Tempted to noodle ...

I am tempted to noodle around, doing house-keeping sort of stuff, but I am exhausted. Even though this is a night when I'd usually stay until 7, I'm going to take off in about ten minutes. I don't even have a lot to say. Those students who come out of BEP are just really difficult to deal with, because their frame of reference is so removed from what I'm trying to get them to understand. I asked one student today what his strongest point was, and he told me he was good at using quotations. No, I said: I mean, what point are you making in your argument that you feel is a very good point.

He honestly couldn't answer the question. Essentially, he didn't understand the question.

Sigh.

I did spend a lot of time in the past few days telling students that they have to just try and make the mistakes--and then work to fix the mistakes, not start all over to make the same mistakes again.

I almost want to take my fiddle in to class and show them how I practice: hit a glitch, work though it, slowly, repeatedly, until it unglitches, then run through again to the next glitch. Oh, I got the right notes but my bow position was off. Oh, the bow position was right, and I kinda got the right notes, but....

and on it goes.

I've also been finding it very difficult to focus on marking the homework for the SF class--not because the homework is particularly difficult in itself to deal with, in fact the contrary. I keep seeing responses and I want to have more scholarly knowledge to bring to the discussion. I spent a good whack of my time in Advisement today doing research on the school databases--and found a bunch of interesting articles, two of which I've printed. (Every now and then, I get a tiny bit of Paul's "I want to do some scholarship" bug--but I never felt that confident of my abilities as a scholar, so I don't yearn for it as he does.)

What ever.

There will be that other day that will show up in about six hours--and I hope to be sound asleep when it does flip over to the 15th. More later.