"Learning Continuity"

In the "Total Administrative Bullshit" category, file this: We are now obligated to fill out a spread sheet with the name, personal email (assuming we know it), phone number (assuming we can find it), and so on for every student who has "stopped attending" class since campus first "suspended" activity on March 10. And we're supposed to do it by Monday. How the fuck would I know? They have been so spotty in their attendance under the best of circumstances, I would have no idea who has actually gone AWOL versus who is just being negligent as usual and could return at any moment.

We're also supposed to write out how we've changed our syllabi and grading policies under the crisis circumstances and have them ready to be electronically filed once the powers that be figure out how to do that. Both of these measures are thinly veiled "bash the teacher" provisions, designed to take us to task for 1. not running all over creating trying to contact every student who's gone silent and 2. not following the same factory-made parameters for our courses so that they'll be "fair." (This is a long-standing battle with the administration: they want to be able to assure students that they will get exactly the same content and experience no matter whose section of a course they take, but short of having everything taught by machines, that can't happen, and in our discipline in particular, the process can vary wildly and achieve the same end result, though we can't persuade non-humanities types, especially corporate-think bean counters, of that fact.)

As for changes in syllabus and grading policy, the answer for me is, I haven't changed anything at all. The only thing I've changed is I'm being less draconian in enforcing my various late policies than I would normally be.

But I'm thinking about my colleagues--especially those who are pretty nearly completely computer illiterate (even now)--who are suddenly having to switch to a completely online modality, and on top of this, they're supposed to chase after missing students and write up syllabus/grading policy changes in a way that will satisfy the administration on top of everything they're doing just to try to keep doing some semblance of teaching? Not to mention the fact that they're in the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis: we all see the news about what's happening in NY, and although our campus isn't in the City, a lot of our students are, and it's close enough to the City that the number of cases in Nassau County alone is more than some entire states are seeing.

I had a great talk with Paul yesterday, but he did share with me that the lawyers have taken over just about everything, so that way of thinking--trying to fend off any possible ambiguity or cause for a law suit--is trampling all over academic freedom and faculty professional autonomy. And again, I am grateful beyond words that I retired when I did, so I receive only glancing blows from the rampant corporatization of the campus. I do not envy my colleagues who are still in there, trying to fight the good fight.

Meanwhile, it's early enough in the day that I certainly could do some evaluating of discussion board posts, plus I think there's one more quiz ready for me to grade--but I'm too cranky to read anything they've written in the spirit of providing learning opportunities. I'd just want to smack them all with a two-by-four. Even the good ones. (And can I just say, thank god for the good ones. I know I can read at least three things--discussion board posts, essays, whatever--that make sense and are not filled with sentence-level errors.)

Gah. I'm cranky. I'm done. Stick a fork in me.

Grading, and teaching during a pandemic

Really, the title of this blog should revert back to its old title, since all I'm talking about these days is teaching. I spend a fair amount of my time not teaching--but I'm not doing much of anything else, either.

So far, where I am, the novel corona virus hasn't had a huge impact. Where my students are, however, is an entirely different story. I truly simply cannot imagine what their lives are like--and a lot of them were struggling to keep on top of the class anyway.

Still, I haven't heard from most of them about their graded essays--though one of the ones who didn't revise and didn't fix plagiarism did get in touch with me. I'll meet with him tomorrow. And Working Dad continues to plagiarize his homework--where he understands the question at all, which he often doesn't. And yet he seems to understand the articles he reads, so I don't understand what's going on there, unless he's just so anxious about being "tested" that he freezes up.

One student has been taking quizzes but doing nothing else.

And speaking of the quizzes, I get the absolute weirdest answers to what I think are very clear and simple questions--partly, I think, because they can't believe the answer is so easy and obvious.

But I also think there's a real factor here of what happens to our ability to read and absorb when we're anxious--and especially to read and absorb what's on a screen when we're anxious. And I can't really advise them to calm down because, as I said, I really can't imagine what they're going through.

