The "Cliff's Notes" post

I'm not invested in putting a lot of time and energy into posting tonight. It was a perfectly fine day, but nothing of great moment happened, for good or ill.

I met with the student I'm mentoring. Today wasn't quite as intense and moving--or as long a meeting--as last week's, but this work with this student is deeply rewarding. I'm not only talking to him about how to develop the discipline needed to stay on top of adult responsibilities; I'm helping him frame his experiences so he sees his successes and builds on them. He was very happy with himself for having successfully presented a speech in his Communications class--and for getting some lovely, positive feedback from his professor--but he mentioned that he realized how much better his speech would have been if he'd given himself more time to practice. He also talked about his writing process, and I pointed out that he is not a sprinter: he's a marathon runner, so he needs to allot his time accordingly.

And of course it was deeply gratifying to hear that he talks about my class with his friends "all the time," and that his friends tell him he's having a "real college experience" in my class. He sees the value in the topics I've selected, and he likes the way I let the students do their own research and find their own focus. I'm delighted that it works for him. He's in the later section, which has seen higher attrition than the earlier one, but even in that class, I'm holding on to more students than I used to years ago.

The SF class was fine. I didn't put the students in groups to finish our conversation about The Year of the Flood, which was a deliberate decision to truncate the amount of time we'd spend talking about it, as I wanted to get them set up for The Left Hand of Darkness. I did some of that, though not as much as I'd hoped (in part because of a technical malfunction that prevented me from showing the students the online materials, all the stuff I put together on my sabbatical which is now on Blackboard, ready for them to use as they will). Perhaps I'll get the computer working better on Tuesday next week and can show them; it won't be as early an "intervention" as I might ideally have liked, but better than not at all.

I was grateful that at the nth hour, a colleague agreed to act as Senate alternate for Cathy, so I could stay it the office and work. I was planning mostly to look at promotion folders, but as it happened, there was really only one I needed to read, which I did and still had plenty of time to do the photocopying I needed to do for the 101s, to do some other bits and orts of organizing stuff, and to start writing up the observation I conducted two weeks ago. (Tempus fugit.) I finished that after P&B, and managed to hack back a few other vines and weeds that have been tangling around my feet.

Now, I want to get out of here, however. I'll be putting in a full day tomorrow, and I'll be schlepping a shitload of work home to attend to over the "holiday" weekend. I'm hoping it's pretty quiet in Advisement tomorrow so I can get a jump on some of that work, but even if it isn't, I'll have time between classes and after the 5:00 class to try to pull together as much as I can.

But, while it's still before 8 p.m., let me just ....