the two.

I also feel compelled to provide images for each week's reading, something to lighten up what is otherwise very text heavy (and daunting for students who aren't used to doing a lot of reading). And--in terms of the overwhelming aspect of text itself--I am compelled to keep my "lectures" as brief as possible while providing at least the big landmarks (as it were). Searching for images is actually pretty fun; the challenge is getting any kind of reasonable information about the images to provide as photo credit. I can always say where I found the image, but sometimes the place where I found it doesn't bother to mention where the poster found it. For instance, I found a very nice print of the streets of Philadelphia in the 18th century--and no clue about the artist, when it was made, what collection owns it: nada. I'm trying to set a good example for my students by always giving credit for the stuff I find elsewhere (something I do not do, I have to admit, when I'm on Facebook--or even in this blog). It's all too easy even for me to fall into the "it's on the web so it's public property" thing.

No wonder students struggle with understanding plagiarism these days: they're used to treating everything on the web as belonging to any and everyone. Makes me realize I need to spend more time talking with them about why we can't get away with that sort of common use in academic settings. The main point is to get them to understand that it's important for them to actually do something with their own brains: to originate material, not rely on someone else's brain to do all the work. I think that may be a more challenging concept than it seems to someone on my side of trenches.

Be that as it may. I realize that I have run out of gas for more work on anything today. I did change the syllabi for this fall's classes--again (adding the technological requirements for what word processing software will work for them--and letting them know they can't do all their work on their phones but actually have to use a computer every now and then)--but my mental channels have all silted up for the moment, so I'm going to call a halt to the proceedings for today. I don't know if I'll get any work done tomorrow, or when I'll next be productive in terms of my actual job. (I will certainly be productive in other areas of my life, including enjoyment.) But whenever I'm back at it, you'll be sure to know.

Progress is made...

Well, Cathy and I got as far as we could with the adjunct schedules. There are two classes we don't have staffed; we're waiting to hear back from an adjunct on one of them, and the other is newly created, so at the moment it doesn't have enough students in it to run, though chances are very good that it will. We think we have an if/then contingency place if it does run. We also did as much as we could to protect full-time schedules, but there are a couple that leave us praying for a sudden surge in enrollment: whatever if/then scenarios we have planned will be complicated to implement, and that's putting it very mildly. But we can't really do more until we see what happens to enrollment over the weekend. It really is frustrating that we have to pull the trigger so soon, when we know--absolutely know--that students will be scrambling for classes right up through the first week in September, and if we close sections that are running light now, those students won't have any place to go.

The other problem is room: actual, physical space in which to hold the classes. As soon as we cancel something, the room disappears--unless we have something else to immediately slot into the space. Well, "disappears" as in another department in equally desperate circumstances grabs it. It is the Oklahoma land rush out there.

And I did start printing and organizing files for my classes. The only handout I can think of that I haven't yet worked on at all is the final essay for the SF class, but I'm going to let that dangle for a little while. I'm pretty sure I have everything else worked out. (Whether I'll still like it when it comes time to use it is a different question.) Also, after printing the same thing about 40 times and then being unsure which was the most up-to-date version, I decided that I would start adding a footer to that kind of document, so I can see at a glance which version is the most recent. I probably should add such footers to everything. Not only will it help me be certain that I am using the latest version, it will let me see when something has been languishing without reconsideration or fine-tuning for a long while and probably could use to be revisited.

I'm going through my usual thing of feeling somewhat baffled by the fact that I'm not running around like my hair is on fire. It seems like I should have to be getting ready to dash off to go somewhere, do something, but nope. There certainly is plenty of work I could be doing (getting some licks in on that online Nature in Lit, for instance), but I'm going to call a halt to work-type proceedings today. I'm still getting my body used to the early to rise (if not early to bed) routine, and since I had a spell of serious insomnia last week, I'm still a bit behind on the whole "rested and ready" part. I will, therefore, pick stuff up off the floor, then make sure I have all my toys and head home.

Strictly speaking, I don't have to come in tomorrow--but I probably will, to start making photocopies of handouts if nothing else. Of course, I still don't know how many handouts to make for the SF class or for the late-day 101, but the other 101 is full to capacity (ka-boom, like that, from yesterday to today), so I know I need at least 27 copies of all the handouts just for that one section. I can always make more copies as my classes grow, I suppose--or just wait until next week to make the copies for the other 101 and the SF class. The more I think about things, the more fluttery and anxious I get, so I'm going to try to retain a Zen-like calm and head for home--tomorrow being another day, as we all know all too well.

