A remarkably prescient student

In the self-evaluation written by one of my students, I encountered the happy exclamation, "I'm excited to see how things unravel from here." All I can think is that she has precognitive abilities, to foresee the inevitable unraveling of the semester as it progresses....

(Insert "Smiley Face" emoji here.)

I just finished writing up the minutes for P&B. I absolutely needed to get them done, as A. I don't want to do them at home and 2. I'm going to be so buried in student stuff for the next week, I wouldn't be sure of having another chance prior to next week's meeting. Of course, until I wrote that sentence, I'd forgotten to send the damned things, but that's taken care of now.

In other "housecleaning" type chores, I scheduled the appointments for the 102 conferences next week, typed up a schedule to affix outside the door for those students who haven't been in class this week, got the notices ready to post outside the classrooms, reminding students that we'll be conferencing, that sort of silliness. In the process, I keep thinking about an email I got from a student this morning (it was sent late last night). First, she was trying to upload her essay directly to Turnitin instead of going through Blackboard, so I set her straight on that--and second, since she was panicking about submitting late, I hoped to alleviate her panic by telling her that the upload didn't need to be completed until 11:59 p.m. tonight, not yesterday. And then she didn't come to class. And she hasn't uploaded her essay. I'm wondering if she bothered to check for a response to her email or if she just assumed that, having emailed her essay to me, her job was done. She also hasn't signed up for a conference time. I think she has the potential to be a great student, but I am not going to chase after her about this. She'll either come through, explain why she didn't, or get the "you need to be responsible" lecture. Whatever.

Backing up to the start of the day: I got here only about 15 minutes later than I'd intended (which I count as a win), and I managed to chunk through almost all the assignments for today's 101 before I went to the 102. I did meet with a student from the 102 who was struggling with the essay. I may have mentioned her before: she's an adult, but she always has 40 excuses for why she doesn't have her work done. Keeping her focused on the actual questions she wanted to have answered was a bit of a challenge, and in the process, she mentioned that she has been diagnosed bipolar--but that she's been off her medications for some time. Oh, now I get it. She's not quite fully manic, but she has tendencies that way. I've offered to do the "calm down" breathing with her, but I did also say she needed to check in with her doctor--and I will encourage her to make use of the campus psychological counseling services. I suspect she'll resist seeing them about the bipolarity, but I'll frame it as a way to manage her admitted anxiety. She needs more than I can offer, that's for sure.

She did not come to class today--and since her essay was only about half done, that made sense. I had heard earlier from another student who wouldn't be able to be there. And, as usual, there were other absentees: about half the class was there--one came quite late--but that was OK by me: they did their peer review; I did a quick demo of how to get on Blackboard and to the Turnitin submissions part, and then I marked a few more assignments for the 101. While I was doing that, one student asked if he could use the computer in the classroom to show his partner that an MLA format template is in Google Docs--at which point, I realized I never went over the format with them. (Doh! Professor has brains of oatmeal moment number 361 for this semester.) Well, for those who were still hanging around, I showed them the pages in the handbook that have the instructions and--more important--examples, and I told them I'd cover it for next time so they shouldn't get too wound up about it at this stage. I will, however, try to remember to put something about that on the "mechanics" review sheets I'll send them ... at some point.

I also realized I hadn't talked to them about the "show your work" copy that I am requiring (instead of a mechanics review or a revision plan). Several of them (including the woman I met in my office) said, essentially, "Oh, I don't need to revise: I get there on my own." Fair enough. If your essay is so great that I have no suggestions, or very few, you'll have less work to do after our conference. I didn't tell them that my hunch is I'll find a hell of a lot more for them to revise--and not just to practice changing things but because it's really needed for improvement--than they might imagine possible.

What with one thing and another, I didn't get all the assignments marked for the 101 before I had to go to class--but in a "God smiled" moment, two of the students whose work I had not yet done were not in class today, so, reprieve. I went over the writing process with them--and, after a student from the M/W class informing me that they didn't have a handout they needed for the quiz, I knew to go over the handout with them. Then they talked about the readings--with intelligence and a certain amount of passion. We didn't get to talk about all three readings with the class as a whole, but we can finish them up on Tuesday.

Of course, that means I have to mark them all and be ready to hand them back on Tuesday, but I won't be as slammed with essay evaluation for the 102 as I might be. Five students are signed up for conferences on Monday--but I already arranged with Advisement not to go in on Monday morning, and I can easily do five essays over the weekend. In fact, if I apply a little discipline (not my best thing), I can probably get the essays for both Monday and Tuesday done over the weekend, with some time to mark homework for the 101s in there as well. It will help to alternate: 102 essays; 101 homework, and so on. It will be a busy weekend, no way around that, but not as grinding as it could be. Not as grinding as the following weekend almost certainly will be. But I'll worry about that later. There will be no way to know in advance how many students (or which students) will actually submit anything, or when the conference times will fall, or anything else. So, not a worry for today.

In fact, I think I've packed up all today's worries--if indeed I was worried at all, which I don't think I was. I'm pretty sure somewhere in there a pearl dropped through the floorboards, but either it won't matter or I'll remember about it eventually. (Or both.) Now, it's time to lug all the student work I have in hand out to the car and home--and to switch off professor mode for at least the next 14 hours or so. Maybe longer. Longer would be good.