Nope, it's gone

The post I wrote yesterday (Sunday 11/15) just vanished into the ether. No clue. I wrote about my decisions to alleviate stress, largely about a different way to handle the essay 2 revisions for the 101s--but ah well. I'm not going to try to reconstruct it, but it is odd that it just disappeared. I wonder what I did--or didn't do?

Can't See

I think it's a function of being tired--and of spending too much time reading (and forgetting to wear my reading glasses: I'm still not used to the idea that they help). I probably should stay and work some more tonight, but since I literally am having a hard time seeing (feels like there's a veil over my right eye), I think I'll pack it in. Oddly, when I checked in to the main blog page a minute ago, a post that I put up last night seems to have vanished--and yet I'm pretty sure it was there, as Sara (dear friend and colleague) mentioned something this morning that suggested she'd seen/read it. Hmmm. Maybe it will reappear when I post this. Anyway, classes went pretty well. Mr. "I'll Bring My Gun" from 229 finally got the idea and dropped today. Another student officially withdrew, much to my regret--she was great (but she seems to be interested in taking Nature in Lit next semester, which would be terrific). A few more have simply racked up too many absences, and I don't think they'll be back (and another 1-2 are on the verge of serious trouble in the attendance department). Yet another student was making noises about dropping, but he was overreacting (not focusing on the fact that he can revise his papers, thought he was already in grade trouble because of attendance, when in fact he isn't), so I think I persuaded him to stay. Still, I think we're down to about 14--which would be 50% attrition. I don't much like that, but it happens--and not just to me, even to some of the gentler and less-demanding professors. In any event, since the class is now that small, instead of group work, from now on we'll do our discussions in a circle: everyone has to ask a question or make a comment. It went well today--even the smirking couple asked legitimate questions and seemed to be paying attention to the answers. (I also caught a cute moment between them that made me laugh. I didn't say anything to the rest of the class, but Miss Smirk and I exchanged a few smiles over it. I don't think I've broken any ice there, but it may have persuaded her that I am not entirely monstrous--despite the rigor of my assignments.) In 101 the students mostly churned away at putting together the logic of a rather complex essay they'd read--and did pretty well at it. I spent the time trying to figure out their groups. I have a rough idea, but I need to do further adjusting: I'm aiming not only for gender balance but also for minimal negative impact from the lumps--which is harder, in part because some of the lumps want to work together and in part because some of the other students specifically asked not to work with the lumps. I am very careful to ensure that people aren't working with someone they specifically asked to avoid--but unfortunately I won't be able to be as accommodating in making sure they work with exactly the group-mates they requested. I was very interested to see a definite gender divide in the requests: the girls wanted to work only with other girls, the guys mostly only with other guys. Very few crossed the gender divide in their requests. I wonder how much of that is a hold-over from the hormonal difficulties and confusions of junior high and high school. (Um, showing my regional roots there--or possibly a time thing, but here and now it's called "middle school," not junior high.) It truly seems odd to me, so I'm wondering what accounts for that divide. Apart from that, I cranked through some P&B business and a bunch of that antique 101RB homework, though a few bits are still left for tomorrow a.m., prior to my meeting. First meeting, I should say: it's another meeting/class/meeting/class day, no break from 11:30 to 5:15. Not sure how early I'll be able to drag my fanny out of bed, either: I originally intended to get up at 6 today, so I'd have that extra hour to get stuff done--and changed my mind before I even went to bed (later than I'd intended, of course). I also feel a bit like I'm coming down with something (scratchy throat, muzzy head--though that could just be lingering effects of yesterday's headache), so definitely early to bed tonight, and maybe not early to rise tomorrow. We'll see. I'm playing everything by ear these days (very playful ears I have, apparently). So far, the improvisational technique is working--and the stress levels have definitely receded to much more manageable levels. Whew.

Lost pearl

I think I used the analogy my ex used in reference to someone who was trying to handle too much chaos: it was like standing next to someone whose strand of pearls had just broken. I've felt very much that way lately, with precious things bouncing around and potentially out of sight. Not so precious--but rather ironic, given yesterday's post about perhaps skipping a meeting--on Thursday I missed a meeting simply because I utterly forgot it was happening. I'd been looking at my calendar all week, but somehow I managed not to see that meeting there, Thursday, 8:30 a.m. No doubt there's something Freudian about it (not a meeting I particularly wanted to go to and not at an hour that I particularly relish). But it's odd to me that I felt sick about having missed it. It's one thing to miss a meeting on purpose, but to miss it because it fell through the cracks, that bothered me.

I'm still in the process of thinking through what I can do to alleviate some of the pressure. I have an idea, but I'll blog about it tomorrow--or whenever. I do need to wind down for bed now, but just wanted to make note of that moment when something did indeed slip unnoticed, out of sight. I've dreaded it all semester, and now that it's happened? No harm, no foul, as they say in baseball. Oddly enough, the world did not come to an end, nor was I de-tenured, because I missed a meeting. Nice to be reminded of perspective from time to time.

Moody

I've meant to post every night this week and just haven't been in the right head-space. I'm not entirely sure I am tonight, either. I've fallen off some sort of ledge and have been in an rank mood most of the week. I think it's largely cumulative effect: I've been nagging myself pretty hard all semester and at the same time trying to find balance, looking for bright sides wherever I can find them. The bright sides are decidedly there, but this week it's been harder to focus on them, and the nagging voice has gotten so loud I think I'm rebelling against myself. When I lose sight of the bright bits, I tend to get into a negative feedback loop: I feel crappy, so it's hard to focus on work, so I don't get "enough" done, so I feel more stressed, so I feel even more crappy, yadda yadda yadda. And random detritus in my personal life has been feeding the negative cycle lately, so I'm struggling to snap out of it.