Back in the office...

Cathy and I didn't make a hell of a lot of headway today; there are a lot of FT schedules that are still pretty shaky, even though we shored up a few. The frustration is that we're under heavy pressure to cancel classes--but we absolutely know that students will be registering during the week after contracts are signed and before most classes begin, so we really have to keep sections open for that eventuality. The other frustration Cathy is dealing with (not my headache, thank god) is that we don't have rooms for our classes. The administration in their infinite wisdom shuttered one of the buildings in which a lot of our classes used to be held--and moved classes and a whole department out of another building (which is now being leased to another entity)--but they didn't bother to make sure they actually, truly would have space for every class. "Oh, there's plenty of room," they said. Hah. Not only do we have classes scheduled in different buildings on different meeting days (Mondays here, Wednesdays on the other side of campus), a lot of our classes have no room at all in which to meet. We're down to bathrooms and broom closets--unless they recognize that the High Muckdy-Mucks will have to give up some of their precious space to accommodate students and classes and give us rooms in the administrative buildings.

So, yes: once again, we are a living example of a cluster-fuck.

I also realized that one of the reasons we're struggling with enrollment isn't actually that enrollment is down: it's that caps on courses have been raised, slowly, stealthily, over the past years, so comp courses that used to be capped at 24 are now capped at 27; classes that were 26 are 28; classes that were 28 are 31. That is unless the class is scheduled in a room that the Fire Marshal has said can only hold a smaller number--or, in the case of at least one of the specialty programs, because the program coordinator has decided that his classes will be capped at 16. (I don't know how he's getting away with that, but so far, he is.) I'm glad that the Creative Writing program is able to keep their courses a manageable size; and our remedial and accelerated courses have reasonable caps, which so far Cathy has been able to battle to keep where they are. But I added it up: if all the 101s that are now full were reduced to 24 students in each section, there would be 158 students needing classes. I'm pretty sure that's more than enough students to make sure every section we have open would fill, and it might even be enough that we'd need to open a few more sections.

But, under the current circumstances, Cathy and I simply tossed all the work we did in May on adjunct schedules. There are virtually zero courses to distribute, and a zillion people looking for work. It's going to be dreadful--especially if we do have to give some of the courses that are currently unassigned to FT faculty. I put together a little spread sheet of classes that are below the threshold (the magic number is 12, I understand--though that seems to change from semester to semester); we need to make sure we have something to give any FT faculty who lose a course--and we need to make sure we don't assign courses that won't run to senior adjuncts. The fun just doesn't quit.

But Cathy and I called a halt to the work pretty early. I've been upstairs at my own desk since about 3:30 this afternoon (it's after 5 now), and I've been trying to make sure I have everything that is currently ready uploaded to the SF Blackboard page and printed out, ready to copy. I need to do the same with 101. (Speaking of enrollment, by the way, one of my sections of 101 has exploded, enrollment-wise. The other section is still holding at 10; there are 11 in the SF class.) I think my life will be made much easier if I can spend some time tomorrow working on the color-coded (and much reduced) syllabi I use for my own planning, so I know what handouts I need when. Then I can carefully go through folders and make sure I have the most up-to-date versions ready to roll.

And at some point, I'll start making the photocopies. There's no way in hell I can get the copies done by Printing and Publications at this late date--at least not anything I need for the first four weeks or so. But I feel very disorganized and bewildered by all the paper and folders and files and shit everywhere, so I hope to have a few days in which I can simply slowly, carefully, methodically check things over and check them off.

That, however, is a worry for another day. Today, I'm going to wrap things up here and head off to physical therapy. If I work at home tomorrow (and I hope I will, after my little dermatological procedure), I'll post. If not, I'll post on Wednesday. The routine is beginning to reassert itself, which is a curate's egg: it's bad, but I assure you, parts of it are excellent.

Maybe I'm finished... partly, sort of

I think--and I hesitate to say this--but I do think that I have everything done for the 101s. I made further changes to the schedule, of course. My dear colleagues on P&B let me know that what I had as the last day of class is actually a "make-up" day, in case campus is closed enough days that we need to make up a day. It's very confusing, as the next day is actually the last day of classes, so that last week we have classes Monday, classes Tuesday, no classes Wednesday, classes Thursday....