Nevertheless, I got about 1/3 of the way through all the stuff I need to grade--some of it way overdue--and my own mind short-circuited. So I'm calling a halt today. I won't get much, if anything, done tomorrow, either, as I have to meet online with Working Dad and I Don't Need to Revise student 1, and by the time I finish with that, I may well be too rattled to do a damned thing--except engage in the kind of soothing behavior so many are turning to in these house-bound times and cook something. Which wouldn't be altogether a bad thing.

It's easier when they don't do the work

It took me a lot less time than I thought it would to grade the essays--because, as I realized, I didn't emphasize that submitting the essay unrevised would mean a lower grade for the second/final version. So several students figured whatever grade they got was good enough and didn't revise.

And I took a step that I'm not entirely sure I should have: I let them know that, since I provided my comments for their benefit, the fact that they essentially ignored my comments is disrespectful of me, my knowledge, and my time. It is, and it pisses me off, so I thought, what the hell. They should know that their behavior actually has a detrimental effect beyond their grade.

I also note that two of the students who didn't revise also didn't fix instances of "accidental" plagiarism that I pointed out to them in their first versions. I've told them both that I haven't yet given a grade, so they need to contact me to set up a time when we can talk. I'm giving them two weeks to contact me. If they haven't gotten in touch with me by then, my plagiarism policy goes into effect and they get zeroes for their grades.

The third one who didn't revise is potentially an A student, but he's just barely able to mask his utter disdain for the class. (He's one of those "it doesn't apply to me so why do I have to take it" students.) I've told him he can disagree with me, but now he knows he still has to listen to me.

I've also made it very clear that--going forward--if an essay is submitted for a second time without a serious attempt at addressing my comments, the grade (relative to number of points possible) will go down.

But one student really is an A student: not only is he very good, he really, truly revised and revised well. What a pleasure that was--especially as his was the second to last essay that I read.

So, now that's done. And although there are assignments I could grade (a quiz, I think, and at least one discussion board forum), I'm going to leave it for now and engage in mindless noodling. And I have a week in which to sort of breathe and get caught up before the next essays land. (Which reminds me: I need to contact one student to let him know he's not going to pass, now that he's completely missed both versions of essay 1. Oh, fun and frolic.)

I could get out walking this afternoon, but instead I'm going to work on the Guinness World Record in sloth.

Grading essays, god help me

It is remarkable to me how many ways I can find to avoid grading essays when it certainly would be better to simply do it and get it over with. I meant to grade four yesterday, four today, and four tomorrow and be done with it.

I graded zero yesterday, four today--so now I have eight still to do, and I highly doubt I'll be able to get them all done tomorrow. I'll be pretty danged happy if I manage to get four done and finish the remaining four on Saturday.

Meanwhile, there is at least one quiz and several discussion boards I could/should be grading, but am I? Hell no.

But I think about the fact that for me, this is all pretty much "situation normal"--except I'm physically far from campus--whereas for many of my colleagues, this is a time of crumbling crisis: quickly switching to FTF classes to online, which even for teachers versed in online teaching would be a nightmare, while coping with all the psychological, social, and pragmatic problems of life during a pandemic: grocery stores empty of basic necessities, medical facilities already strained close to breaking point and the numbers of confirmed cases still climbing, people trying to balance maintaining lives while remaining as isolated or "distanced" as possible.... Out here in the sticks, we are in a much better situation: not very many people and a whole lot of space, and we started putting all the precautions in place before things were already getting ahead of us. And apart from the need to get to a store from time to time, and the absolute lack of toilet paper anywhere in the state, it seems, I can toodle along just fine for a good long while just me in my little house, bitching about my students as if life were normal.

