Conferencing: complete, or nearly

I am meeting a few more students tomorrow, but one is a student from the SF class, one is a student I already met once this week, and one is a student who messed up his appointment time and had to reschedule. But I don't have to grade any more essays today or tomorrow, thank God, and I can turn my attention to reading promotion folders to be ready for next week's P&B meeting.

Reviewing the promo folders is the most pressing "in office" task on my list, but I do have to take essays home over the weekend to do the "editing review" pass--which is relatively quick and easy, comparatively speaking (though at the moment the prospect feels painfully daunting).

I haven't reworked the triage list in some time--in part because a number of items haven't moved up, down, or off the list since I first constructed it, but more because the tasks I have to do are all so large that I'm not really forgetting any of them; I'm just in the process of cranking through one after another, as each particular plate threatens to crash to the floor.

There are other things I need to do which I may opt to do before I address the promotion applications--mostly in a feet-clearing frame of mind: photocopying, sorting out the stacks of homework so I know what I have, that sort of thing. But I'm about as set as I can be for tomorrow; I'm prepped to sub Scott's class, and I'm ready to teach my own.

I'm also still suffering from lack of sleep--which is, I grant, a chronic condition, but this week has been pretty extreme, and is unlikely to get better any time soon. I did, however, have time to practice fiddle before leaving the house today, as I'll get home too late to practice then. Other life maintenance is briefly on hold: things are nailed down well enough to get me through the next few days.

The conferences today were fine--or as fine as possible, given the drag of sleep deprivation on my mental abilities. But the students seemed to feel more confident heading into their revisions, which is the main thing. As I'm marking the editing review, I'll be making notes for myself of what I want to cover in Monday's "editing review" classes--which will include more than just editing concerns, as I realize I need to emphasize with them that the abstract required by APA style does not eliminate the need for an introductory paragraph to the essay proper. There are a few other specific wrinkles to APA style that we'll go over--and that's on top of whatever sentence-level errors many of them have to fix.

However, for the moment, I am going to retreat from the fray--as I am frayed. There are specifics about the conferences that I might relate, were I in a more perky frame of mind; perhaps I'll manage to record those another day. For now, it's time to climb out of the trenches until I climb back in again tomorrow morning.