Weird, but it did make that change to the assignments very easy, as I had that slated as a "conferences in my office" day anyway. But I also remembered (after stumbling across the uploads on Blackboard) that I'd decided I wanted to provide a few extra credit readings (and associated discussion boards) for the second essay--which meant not only changing the schedule of assignments but also changing the grade calculation sheet (which I changed about seven times today even apart from that particular adjustment). Still, it wasn't terribly difficult to accomplish--and fortunately, because of the way the pagination fell, the additions only affected two pages out of the 22 (or however many it is; you can look it up in yesterday's post).

I actually spent a lot more of the day working on Blackboard, making sure all the materials are there, are current, will be available when I want them to be (and not before), that all the links line up and connect... and I finally was able to copy it all from the section I've been working on into the other section, which I carefully emptied of all content earlier in the summer so I wouldn't inadvertently load things 45 time (which I've done in the past, despite the warnings provided by the Distance Ed mentors about how easy it is for that to happen).

The only thing I haven't done regarding the 101s is to reexamine my grading rubrics, possibly reworking the rubric for the editing step in the process. But I've been nailed to the computer all day--I was not smart enough to set up the timer to get me out of my chair at least once an hour--and I'm just about frozen in place. So I'm not going to do any other work today, and I'm going to try to minimize the noodling around I'm bound to do as soon as I finish this post.

I don't know whether I'll have time to work tomorrow, but I'm guessing not. I have a dentist's appointment, then I head into the City for my rescheduled fiddle lesson (as my instructor is leaving town on Saturday and will be gone for about a week), possibly a tango class after fiddle. Friday may be the usual string of events--or may include another dental appointment. But because of the rescheduled fiddle lesson, there's a chance I'll have time to work on Saturday. I don't think I'll go to the City just for tango; I'll probably do yoga class and then toddle on home--or maybe yoga, life maintenance, home. There is still some significant work I need to do for the SF class, and although I could possibly leave it for later, I'd rather get it done before classes start, so I don't have to think about it any more. And then there's the ever dangling online Nature in Lit, which will continue to dangle for god knows how long.

When I'm on campus next week, I'll do a lot of printing and copying. I still don't know how many copies of anything to make: the enrollment in both the SF and the relatively empty section of 101 has improved slightly but not enough to make me completely sanguine that both classes will run. Well, Cathy and I will deal with the FT schedules that are in much more obvious peril first; then we'll deal with folks like me--at which point we'll be setting up if/then scenarios: if Prof. P's T section of 101 runs, give the "no instructor" G section to Adjunct X; if it doesn't run, give Prof. P the G section and find something else for Adjunct X, if possible. That sort of thing. We try not to let any of those scenarios have more than three dominoes in them, or it gets impossible to track (and that's why we ended up giving someone a three-class schedule in the spring. You'd think the faculty member in question would have noticed and said something, but she didn't until it was too late to fix, so she had to teach a summer class without pay to make up for it. But I digress.)

I have piles of paper all around my little computer desk, printouts and notes to myself--and I have no clue any more what's still current and what's old and useless (or potentially confusing). My inclination is to throw it all into the recycling bin and believe that at some point I will remember anything I really do need to do--or that if I don't remember something that was on one of the lists and was left undone, that it doesn't really need to be done in any event.

I'm starting to confuse myself. I'm packing it in for today. I'll be back posting, well, whenever, I reckon. Whenever I have something to report....

Oops, a little distraction there...

I'd meant to be finished with everything (including fiddle practice) by now, but I got side-tracked. I was checking several things online, including work emails, and there was a lovely P.S. from a colleague, praising the whole group of us who run the major functions of the department (Cathy, Bob--soon to be replaced by Paul, Brian--who heads Placement--and the summer Placement coordinator Johanna), and in a sort of "aw, shucks" response, I was moved to quote the Pogo cartoon strip character Bun Rab, who is awfully proud of his job carrying the hose...

That pretty well sums up my job. Notice that Bun Rab doesn't actually put out the fire; he just wants everyone to notice that he does, in fact, carry the hose. Bun Rab, c'est moi.