I have to remind myself how challenging things are for everyone back "home." Today, for instance, I started to feel impatient that I haven't gotten an answer about a payroll issue--but then I thought, "I have no idea what kind of insanity they're dealing with that's a whole lot more important than my question; I can follow up in a week or so. This is not 'house on fire' urgent." Ditto an issue with my vision coverage; it seems I've been paying COBRA payments but my coverage won't work out here. I've asked my Human Resources contact about it, but I don't expect an answer any time soon.

This is such a completely weird time in history--as one friend said, living it is a bear. Things to be grateful for: that the internet still works, that my computer and internet connection still work, that most of my friends and relatives are accessible through the internet one way or another. Strange, strange days.

Kinda-sorta caught up

I believe I have caught up with all the stuff I didn't grade from last week. I don't know why I resisted doing it for so long (and several times started, graded one or two, and then thought "I can't do this right now" and stopped). It really wasn't onerous, and it's nice to have my feet clear so I can focus on grading revisions of essays in the week to come.

There has been a whole lot of silence on the freelance front, which is OK by me at the moment. I may have mentioned that at one point I was contacted by some book designers who wanted to include an estimate for my services in a proposal they were making to a west-coast museum. I heard from them that they didn't get the job, so that won't be landing on my desk over the summer.

I really don't have a whole lot else to say at the moment--other than noting that I did create overall posts on two discussion board fora, correcting misunderstandings and pointing out realities that the students tend not to consider in their responses to the readings (about U.S. industrialized agricultural practices). I have stopped commenting on most individual posts, as most students aren't reading my comments anyway, but I specifically informed students that those threads now exist and that, well, they should read them.

I don't know how much work I'll do on the class tomorrow; I imagine I'll at least check Turnitin to see how many essays were submitted on time. Apart from that, it will be a day mostly about life maintenance--and simply doing personal stuff that I want to do (transferring compost from one bin that is not bear-resistant to another that is, for instance; it should be warm enough for such shenanigans after the brief arctic snap we just endured).

Life goes on. Life is, generally speaking, just hunky dory.

A little grading, a whole lot of fiddling

I've been futzing around with things like grade sheets and emailing students who are AWOL--mostly because I can't quite bear to read any more student work but feel as if I should be doing something that has something to do with class.

Regarding grade sheets: this may seem like a ridiculous expenditure of energy, since I'm teaching, and therefore grading, online, but since NCC insists on the need for paper rosters--and those paper rosters have to have a break-down of how the grade was determined--it's helpful for me to have an Excel spreadsheet that will calculate specific categories of grades in ways that Blackboard's Grade Center doesn't seem to like. Or, really, that I don't want to have to figure out.

But in putting together the Excel spreadsheet, I realized I wasn't sure exactly how many sheets I'd actually need. I only need them for the students who have submitted enough work that calculating their grade requires more than adding two or three numbers. And I realize that there are a few students who might still return--at least for a while--though they seem at the moment to be among the missing.

As for the emails I've been sending, I doubt they'll have any particular effect, but I've now done all I intend to do. We haven't yet gotten the Academic Progress thingy that we are required to do every semester; I imagine that in all the upheaval over the pandemic, "suspended" classes, attempts to transition as much as possible to online modalities, and hoarding of toilet paper, that little detail has slipped through the cracks. If it ever happens this semester, it will happen too late to be of any use to much of anyone (especially students whose grades are in danger)--but I will, of course, dutifully fill it out.

And in all this pother, I had rather blissfully forgotten that students are supposed to submit their revised essays by end of day Sunday--which means more substantive grading for me next week. So I really "should" have tried to hang in there a little longer getting discussion board fora graded, but ... nah. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe Sunday. There will be time....

