On the whole, a good day

The only truly icky bit today was with the plagiarizing student. I returned his plagiarized paper, and with it the source he stole from and Paul's Plagiarism Letter. As I started working with students individually, he left the room--which I was glad to see, as that way I didn't have to chase him out. However, he came back about 40 minutes later, withdrawal slip in hand, and wanted me to come out into the hall to talk with him. No, I said, not until tomorrow (as the letter clearly says the student must think things over for 24 hours before I'll talk about it). If he comes to my office hour tomorrow, I'm not much looking forward to it, as I will have to tell him that I will not sign his withdrawal form, will not allow him to withdraw. Fortunately, my syllabus clearly states that withdrawal will not be permitted if a student is deemed to have willfully plagiarized, so he has no grounds to argue, except the usual, which is to deny that he plagiarized--but if he goes that route, I'll be very disappointed in him. But we'll see. No telling when or how he may try to get me to sign the withdrawal form--if indeed he persists in that attempt--or how he may respond when I tell him he can't. We'll see.

As I write that, however, I keep thinking about the student Paul was telling me about just yesterday, one who forged Paul's signature on a withdrawal form. It never dawned on me that any student would be that stupid--as if we don't know to whom we've granted withdrawals and wouldn't check--but apparently this is something to keep an eye on. I don't think my plagiarizing student would go that far, but if he kicks up a fuss, I'll be on the lookout for the possibility.

There was one other minor piece of ick: one of my colleagues submitted a year-end evaluation form that was missing one relatively important piece of information. I let him know about it and asked for a revised form; as a member of P&B, I have to write up an "evaluative statement" for a portion of the year-end reports and his is in the stack assigned to me. He wrote back to say that he's in Brazil at an important conference marking the launch of a book he's published--which is wonderful, of course--but he wondered if he could submit the revised form and have me deal with it "during the summer." Um, no. It's true that I may be around a bit in June, doing preliminary scheduling of adjuncts for fall (just to make life easier for Bruce--and for me, come August), but I'll be damned if I'm going to have this stinky little task hovering around because he was in a hurry to get to Sao Paulo. I told him we could submit the form as is, or I could print out my pages and leave them for him to attach to the revised form when he comes back.

So there.

There were virtually no students in Advisement, so the time went painfully slowly--but I did get all the papers for today's 102 marked, so I could spend the time in my office before class writing e-mails and then, glory be, eating lunch and reading a wonderful old mystery (Josephine Tey's The Man in the Queue, which I haven't read in millennia). I was so exhausted, I wasn't sure I'd be able to do anything valuable with the students in class today--but as it turned out, it was a great session. One student met with me before class to tell me he wouldn't be able to finish the final paper; he wanted to turn in what he had today and have me "give" him a D, but in his case, the "mercy D" is not warranted. This is the young man who was highly articulate and sophisticated in class discussion but couldn't write to save his life--and who only submitted about 10% of the assignments all semester. He'll re-take 102 in the summer, and I offered him a withdrawal, but he said his financial aid adviser told him that it would look bad, so unfortunately, he'll have to take an F for this term. But I reminded him to focus on everything he's learned, and to remember that he'd known all along that the work load was probably more than he could handle--which is not his fault; it's just one of those things.

However, after that discussion with him, I returned papers to the rest of the students, and essentially I was able to have a brief conference with each one. In almost every case I was able to point out how much they've learned, how well they're understanding what they need to do. And now, all that's left in terms of actual work for that class is whipping through their final papers. I'll barely see them on Monday: they'll come in to give me their final papers; I'll hand them the end-of-semester self-evaluation assignment, and off we'll all go. I'll meet with them next Wednesday for the end-of-semester wrap-up, but that's usually relatively festive, and certainly requires little to no effort on my part.

When I got back to the office, although I was (and am) still rolling on the adrenaline of teaching, I knew I couldn't face grading any papers--but I wanted to put that energy to use in some way, so I decided to sit in Bruce's office and do what I could with the summer scheduling. I got as far as I could, and now I turn it over to him. He'll change some of what I did (there are some adjuncts he doesn't consider qualified for certain courses--courses I may have assigned to them--among other potential errors I may have made), but at least there will be a number of cases where he can simply go "yep, good" and move on. My main fear is that I didn't keep track of all the paperwork--and that I may have inadvertently assigned the same course to two different people (it's been known to happen). But he'll also have the office staff check my work, and they'll point out that sort of blunder. The main thing is, I can now stop thinking, "When am I going to find time to finish up the scheduling?" I have. Tomorrow, I can focus just on student assignments--and when I leave tomorrow, I may have every piece of paper generated by a student either out of my hands entirely or at least ready to return. That would feel fucking amazing.

