I should be out the door already. I'm heading off to a long-awaited, much-anticipated dinner at our favorite steak house with Paul, William, and Kristin. Life holds few pleasures as great.
Both classes went fine, which was a much needed boost, as I started the day miserable. I was in trouble with Advisement, as it happens--for good reasons, I confess--so I'm figuring out what I can do that will make it possible for me to still conference with students and not upset the Advisement boat. I need that boat; I cannot imagine going back to teaching four courses--not the way I teach them.
I did, however, realize that an alteration to the process which I'm making out of necessity in this next round of essay grading will actually work better for the students, so I'm going to implement it for future comp classes in all the essays. In the past, I've gone through a printout of the first submission of an essay to point out sentence-level errors, and I've told the students they need to look for similar errors on their revised essays. They absolutely do not understand how that would work: all they know to do is to find the exact things I marked to correct exactly what I marked. If the sentence doesn't exist any more, they won't look for something similar. Part of that, of course, is they don't know what makes the error an error--why a run-on is a run-on, for instance--so they don't know how to locate other instances. But also, they're just too accustomed to correcting what the teacher tells them to correct, nothing more. So, I'm just going to mark the check-list of possible errors and give them that; then they can go through either the first version or a revision or whatever they have, try to find the problems, and try to fix them.
It still won't work, I'm betting, but it takes less time and energy from me.
And at that, I'm out the door. I may fill in some more details from the day tomorrow, if I remember--and if I'm not bolting for home as early as humanly possible.
It isn't May yet. That seems cosmically unfair.
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