Working with an aspiring writer

Using the online tutoring platform Wyzant, I just met with a student who wants to become a better writer and who is working on a "fantasy" novel. Really, what he wants to write is a tragedy; the "medieval" trappings are simply a device--and honestly, I'm not quite sure why he wanted them, but whatever. He does, so we'll work from there. I talked to him a tiny bit about fantasy as a genre, what it is and what it does, but mostly I talked more concretely about things like having the personas of the main characters more vividly present in the first chapter, having the emotional stakes higher (and more clear), and making sure he knows enough about the characters to know how and why the main plot points could happen. I found out toward the end of the lesson that he feels like, once he puts something on paper, it's therefore and forever after immutable, so my first assignment for him was to write five pages of anything, then make a copy of the file and make deep, systemic changes to what he's written. This is a bit of "do as I say, not as I do," but he really needs to know that revising is not only possible but necessary. I also wanted him to do a detailed character sketch of one character, one he doesn't know very well yet but who will ultimately be an important part of the overall plot.

It was interesting--and it's going to work in a very catch-as-catch-can way going forward; he's not sure when he'll have time to write, and I'm not sure how this is going to work generally speaking. But we'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, the students in my online class are turning into idiots, all of them, asking questions about things I just explained--one student asking a question in reply to the email that answered precisely that question. I'm getting a bit testy with them. They're also emailing assignments to me when I've specifically told them not to--but they're doing that because they're experiencing glitches with Blackboard. They probably need to clear their computer cache and cookies, but if I tell them that, their brains will explode. I was hoping to get an email from the help desk about how to do that, so I could mail instructions to my students, but I haven't gotten that yet. The Blackboard glitches are annoying to me and anxiety-producing for the students. Not happy about any of that either.

In fact, I'm sort of systemically grumpy. But I think I was helpful/encouraging to the aspiring novelist. I reckon I'll find out in a while whether he liked what I did well enough to want to use me again.

I'm too tired for more tonight. But it is fun working with the potential novelist. I wish we could work together more often and at greater length. Much more fun than teaching comp.

Must dash...

...but wanted to vent just a trifle here first.

One particular student was hounding me all day today about the fact that there's some kind of glitch with an extra credit discussion board forum, so she hasn't been able to post to it. I fixed what we thought was the problem, but it didn't work, which means I have to contact the help desk to figure it out--and she was all over my email about it. She also was all over my email asking about her essay grade--even after I returned the essay, which has the grade on it. Calm the hell down and be patient--and recognize that the world doesn't run to your schedule, dammit.

And Boopsie did respond to my email, to my astonishment, and she said she has been falling down on the work but thinks she can pass the class--so she and I will talk during my office hour on Monday. That will be interesting, to say the least.

Oh, yes: and there's the student who said he got his essay back, and was there anything he could do for extra credit. I referred him to the syllabus:

Some extra credit is built into the regular assignments: if you do all the assignments and get top marks, you can earn more than 2,000 points—and that would be the equivalent of getting 100% on every single assignment. I have also included a few extra credit assignments to help if you should fall behind. That’s enough extra credit. Your task is to do the work assigned. Do not ask for additional assignments to boost your cumulative score.

So, answer your own question, young man.

But I got the essays all marked--including Boopsie's--and got the Met project done (turned out to be tiny, thank God), and even wrote a letter of recommendation for a student from my last semester in the classroom, and I am now, by god, stick-a-fork-in-me done for today. I'm going to meet my mother and go out for dinner. Not a steak blow-out with Paul and the gang, but it will do nicely, thank you.

Might as well revert to the old blog title

Seems like, for the foreseeable future anyway, this is going to be a blog that is 99.9% about students. Which is OK, of course; it just isn't what the title might lead a new reader to expect.

But about the students:

Imagine my utter astonishment when Little Boopsie--the one who tried to join the online office hour, gave up; submitted a quiz and started another, gave up, otherwise has been AWOL--submitted her essay, two days late, and sent me two very chipper emails, one saying, "Oh, oops, I forgot my works cited page!" and the next saying "Oh, sorry, sent you the wrong works cited page; here's the right one!"