Next week, I'll be finishing up the P&B work (evaluative statements for year-end reports, writing up that other adjunct observation) and trying to pull my head together in preparation to and following up on Wednesday's Assessment meeting. I also have to write a letter of recommendation for a student who was in my classes several eons ago--but whom I remember vividly. And I may well suddenly locate other pearls that have vanished in various amusing places. But it's winding down: I finally feel a little less as if I'm being eaten alive by gnats. That right there is reason to feel like it was, overall, a very good day.

Blooper of the day

I'll write a real post later, but I wanted to record the best student blooper I've seen in a while.

"This novel allows the reader to see into a world where everyone is literally on the same playing field."

The entire book takes place on a softball diamond....

Always surprises me

I walk into the classroom. I tell the students, "here's what you're going to do." They do it. Somehow, today, that strikes me as a minor miracle.

Of course, they don't all do a good job at whatever task I've assigned--and there have, on occasion, been students who've grumbled a bit--but generally, I say, "OK, get rolling"--and they actually do. Amazing.

Today the experience was having the more slug-like 102 do the "post outline" exercise I ran with the M/W group. This time, knowing the students are not as solid (or most of them are not), I asked to see their outlines before I allowed them to leave. There were two students I was particularly concerned about: they seemed to be diligently doing the work, but my experience with both has been that they are reluctant in the extreme to put in any genuine effort. One of them--Ms I Hate English--is starting to come around (barely, just around the edges, and still with notable reluctance). After talking with her about the problems I saw and how she needed to approach things instead, I said, "This is the hard part: you have something already done and now you have to go back and substantially re-do it." She almost grinned and said, "It's frustrating." Yep, I agreed, it is: but that's the process--and the resulting paper will be much better for having engaged in the process.

The other reluctant student I can't get a read on: I think I've mentioned her before, that I'm not sure if she's genuinely struggling or simply profoundly lazy. But even she seemed finally to be getting a grip on what is required.

The other students clearly were getting a lot out of the process, especially the one, lone, remaining male student: we circled back to his thesis at least twice, and made it better each time. And for each student, I got to iterate, "This is the process. This is how it works."

Nature in Lit was a bit of a bust: we read Le Guin's story "May's Lion," but they didn't have a lot to say about it--and a number of them missed the key passage that explains the whole purpose of the story--but at least we were able to point to the main issue, which is Le Guin's re-imagining of a real event as it might have looked in an alternative society, one that approaches the nonhuman world very differently from how we do.

I'm looking at the day backwards: from last class toward morning--and the morning felt productive but flurried: I got all the student stuff marked, and I was all set to go work on adjunct schedules--but Bruce was in a closed-door meeting (and the scheduling stuff lives in his office), so instead I was able to go to the meeting of the Creative Writing committee that I'd been afraid I'd have to miss. Still, that ran a bit long, and then I had to jet downstairs to P&B for a couple of interviews. Both candidates were very strong, though in very different ways. Many members of P&B seemed ready to hire the second one on the spot; William expressed some stronger reservations--and although I wasn't as skeptical as he was, I must confess that personally, I liked her less well. She may have a better mix of qualifications, but I thought the first candidate was simply a stronger scholar and a more grounded human being. They both were vibrating with nerves, too. I am grateful that I've never been that nervous in a job interview--and please god, I won't be in a high-stakes interview ever again.

Now, however, I have about 35 seconds to make up my mind whether I'm going to go to tango tonight or head home again and try--again--for an earlier bedtime. I was awakened an hour before the alarm by the start of a fight between the cats (there is no joy in catville these days), and was unable to get back to sleep, despite also having had a difficult time going under last night. Eventually, my body is going to make me do a face plant into the pillow and stay there for a while, unless I manage to pry my little bulldog teeth out of each day much earlier and easier. Will tango help? I don't know. I'll sign off now, and meditate a moment to try to determine what feels best.

