About half-way there...

Numbers are crunched for the SF class (no A's, one B+ and a couple of B's--and two mercy D's). I've started on the stuff for the 101 class--but I've run out of patience, so I'm giving it a rest until tomorrow. More work may still come in for the Nature in Lit; they have until midnight to get their revisions of essay 2 submitted. We'll see where those chips fall.

The past few days I've been very nicely uncranky, but that's wearing off: the cranky factor is increasing exponentially. I was just telling Paul that I want to teach a class that is just sentence skills: not even grammar (though that's what students think our grammar course is going to be), but stuff like where apostrophes go, what makes a sentence a sentence, where to place commas.... I find it just drives me nuts that so many of them cannot manage even the most rudimentary pieces of that--and I want to just drill them and drill them and drill them until they can get that little piddley shit right. I don't have time in any of my classes--though I think I may hold seminar hours specifically for that purpose in the fall: designate one of my times as "sentence skills drills" time for my students--in all my classes. Work with them in small groups. Something. I'm at my wit's end.

And perhaps the most appalling part is that it starts to rub off on me. I find myself making mistakes I never would have made in the past--and not even immediately catching them--because I see things done wrong so often. It drives me mad, I tell you: mad.

In the "well, that's nice" department, however, contract signing for summer is now going to be on Monday, so I will definitely be on campus that day--but then I'll be done (except for those incompletes that will still be trailing in). Having to deal with those will be moderately annoying--but I'll take advantage of a reason to come to campus to sort out my files and start prepping for fall. Because ... I hate to admit it, but yes, I already feel anxious about fall, as if I am not going to have enough time to prepare. Usually that doesn't hit until July 4. I'm running early this year.

Paul and I also had a talk about enrollment and the usual tenterhooks about whether classes are going to run--and right now, all of my classes, even my 101s, look dicey as hell. Of course, it's very early days yet, and the bigger concern will be handling the summer classes that don't run because of low enrollment, but it does seem as if filling courses for full-time faculty is going to continue to be a challenge for the foreseeable future--unless enrollment picks up campus wide or we continue to lose faculty to retirement (and not have lines to get them replaced). I'm not so sure I like the look of what may be the wave of the future. I was saying to Paul, if I have to teach at 8:30 a.m. in order to have sections that run, will that be the thing that finally triggers retirement?

Who knows. Right now, I have no idea how I feel about anything having anything to do with my career. It's end of the semester and I'm completely fried. So, I'm taking my cranky self home. Fiddle practice, food, and noodling: that's the order of the day.