OK, so clearly she understands at least that emails work in one direction, but I emailed back saying the professorial equivalent of "What the fuck??" and of course have heard absolutely nothing back. The letter that was mailed should arrive at her house any day now--assuming she still lives at the address she has on file, which may be a huge assumption.

I'll give her some feedback on her essay--once I finish with everyone else. I got another late submission, too, from a student who emailed on Sunday to ask where he could find the article for the essay (and to whom the answer was, "You need to do research; I suggest you read the essay assignment"). So now I've gotten submissions from ten of thirteen, but not from one of the students who I thought was among the best.

And what with one thing and another, I haven't gotten everything marked--and I'm going to send everything back all at once, to sort of level the playing field as it were: no one gets extra days to work on the revision--so even though there are only two more (and Boopsie's), I have to really get rolling tomorrow morning and crank fast, so I can at least start on the Met project and see how long that will take.

Of course, while I focus on grading essays, I'm falling way the hell behind on everything else I need to mark for them, so even when I finish grading essays and get the Met project returned, I'm still going to have a bolus of work that needs doing.

Meanwhile, Cathy offered me a summer section of Native American Lit. Online courses in the summer run ten weeks, not four like the FTF versions, so that removed one objection, and I confess I'm kinda tempted--that whole "I need money" thing--but I'd have to start over from zero, as the textbook I used to use is insanely expensive new, and there are problems with students getting it on time if they get it used, and I used to use a lot of handouts, so I'd have to think of something else to do ... and I think I just talked myself out of it. I do love the course, but I haven't taught it in seven years, and there's just an awful lot to convey if I'm going to teach it right. The problems go way beyond the textbook. I'll think about it over night (the idea of the money really is appealing), but it would be an astronomical amount of work to get it up and rolling. I don't think an online version of the class has ever existed, either, so I couldn't even raid what someone else has done (and actually, full-time faculty get paid a stipend to put together an online course when it's never been taught online before, so I'd kinda be giving NCC my work for free, which I don't much want to do).

But now, even though the sun is still up, as far as I'm concerned, the curtain has descended on the day, and I'm packing it in. I thought I might do a little research into possible textbooks for the Native American Lit class, just to see how possible it might be to throw something together, but if I start on that, the wind-down process will be delayed even further, and I would like to try to make an early night of it. I expect I'll touch base tomorrow. It will be interesting to see if I get any more late essays (tonight midnight is the absolute deadline), and to see if I hear from Boopsie. We'll see.

Mostly students

I did get another little freelance gig for the Met, but I'm going to make myself finish the student essays first.

And it's a damned good thing I'm only teaching the one class, or I'd be utterly, completely sunk. It's that whole keyboard/spend-too-long-on-comments thing. But then again, I have only received eight essays--and I rather think at least one of those (Working Dad) won't make it to the end.

Working Dad plagiarized, by the way. According to Turnitin, 39% of his essay was plagiarized. And his "argument" was about which college his son should attend. (The plagiarized stuff was from a website about the values of a Catholic university education.) I hardly knew what to say to him. I do wonder what's going on with his mind: there are things he misunderstands that simply baffle me. Is he not reading? Not comprehending? Too distracted to know what the hell he's doing? All of the above?

One student tried to cover all four possible topics. {{buzzer sounds}} Thanks for playing, but you lose.

One student wrote two pages of random thoughts with no focus.

Those were the three I graded today--and I was unbelievably nice to the non-plagiarizers. The grades I give on the first version of the first essay are usually what I would consider very generous and students still receive them as horrifically insulting and demeaning. Well, sorry, but if you don't actually do what you need to do, failing grades would probably be appropriate, so anything above that is a gift, don't you think?

But I recognize that they are learning--and we're at the "they don't know what they don't know" stage: most of them simply have zero clue what a college paper should look like and have even less of an idea how to approach creating one. So, yes: I'm generous. Once they get my feedback, one hopes they'll have a better sense of what to do. But I just realized that I could have--and should have--provided a sample essay so they can see what a good, solid B looks like. I'm sure I've got one somewhere....

