Hold on to the safety bar...

We're officially in that part of the semester. I meet with my classes nine more times. Nine. That's still five weeks, counting this one--which I will count, because, despite being a truncated week, I've only completed the first day of three--but somehow five weeks feels like a long time. Nine classes feels short. Well, shorter.

And if I look carefully at everything I have to do in those five weeks, I may start to hyperventilate: suddenly five weeks may seem insanely short. But still. However we look at it, the count down to "stick a fork in me" is speeding up.

I confess that I did absolutely nothing with all the work I took home to grade over the weekend. I did read the chapters in the novel that I have to talk about tomorrow, but that's it. So, at least part of Thanksgiving weekend will be spent grading. It is now officially impossible to do any of our own work in Advisement. The parade of students is pretty well continual. The line of those waiting may momentarily get a bit shorter, but then it fills back in again. The silver lining to that particular scenario is that the time does whip by when the students come in back-to-back like that.

Um, what else. I did some reading today of the articles turned up by the research into the socio-historical context for the novel. I think I mentioned that students can choose either to do research into literary criticism (which is not easy for them) or into the context, but I need to make sure the assignment sheet covers the bases and makes that research as simple for them as possible. I'm not entirely thrilled with what we can turn up for research into socio-historical context, but whatever. It gets the job done: I am required to teach them "information literacy," and I'm doing that. I'm keeping the bar pretty damned low because I don't want to have to deal with students who can't get over it. Of course, some will fall in that category anyway, but that's how it rolls.

A bunch of students were missing today in 101; I think there's another wave of attrition happening, but we'll see how deep it goes. They had a little more to say about the topic we're embarking on next--"social technology"--but not much. I bored them stupid with a lesson about comma use, which I tried to enliven a little by using my family for the examples. (Didn't work very well. They just are not reachable, for the most part. Ah well.)

And tomorrow will be whatever tomorrow may be. I did reply--belatedly--to some emails about P&B business, which doesn't entirely redeem me, given the ways in which I've been pretty functionally useless on that committee, but it scratched the guilty conscience at least a little. And I'll go to the meeting tomorrow like a good little soldier and take minutes. I don't know when I'll get them written up, but I'll at least take the notes. Maybe I can do them Wednesday after Advisement, before I scamper away from campus to enjoy an extra, bonus morning of no alarm clock.

I'm sure there's more I could say about the day, but that sums it up well enough for now. Just turning the crank, as my dad would say: mule in the traces walking the endless circle. And counting down the days.