And tomorrow is another day.

Monday P.S.

I thought I'd just quickly check Turnitin before leaving, to see which students had submitted their papers--and bingo: first blatant copy-and-paste plagiarism of the year. Apart from changing a few words here and there and cutting a line or two on occasion, the student has simply used a paper he found online. I'd have flagged it as plagiarized even without Turnitin, but using Turnitin saved me some time in trying to locate the source. Not even a lot, though: I couldn't get to the original source through the link on Turnitin, so I simply Googled a tell-tale phrase, and ta-da! There it was.

The kid was failing anyway. I don't know if he's actually been stoned all semester or if he just looks and sounds that way, but he's potentially a sweet kid--and might even be potentially smart, if he lays off whatever mind-altering substance he seems to be on. If he's not on any mind altering substances, then he's going to have a hell of a hard time making it in college. It's a shame, but there it is.

Nice

I wasn't sure what to do with students today, so I came up with an in-class task they could use as they work on their revisions: I call it "post-outlining." Essentially, how it works is that students have to read their papers and create an outline of what they actually wrote: it approaches the process backward, but it is a wonderful tool to help get some objective distance on a paper and to help evaluate organization and structure.

I had the whole thing very carefully spelled out on the board, telling them first to read slowly and carefully, one sentence at a time. (When I do it tomorrow, I'm also going to tell them to stop at the end of each paragraph to do the outline task associated with it.) They were to use the following format:

Introduction: In my paper, I will prove _________________________.

Body Paragraph 1:   * phrase giving the topic of the paragraph (the instruction being that each phrase should be simply a bullet point, no more)
            This helps prove X about my thesis.

Do that for each body paragraph.

Conclusion: Summarizes ideas from paragraphs ______ (provide the number of each paragraph that is recapped in the summary).
          Final sentence connects back to the thesis because _______________________.

I told them that working this way is very difficult, as they have to look at their work as objective outsiders, which is challenging. I also told them that if they were unable to locate a clear topic for a paragraph, or if they couldn't quickly and clearly state how it helps prove the thesis, that should raise a red flag. I also said that the conclusion doesn't need to recap the point in every single paragraph--but it certainly should hit the high points. I also encouraged them to consider moving things around, and to go ahead and correct any sentence-level clarifications they noticed along the way.

I'm not sure how well it worked: I didn't collect the outlines but sent them home with the students so they could keep working on revising while I'm evaluating their second versions--but the better students did seem to see their papers in a whole new way.

One young woman arrived late, still without a paper at all, and again, she told me that she just sits there in front of the computer and can't think of anything to say. I was about to tell her to withdraw, when I thought, no, let me ask a little about what's happening first. She said, "I have ideas but..." and shrugged. Wait, I said, you have ideas? So why aren't you writing them down? We spent some time talking about it, and she's going to keep trying. Unlike the young man who finally, mercifully, withdrew a while ago, I'm actually very glad this young woman is sticking it out. It's very likely she won't pass the class, which is a shame: she started to pull her socks up a little too late in the game, and she still isn't getting as much help as she really needs--but I give her full marks for working through frustration, and I told her so. She is at least trying, and unlike earlier in the semester, when she said she was trying but showed little evidence of actual effort, now I can see that she's doing what she can. She's just barely beginning to understand what hard work actually means, or how to work not merely hard but productively--but at least she's getting that much, and I'm proud of her for sticking it out so she could begin to have that experience.

A few students I had to send off to work on papers, as they had nothing with them in class (and one student was, once again, absent: If he's back next class, I'll have to talk to him after, as at this point I think his absences alone are enough to prevent him from passing the class.

But the best moment came from the very quiet young man whose work has been getting extremely good along the way: I'll call him the Quiet Man. He stayed after everyone else (of course: he's the closest to getting an A of any of them, which is how it always goes. He said that, the more he looks at his paper, the more he sees to change. I told him that's good, and normal--but then we started talking, and he shared his sense of regret that he hadn't come up with an idea earlier: he suddenly saw an idea that he thought would work very well, but he felt he'd have to rewrite his entire paper to include it now. We talked about it, and he's going to at least play around with the idea, see if he can introduce it as a thread throughout what he already has, instead of taking an axe to the paper in order to create a whole new focus. He specifically asked for some feedback on the final body paragraphs of what he has now, so he'll get that, but since he has an idea for real and substantive revision, I don't want to muddy the waters for him: I'll point out anywhere that I think can lend itself to addition of his new idea, and I'll focus on the sentence-level stuff (which will be minimal)--but simply the fact that he's aware that he needs to reorganize paragraphs and include some different support is enough to set me tap-dancing with glee. The fact that he's going way beyond that to consider revising to the extent of including a whole new thread is glorious. I'm beyond thrilled--and I told him so.