I'm also a bit concerned about one of the students who has not yet submitted her (I think her) essay. She's a pretty good student, so the fact that her essay hasn't been submitted yet is a real concern. I sent her an email--but then I decided to send a group email to the students who are not as good but who still have been hanging on up to this point but haven't submitted essays. It's my compulsion to keep them from drowning--if nothing else by pointing out where the lifeboats are. I doubt I'll get more submissions--and if I do, I might be kicking myself for making more work for myself--but I really do have a vested interest in teaching them, even when they don't do their part.

Well, whatever. If they don't submit by midnight tomorrow, they're out of luck on this one--and even if they do, I'll still devote Thursday to the Met project. My policy says I don't give comments on anything that's submitted more than 24 hours late, but if they at least make the attempt, I'll give them something; I'll just try not to devote quite as much time and attention to them as I have given to their peers who submitted on time.

About students--the perils of electronic files

Yeah, see: it's about me and the keyboard.

When I marked essays by hand--writing comments and noting problems with the mechanics in pen on the page--there were limitations in how much I could say and how quickly I could say it. I still spent way the hell too long grading essays, but I was kept at least a little in check.

But with a keyboard under my fingers, all bets are off. I am a very wordy person anyway; I talk a blue streak, and I'm even worse when I'm writing using a keyboard. (If you haven't, you should see what a "brief" email from me looks like.) I except the "keyboard" on my phone, which doesn't really count, as I can't use all ten digits the way I can on a computer keyboard, but when I can type the way I was taught in junior high (and perfected as an undergrad and even more when I worked as a secretary), it's off to the races.

Which, of course, means that a. I provide comments that are way, way, way too long for the students to absorb and 2. I spend way, way, way too long providing them. And I don't quite know what to do about that, as all my usual solutions don't seem to work: setting a timer (I ignore it for the first two and then just stop setting it), drawing a line (because I keep reading after the line, and I find more that I really just have to point out), whatever.

So of the approximately 13 students who are likely to submit an essay at some point, eight have actually done so (they were due yesterday)--and it still could take me most of the week to get them evaluated and back to the students. Which is not optimal to say the least; I know they won't do their revisions until the nth hour in any event, but I don't want that to be my fault.

It's a dreadful thing to say, but we all know it's true: I'm relieved that at least one of the essays is so ungodly bad that I won't have to do much at all. The student has falling into the trap of "plagiarizing" because he didn't use quotation marks, even though he's tried to give credit to the sources; his essay has absolutely zero attempt at correct formatting; his ideas are all over the map. There's another student who used quotation marks correctly, but Turnitin helpfully points out that more than 30% of his essay is quoted, which is problematic for other reasons, mainly that whole "you actually need to have an argument" thing.

And I grant you that the one essay I graded probably is a sort of worst-case scenario: there's enough going on that it's worthy trying to get the student to do better, but it's bad enough that there's a whole lot for her to do.

In any event, I'm going to take a break--after having graded only one essay!--to catch up on other stuff I need to grade from last week, which also will help me take attendance for last week.

But oh, I didn't mention the student who sent me an email at 5:30 last night asking where he could find the article he needs to read so he can write his essay. Uh, that would be the one you need to find doing your own research?? He even took the quiz about doing research, so I don't understand where the disconnect occurs in his mind--and of course he hasn't answered my email, because my response wasn't instantaneous (I only got his message and replied today, early afternoon NY time).

On the other hand, I did talk with the student who didn't realize she'd already taken and passed 101, and we sorted things out; she'll withdraw after spring break, so she won't have to finish the class and her financial aid won't be affected. That's a positive sign. (And I just remembered that I need to contact another student who said she was going to withdraw but--as far as I can tell anyway--hasn't yet.)

Well, this is how this particular cookie will crumble. We roll along, doing what we can and knowing that many will fall by the wayside before it's all over.