Despite the distraction, however, and the fact that I didn't get started until much later than I'd hoped, I managed to make genuine forward progress. Part of why I was so easily distracted by the urge to find the particular book of Pogo cartoons in my lovely collection (thanks, Sam Sandoe) is I had started to bog down in the organizational streams of making sure I have all the bits and orts for each step of the process from first handouts to final, that they're all up to date, have a minimum of howling errors, and are saved as PDFs, for easier access by my students online. But I think I'm in pretty good shape with the 101s now. Having that assignment schedule finally nailed down makes everything else infinitely easier.

However, I did discover that there is a boo-boo in the official academic calendar. Tuesday/Thursday classes meet 30 times, as they should, but Monday/Wednesday classes meet 31 times. (I didn't look to find out if classes that "break the grid" meet the requisite number of times because I'm not teaching any of those, so I don't really care.) Of course, it's possible I misread the calendar, but I checked it four times, and I swear I'm not missing a "Wednesday is a Tuesday" or a "Classes will not meet" thing. I see some of that going on with evening classes, but not day. I've mentioned it to P&B, but if I have to tear those schedules apart again...

Well, that's a worry for another time.

I also feel a slight lessening of pressure and panic because the friend I was going to go to the beach with tomorrow ended up having to work--so I have the day with no other commitments in which I can grind away, making (please heaven) further progress. Maybe I can even really have the classes for fall completely nailed down (except, of course, for the changes I will make on the fly, which always happen) and can then turn my attention to the online Nature in Lit. I also realized that the entire week after contract signing, classes won't have started yet, so I'll have all that time to work as well. The schedule is weird because Sept. 1 is a Friday, so that's when the semester starts--but because classes start that week, adjunct contracts are officially due the week before. Of course, we'll still be changing contracts all the way through that week, but I don't think I'll have to be on quite the same high alert as I'll need to be next week and the following.

But it's now well after 8 p.m., and if I'm going to get a decent night's sleep tonight, I can't keep noodling around on the computer--or practice fiddle. I feel a trifle guilty about that, but maybe I'll manage to practice twice tomorrow, or put in one much longer practice.

For now, I'm wrapping up the work day and putting a big bow on it. And I'll continue to carry the hose.

Progress again ... I think

I think--I hope--I have the syllabus for the 101s finally worked out and finalized. Yesterday I reconfigured when the assignments fall, which was made easier by the realization that I really didn't want to use one of the readings I'd assigned for the first essay. Ditching that made it more feasible to tighten up the first few weeks--and after that, getting the essays to fall on Wednesdays and having room for conference weeks turned out to be remarkably easy. I printed the revised thing out last night, and first thing today, I went through it, fixing mistakes, adding a few readings (too good to pass up), clarifying things (well, clearer to me; I have no idea how students will feel about it).

The result is 22 pages long. Holy fucking god. But it includes everything possible to defend me against grade grievance--which, viewed from a more positive light, means it includes everything students could possibly want or need to know about what is expected of them. (By way of contrast, the SF syllabus is 16 pages long--but I don't have to deal with discussion boards or other assignment wrinkles with that class.)

Twenty-two pages. I wonder how many students will flee the class just getting that syllabus.

I'm now going through the assignment schedule, one day at a time, to make sure I have the handouts needed and that I'm happy with them the way I have them. It did take me a while today to do the math on the points for various assignments. Since I ditched the "preliminary" essay assignment I did last time I taught the class (opting for conferences instead), I had to spread out 300 points across everything else--and I didn't want the essays to count for quite so much of the total. But I think the points values are appropriate for each assignment, which is the main thing: low stakes versus high stakes--and recognizing, for instance, that the students won't put as much time/energy into the editing step as they probably should, so that won't be worth as many points as last time.

As I gradually get all this under control, I hope my sleep improves. I had another bout of insomnia last night, though it was not as fierce as the night before. I'm calling a halt to the work relatively early this evening largely because my mental abilities are rapidly shutting down (hitting those walls), but also because 1. I want to wind down earlier than I have been, in hopes of a better night of sleep, and 2. I want to put in some time on the fiddle. My lesson is being moved up to Thursday, so I need to get in as much practice as possible before then.

Which is what I'm about to do, actually: practice some music. I hope I can get a good amount of work done both before and after my doctor's appointment tomorrow. I should have scheduled it for later in the day (or earlier), instead of at 1, but ah well. Tomorrow will take care of itself. The only thing I need to do now is get off the computer, move all my stacks of paper so I can get into my closet and into my bed (when it's time), and embark upon my evening--tomorrow being another day, and all that.

