Making some progress...

I think I'm (at least mostly) caught up on the Nature in Lit grading. I haven't graded a few assignments that were submitted early; I could, of course, but somehow it feels less confusing to do them all in one go. And I feel a little bad about some of the feedback I left for one student, as the feedback is public--and harsh. But his posts are 99.9% idiotic parroting of the author's words, and I'm sick to damned death of it. I tell myself that neither he nor anyone else is likely to look at what I wrote there at this point anyway.

I probably "should" do some grading of stuff for my face-to-face classes--especially whatever things I have promised to have ready on Monday--but ... well, there's always tomorrow. It's late enough now (and I'm just tired and headachy enough) that I think attempting anything more today would be an exercise in futility.

On a completely different front--looking ahead--I just collected from the post office three (count 'em: three!) anthologies of Native American literature, which I want to look over and consider as replacements for the one I've used in the past. I hadn't realized before how insanely expensive that book is, and all three of the alternative options are priced much lower. Of course, if they have crap offerings (or if I just don't like the way they're organized), I'll stick with the one I know--largely because doing so would entail a hell of a lot less work on my part. If I choose a new anthology (as I think I've whined before), I have to redo the entire assignment schedule and all the essay assignments, which would be ... well, a lot of work. I'm only taking on that work if I deem the switch worth it. One of the anthologies I'm evaluating has discussion questions and writing topics. I'm never entirely sure how I feel about those. They may be beneficial, but sometimes I sneer at that kind of "apparatus" as being too simplistic or providing too much of the thinking for the students. On the other hand, if they help me with that part of redoing essay assignments--and if they help the students structure meaningful notes in response to the reading, that could be a good thing, save on the frustration factor.

Well, we'll see.

Switching back to the work of today, I have discovered to my infinite relief that it is completely easy to have Blackboard generate a report of the discussion board points I've assigned, so I can tally them up for the idiotic paper rosters I still have to do. I can, in fact, have Blackboard generate a report of any specific subset of grades, the better to tally with, my dear. Eventually, the final grading always comes down to just adding up the marks for each student--and fiddling where necessary to generate an outcome that I deem warranted when the numbers don't get there. (I don't downgrade; if someone has "earned" a D and I think the student should really fail, the D prevails. But--apart from the occasional "mercy D"--sometimes a student hasn't numerically achieved a mark I think he or she deserves, and in that case, I'll fudge things in an upward direction.)

And switching back again to a forward view (back and forth), I suspect I'll be posting to the blog a fair amount over the summer. I'm going to be doing a reasonable amount of fixing and fiddling on the Nature in Lit (adding some explanatory videos--which I finally see as beneficial--and changing some of the readings, swapping out, or even entirely ditching, some ill-considered choices), and, as intimated above, I'll likely be doing a fair amount of work on the Native American Lit. And as I'm doing that work on both classes, of course, I'll be hoping madly that they run--not just so the work pays off but also because I'm getting spoiled and really do not want to teach two comp classes, which is what will happen if either lit elective doesn't run. Nature in Lit is more likely to run, as the cap is lower and online classes almost always fill. I also sent an email to the SF students (taking bets with myself about how many students will actually get it and respond), telling them that I really wasn't kidding about wanting them to sign up for it--even if they have no intention of actually taking the class. (I also gave them some reading suggestions, reiterated my encouragement that they see me for mentoring in the fall, and offered a little extra credit if they get and respond to the email in time.)

Now, however, I'm going to take care of logging my mentoring/conference appointments and call it a day, at least as far as work is concerned, and head into the gloomy, cloudy, chilly evening, reminding myself that it's almost all over, almost all over, almost all over....