The wheels have fallen off, the undercarriage is lying in the road...

The 101 class is a complete disaster. It's falling apart in so many directions, I pretty much have given up. I was going to read the riot act to the students in the 101, but ... nah. What would be the point?

Seven showed up (two very late). One has missed almost as many classes as she's attended. (Chances of passing? Next to nil.) One is a student I really wanted to have back and was afraid I'd lost; I'm offering her an incomplete, if she manages to pull everything together for the rest of the semester. One is a student whose personal life is in turmoil but who didn't have his head together even before the turmoil began; he left his binder, his books, his essay, his handouts ... everything, pretty much, in the classroom at the end of class. I thought about calling him to let him know it's all still sitting there. Nah. I'm not going to run around after him, cleaning up the trail of chaos he leaves behind. Little Mr. Formatting was there--and I could praise him for a good idea; he already knows what he wants to write his essay on (which worries me a bit; I think he may have written something in high school that he wants to retread, but ... we'll see). The young woman who was excited that I saw signs of progress was there--about 30 minutes late. I kept them for about 40 minutes because, really, I don't have it in me to haul ideas out of them. As it is, I replaced one of the most interesting readings with something more mundane but easy to understand--and rereading another of the required readings, I'm already dreading the bizarre ways they'll misunderstand it.

Whatever. Technically, I see them ten more times before the semester is over, but really, that's only eight teaching days (plus a wrap-up day and a day of "conferences"--which is, I tell them, code for "I'll be in my office grading, and I don't expect to see any of you"). I can survive that.

I think.

I've made a little headway on some of the other stuff that's swirling around the chaos on my desk (and the chaos is reduced somewhat, as I can put things in the "to be filed" file, having completed the task). Poor Paul told me earlier that he's drowning in stuff to do. I didn't want to tell him that--miraculously--I'm not. Next week might be a bit of a cluster fuck, as I'll be getting essays from both my lit electives (at least that's the theory), but I don't have to grade them toot sweet, so I think I'll be OK.

My primary thought as the day winds to a close is that I do not need to set an alarm tomorrow. Of course that nearly guarantees that I'll have another bout of insomnia, but ... I don't strictly have to be on campus until 1 p.m. That, my friends, counts as bliss. I have a sense of the triage list for the day tomorrow--and a sense of how I want to approach things for the SF class (which will be a bit disastrous, I'm sure, given how sketchy my set-up of the novel was)--and that's about as good as it gets these days.

So, I will, for now, sign off. Early. And it's still light out.