I'll regret this in the morning

I had an awful night of sleep last night, for reasons that are completely mysterious. When I finally did fall truly asleep, I ended up sleeping very late--and since then, I've been unable to get my ass in gear to do any work of any kind whatsoever. I did check enrollment numbers, which have improved ever so slightly (and interestingly, the student whom I've called "Rose in Bloom" had signed up for SF initially--one of the first people to register--but now is not in the class any more). That's a good sign, though I'm still prepared for the possibility that I may end up tearing my schedule up in order to teach a section of 101 that's sure to run. I'll know more next week, when Cathy and I start on adjunct scheduling.

So, I've been doing everything except work today--and suddenly, now that the feasible window for work is getting very small indeed, I realize how little time I have before classes start, and how much time I still need to get everything ready for the 101s in particular. Cue wave of panic.

Given the situation, I'm posting in advance of working, as a way to rev my engines, as it were. I know that even doing a tiny bit of work--specifically, resolving the problem of how/when to schedule the essay assignments for the 101s, even if I do nothing else (and even if I change my mind another five times about what makes sense as a resolution) will help calm the panic.

I'll post tomorrow, I expect, and I expect that tomorrow I'll post as usual after the work is done, instead of before. But it interests me that sometimes it takes a modicum of panic to push me through a blue mood and into productivity. Today would be one of those days.

Off I go to reconceptualize...

Oh, argh

I have conflicting desires for what I want to do with the 101s, and it's making scheduling around the essays ridiculously complicated.

I realized that, in constructing the assignment schedule, I needed to start from when the various essay steps would be due, then fit in everything else around that. I've scrapped the preliminary essay step that I did last time I taught 101; I liked it, as it let students test-drive ideas before they got too far into their essays--but I just can't figure out how to squeeze that step in (not with time to read the essays, respond, and get them back to students) and still do conferences. And in fact, I'm not entirely sure I can do conferences, unless I really tighten up on the reading schedule--but I'm afraid students will implode if I do that. (They may implode anyway.) At the moment, I only have one class day that I can devote to conferences for each essay--if I still have them work on editing in class. I suppose I could have them do that editing step on their own. In fact, the more I think about that, the more I think it might be better to give them a clear assignment for what's required in the editing stage and let them work on that part on their own while I focus on revision--which is always a much harder concept. Or I could skip a formal editing step, though I like making sure they understand it as an important step but a separate one from revision.

Oh, Christ, it's just all such a hairball in my mind right now, I don't know how to get it sorted out. I really do want to do conferencing with them, and I want to do it for all three essays. And to do that, I need time to read and respond to essays. Doing my evaluation and commenting online does streamline the process for me, as I can get essays to students more easily (though it doesn't save any time, really, as the impulse to comment at length is too hard for me to resist). But I need to think very carefully about how to schedule the turn-around time so I don't completely lose my mind. And I think I need more time. At the moment, the schedule has me collecting essays on Mondays and starting conferences on Wednesdays--and that's just a really, really, really bad idea. I need to give myself the five days over the weekend to grade stuff. So, I have to either ditch readings, load up on what's due in any particular day, or ... something.

So, I keep moving things around--and of course, along the way, I'm making adjustments to other assignment sheets to try to make them fit with the new procedures--and the chains of things I have to keep track of get longer and longer.

I do realize that all of this is self-imposed, of course. I do all this changing of how I teach because I want to feel good about what I'm doing, to apply what I think I've learned from successes (and failures) past, so there's a better chance of students doing better work. In other words, I put myself through a lot of stress and anxiety formulating processes and procedures in order to attempt to reduce stress about the quality of the work I receive, as the frustration of reading absolute, unmitigated crap seems more painful, in the long run, than the frustration of what I'm doing right now (revamping, trying to make all the pieces still fit in the frame).

I didn't get in a lot of hours of work today, which wasn't hugely surprising. I hope that allowing things to simmer on the back burner until Sunday will lead to some clarity--or at least a potentially good idea or two. I didn't work at all yesterday (prior to my doctor's appointment, I was doing what my father called "fiddle-farting"--which has nothing to do with the horrible noises I make when I practice violin--and after the appointment, it was late enough that I didn't dare embark on more work). The one thing I did was go to the post office--and of course, since on Wednesday I had broken down and bought the damned handbook, it was delivered to the P.O. Box yesterday. (And I owe the post office a minor apology: it seems as if, this time at least, the slow delivery wasn't because they misplaced the thing but because it wasn't shipped until much later than I expected.) Still, I now have a copy of the book for here and one for the office (though it really isn't substantially different from the old one, there are some small page number adjustments).