When I can work with a student like him, it truly helps me continue to want to teach. He said he liked me as a professor because I love teaching--and I'm glad it shows. I don't always, but when I can teach a student who is so willing and able to learn? Yes, I love it. I truly do.

I did, however, hit the wall a while back in terms of marking any more assignments. I still have a stack to do for tomorrow's classes, not to mention now needing to get the second versions marked and back to the students from today's class--not to mention summer scheduling and a raft of other committee work. But my ESL conversation partner told me last week that he wouldn't be here today, which bought me a little time, and I think I'm going to go home. I may set an early alarm for tomorrow, if I can get myself into bed and asleep early enough. I'd love to go to this year's final meeting of the Creative Writing committee, which is tomorrow prior to P&B, and I remain open to miracles, but even getting up early, I suspect that getting student assignments marked and maybe getting a little scheduling done will be the best I'll be able to manage in the morning.

And now, there are only two more Mondays left of the term--unless something unexpected arises, which is, I suppose, possible. Who knows what the future holds? All I know is that it looks very likely that I'll be out the door and on my way home very shortly here. For which I am grateful.

Drinking the Assessment Kool-aid

Today's assessment symposium was, interestingly enough, interesting--or at least the first part of it was. In fact, I was sorry to have missed the beginning of it all (though nothing on earth was going to get me to campus at 8 a.m.). There was a guest speaker--the assessment maven from Monroe County Community College (which actually offered me a position before NCC did)--and he showed us an organizational strategy that made enormous sense. I spoke with another of our department's faculty who was there--and who also was one of the organizers of the symposium--and she was even more excited than I. I stayed until the end, because at the end there was to be a demonstration of how to create the kind of grids the guy from Monroe was talking about by using Taskstream. However, typically, the person doing that presentation ran through it so quickly that I turned into Ginger from the Gary Larson cartoon, and all I heard was "blah blah blah Taskstream blah blah blah." Still, I offered to work with my colleague in creating a grid for us as a department

 I know I'll kick myself for volunteering for yet another thing to do, but among other things, it will reveal to the rest of the Assessment committee (and who knows, even perhaps the department as a whole) the fact that the language we use is too dense to work for assessment. At very least, we need to unpack the language: we can still keep all the same ideas, but we can't mix them together as we now tend to do. The fact that the language is so dense is part of why we continually rework the language every time we do an assessment of anything, and as I believe I've said before, I'm sick to death of continually going back to the drawing board--almost literally, as every change of language needs to track through about 45 different places where it appears, from course description matrices to assessments to Taskstream.

In any event, the one benefit to the fact that the symposium started so insanely early is that I was back here in the office by 2:15. I confess to a small amount of noodling, instead of productive work, but I did write up one observation while waiting to meet with the other person I observed. That meeting has now come to a close--and I can now leave the rest of the mess messy until I try to impose a modicum of organization on it come Monday. Monday will come a mite sooner than I'd prefer, but still: even including that week of work after classes end, three weeks from right now, I should be free as a bird.

Broke even

Last night's gamble paid off--barely. I finished marking the last of the 102 first versions in class at the beginning of the period, and although I didn't get anything more than that marked and off my plate, still, that was (in terms of papers) the prime objective, so, well, whew.

