A teeny bit of headway

After being in "I'm on a break; I can collapse" mode for several days, I have just spent the day trying to get caught up and even a little ahead on the Nature in Lit course. I did find some critical material to provide for them to use for their second essays--though I don't quite know how to get it to them, as I have it in print and I think our library only has it in print (and a number of them cannot get to campus--in at least one case because he's not even in this state). But I did also manage to pull together essay topics--and to get a rough idea of the essay topics for their final essay as well. I think I may have mentioned that one of the librarians is going to create a LibGuide (a focused guide to specific research) for me for that essay, which will be wonderful. I'd do the same for my SF class--except there's already a LibGuide on LHoD that they can use, plus all the materials I put together on my sabbatical. I will do the same for any other electives I teach in the future. I'd dearly love to get rid of the critical research component altogether, but it's one of the Course Goals, so ... well, needs must.

I also realized I could organize a few things better--specifically where students go to see the essay assignments. I had that information buried in a "weekly" folder, but some students I know will want to get rolling on their essays early, so (duh) I made a specific "essay assignments" folder. I am, however, putting time restrictions on when the assignments appear: they can't see Essay 2 until after the due date for Essay 1; can't see Essay 3 until after the due date for Essay 2.

Then there's the issue of grading. I did grade everything--or so I thought, but when I look at the overall grade records, some students seem to be missing grades for assignments I'm pretty sure they did--and in at least one case, not all the grades are showing up in the "Total" column (which will entail a call to the Help Desk, dammit).

And, oh joy, I realized that I hadn't gotten quite as far as I remembered in terms of getting the Weekly folders ready to go. I grant, I only have three more weeks to do, but I thought I'd at least sketched out everything. Nope, not so much.

Well, c'est la guerre.

So, at the moment, I have several stacks of books on the bedroom floor--which obviously isn't going to get the information out of them and to my students, but I'm hoping I won't have to scan in the neighborhood of 15 separate articles. I think I can do that on campus (though I'm not sure how it works on our new copiers), which would be better than using my little at-home printer-scanner-copier-fax dealie (which gets the job done but can be torturously slow).

I don't even quite have it in me right now to put away the stuff I pulled out but am not going to use. I'll just pile that stuff up on the floor too and deal with it ... guess when. Oh, you'll never guess. But try. Guess.

(Yeah, yeah, that's right: tomorrow. When the sun will come out. When it's another day.)