And now it's time for me to pack my little bags and head off for my regularly scheduled Friday personal enrichment activities. I won't be checking in tomorrow but should be back posting on Sunday, good Lord willin' and all like that.

Please help satisfy my curiosity

My readership has suddenly increased this year--and has reached new highs over the summer. I still only have a few official followers (which is fine; I know, among other things, that becoming a follower requires a Google account of some kind)--but apart from those five faithful readers, and a few others I know about (colleagues and friends), I don't know who is reading my blog or why.

So, if you're not someone I know--or if you are someone I know but you haven't let me know you read the blog--I'd love it if you'd leave a quick comment telling me what brought you to the blog and why you're interested. If you also would like to say a little something about whether you read regularly or just stumbled across it once and check in on occasion, that would be interesting, too. Please use the "Comment" function below. And thanks for reading!

Shifting gears--and hitting the wall

The good news is that I finally have the correct version of the handbook, so I can work on the 101 syllabus using the correct page numbers and adding review of the Sentence Guides. What I like about the Sentence Guides is that they're not nuts and bolts of GSP (grammar, spelling, punctuation) but rather examples and tips for constructing sentences to present an argument and use sources appropriately. It's astonishing how basic it has to be for students--somehow I learned this stuff by osmosis, and I have no idea how--but examples include "Presenting what is known or assumed," "Presenting others' views," "Presenting your own views: agreement and extension," and so on. There are "fill in the blank" type examples, so students can see what academic language looks and sounds like. Conceptually, I like it a lot. It remains to be seen whether students can glean from the material what I hope they can.

I got the handbook, by the way, by going to the bookstore on campus and buying a copy. (The rank incompetence of my post office strikes again.) I actually bought two copies: one I donated to the library, so I know for certain that it will be on reserve for students when the semester starts. But as I was walking around campus, I suddenly realized a few small changes I wanted to make to the SF syllabus, as well as to incorporate into the 101 syllabus. One had to do with letting students know that I am not instantly available when they email me. (They're so used to the instant reply of texts--or emails, received on their phones--that it takes a lot of repeating before they understand that, if they contact me immediately before class, I probably won't get the message until after class, and sometimes long after class.) The other had to do with point value for the handbook review assignments. They're very low stakes, but I also want them to have enough points attached that students do them. I changed the points from 10 to 15 for each review--but that meant changing the syllabus, changing the assignment handout, and changing the grade calculation sheet, as well as uploading all the changes to Blackboard. (Seems like I made other changes as well: it feels like I re-uploaded the syllabus three times....)

Thinking about the schedule also made me think about what to do with the SF students the second day of class. There may be new students (through add/drop, or simply students who weren't there the first day), and I don't want anything substantive to be due--I'm going to ease them into the work of the semester a tiny bit more gradually than usual--but I need to do something on that day that will make sense for the students who were in the first class. I thought about showing a YouTube video about the value of SF (and found one that isn't bad), or showing a short SF movie (I didn't get far in the search, being very disappointed with what I first found). Neither option is floating my boat at the moment, so I'll have to keep thinking.

The idea of showing something in class also triggered an "Oh, right, and I need to..." thought: I need to put in the request to have the computer and projector up and running for every session of 101. I won't use that tech every session, but it helps to have it there for spur-of-the-moment demonstrations.

So, the chain of things to tend to keeps getting longer, and what I've actually accomplished feels correspondingly less significant. But I do know I'm making something akin to progress. And since I got about five hours of sleep last night (and not very good sleep at that), I can feel my mind shutting down all higher functions. I have about enough left in me to write an email or two; then I will decidedly be stick-a-fork-in-me done. My work day tomorrow will be interrupted by an afternoon doctor's appointment, and then I'll have the usual limited time on Friday, no time Saturday--and here we go 'round the prickly pear. All of that, however, is the future, which does not exist. Now, I'm closing up the intellectual shop for the day (and hoping for better sleep and a more productive day tomorrow).