The 102 class was tolerable, but mostly because I spent a lot of the period working with students on their papers. A few of them did get into a little bit of lively discussion for a brief moment, but I have to admit that I am very relieved that I won't have to try to drag any more responses to readings out of them. From now on, we're just going to hammer away at their final papers. One student--Ms I Hate English--seemed to look a bit askance at that notion (quelle surprise), but she can either take advantage of what I have to offer or not. And another student who has in the past protested about the submission requirements was in that position again: she got her paper uploaded to Turnitin late--and didn't have the hard copy for me until class today. I told her I wouldn't take it to mark and reminded her that the assignment sheet is very clear about the submission requirements. There was a little flouncing on her part when I refused to budge on that, though I did encourage her to get to the Writing Center or to do what she can to try to think through potential changes on her own and fix as much as she can find between now and Tuesday. I doubt she will, somehow, but the main suggestion in my remarks to her (which I doubt she picked up on) was that she made a choice in terms of her time management that led her to the situation she found herself in.

I have a suspicion I'll be making that point a lot on the final day of classes with all my students. If you miss a deadline, don't get pissed off at me for the deadline: take responsibility for the choices you made that necessitated your missing it.

Today's meeting of Academic Standing was quite interesting, and indeed, I'm considering the possibility of writing up a brief report for the English department of the issues that have come up over the past year--among them codifying the policy for granting extensions to Incomplete grades; re-evaluating the UW (unofficial withdrawal) grade, especially to determine whether we think it should remain punitive (right now, it figures in the student's GPA as an F); proposing alterations to the coding for various levels of academic standing so they're easier to understand (I think we actually got that one passed, amazingly enough). I did not volunteer for some thing (I even missed what exactly it was) that would require being on campus pretty much all day on July 29--but I find I'm actually looking forward to continuing to work on the concerns around the UW grade, as I personally see portions of the current policy as problematic. I'm also interested in the debate about extensions to Incompletes. Well, most of it, really.

See? If I just didn't care....

But, speaking of caring: I was very happy with how Nature in Lit ran today. We started with general conversation about papers, what students were still confused about, what they were starting to understand. Two students asked me to address specific portions of their papers and agreed to let me share what I had to say with the class: I think it was useful. The conversation actually did end up being at least partly about learning as a process, specifically about the fact that real learning also requires a fair amount of error, even failure, before one can grasp something new. After we talked out the issues with the class as a whole, I put the students into two groups of three and asked them to talk with each other about their concerns and/or solutions, and those students who wanted to talk to me individually stepped out of their groups for a few minutes. The lovely thing is that they know each other well enough now that they were completely comfortable doing that--and what I overheard truly was on task, at least for the most part. Of course, typically, the student who is having the most difficulty did not seem to feel the need to talk to me individually, and some of the stronger writers did, but overall, I think it was a success.

The other happy moment in that class arose when a student verbalized something I'd just started thinking about anyway: I started to say that I was thinking about their final mini-paper and she said, joking, "It isn't due?" In fact, that was exactly what I was thinking, as I'd just been talking to a student who'd said she had no clue what to write about for her final mini-paper. I said something to the effect that she should simply use the mini to talk about another aspect of what she wants to do in her final paper--and then I thought, "Why? Why not just work on the paper itself?" So, to the immense relief and delight of the students, I canceled the final mini-paper and will instead simply count each paper as 7% of their final grade.

Of course, this also has me thinking about the next time I teach a literature elective, and whether I should do something closer to what Paul does (a draft, which gets comments, and then the paper itself)--or even a version of my own process in the comp classes, albeit not as complex. Thinking about it now, I think Paul's process makes more sense. I don't want to require revisions in literature classes, but most students are not yet ready to simply write papers: they still need a lot of guidance. I need to pick Paul's brains about how he does it.

But--imagine!--I don't actually have to think about it, or have anything in place, until fall 2015 at the earliest. I'm not teaching a lit this coming fall (my elective is Fiction Writing) and then, sabbatical, thank all the gods there may be.

And for this semester, I have two more weeks of classes, but the teaching mode has shifted drastically. We still have some readings for Nature in Lit, but for the rest, I'm just working with students individually on papers. Then the mad crunch of final grade calculations and tying up committee work--which will pretty well fill the week after classes end. I can't think beyond that; I'm just trying to flop across that finish line.

As for tonight, I will send a few work e-mails and then traipse off, leaving everything in its current chaotic state. I will be on campus all day tomorrow, first at the Assessment symposium, then waiting to conference with the adjunct I observed last Friday, so the week ain't over yet--and yes, there may be a rare Friday post this week. If not, I'll be back with you all on Monday.

And, Serious Student, because you said you read the blog, a special hello to you and a wish for a good weekend.