I didn't get those homework assignments marked that I talked about on Monday: they're still sitting in a pile (on the office floor at the moment, as I contemplate where they belong in the ever-shifting list of priorities--which in turn dictates whether they stay here or go home with me). And now I've got first versions of the second paper for my 101 classes to mark; those have to be back as soon as I can manage, so the students have time to revise without doing damage to the time they need for their final projects and papers. P&B business is piling up (though I did crank out drafts of letters of support for sabbatical applications today, one of my myriad responsibilities crossed off that list). I just spent hours adding to and refining the final project assignment for the 101 classes. This is the time of semester when I feel as if we're cranking our way toward the highest point on a roller-coaster: one can see that insane rush downhill toward the end looming, but we're still chugging painfully toward the crest--and yet I have a white-knuckled grip on the safety bar, trying to prepare myself for that wild ride. Once we hit that point, everything happens so fast there's no time to anything but hang on and holler until final grades are turned in.

I came in this morning for a symposium (good for the promo folder--and as a bonus, I actually got some decent ideas out of it), and I've been in the office since. I think on Monday I talked about how full my (metaphoric) dance-card is this weekend, and because I've got so many other things going on--and am in this crabby state--I'm not at all sure how much I can realistically expect to get done.

I keep reminding myself, however, that 99.9 percent of the pressure I feel is self-imposed. Even the P&B pressure is in a sense self-imposed, as I chose to run for the committee. (And--evidence of something, perhaps my lack of sanity--I think I will run again this year, for another 2-year term.) I've picked the committees I'm on; I put together the assignment schedules; I decide how much to comment on papers, and so on. In turn, that means I can decide how to proceed. I can cancel or reconstruct assignments; I can handle paper grading in a different way; I can duck out of some committee meetings instead of always being the good Do-Bee (a reference for those of you who remember Romper Room). I need to seriously think through what I can let go of, what I can do differently--without feeling that I'm compromising my standards. And that includes considering whether it would do any significant damage to my students were I to cancel another day or two of classes. It feels a little ridiculous that I cancel classes in order to do what I need to for my classes, but it's a relatively simple solution to the time crunch. The main thing, though, is to make a decision that leaves me feeling good about myself professionally and doesn't ride me ragged personally.

It's relatively early--not even 6 yet--but I think the most productive thing I can do this evening is attitude adjustment (and take care of my bodily health). I do wish I could run away to the Virgin Islands for a few weeks and then pick up from here--but as capable as I am, I haven't yet invented a time-dilation device, so I can't squeeze a two-week vacation into 12 hours, more's the pity. But I have pictures of beaches up on my bulletin board, and there are times when it is immensely soothing to stare long and lovingly at them and daydream: me, creamy sand, crystal waves, gentle salt breeze, delicious book lying idle in my lap--and infinite stillness all around. Ah, heavy sigh. Imagination is a wonderful thing.

Noodling

I got a bunch of homework marked this weekend and it actually went pretty quickly, so I haven't pushed myself to finish up the stuff for the Tuesday/Thursday classes yet. I've got a jump on it, but I think I can get most of it done before my first class tomorrow. Students are also doing peer review of papers tomorrow, so I can chip away during class while they work, and finish (I hope) in the break in between--and still have time for lunch. Because I wasn't feeling time crunched, I did a fair amount of noodling today: silly housekeeping things that require very little in the way of mental lifting but still make me feel as if I'm accomplishing something, not just reading fluff and (metaphorically) eating bon-bons. I did get the first batch of the next round of 101 papers today (oh argh), but I'm hoping madly I can get a good whallop of those done on Wednesday so I don't have to chain myself to the office this weekend in order to get them back in time for the students to revise. I have a relatively full calendar this weekend too (symposium Friday a.m., placement reading Saturday a.m., long-overdue double birthday celebration with a friend Saturday p.m.; laundry in there somewhere), so any window of time I find in which to crank out papers, I'll have to take advantage. (I'm saying this mostly to myself, to gird my loins, so to speak.)

Among my housekeeping chores was to make a list of the little bits and shreds of things I have to prep for later this week and next--even slightly beyond (trying to get a fraction ahead of the curve before all hell breaks loose again). I didn't actually do any of those bits, mind you: noodling means making a list instead of simply getting something done. But in all honesty, I need the list: while I'm accomplishing one thing, much will vanish from my mind, and then I'll have another of those "oh shit" moments. Taking a breath to jot 'em down gives me something concrete to refer to--and the gratification of crossing things off later as I do them. Assuming I don't lose the list, or bury it under a pile of other things I need to attend to, which seems to be happening a lot this semester. I think about vast and complex cultures without written language and the consequent feats of memory they are capable of that seem so impossible to us. Writing stuff down has led to memory atrophy (imagine having to remember the entire Odyssey and your shopping list, at the same time). But here we are, and that's what's happened to our brains. Funny that we're so dependent on the written word and yet so many are scarcely able to decipher a marginally complex sentence. A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha). (Any Gilbert & Sullivan fans out there? Sing along...)

I did the last of my observations today, most interesting. At one point, the students were working away in their groups, and my colleague came over to chat with me for a moment. I told him our 200-level classes are pretty much interchangeable: same kinds of students (good and bad), same struggles with their writing (and their insistence that we are wrong to find any problems in what has always been good enough before), and so on. When he sent an e-mail last night to give me a little context about the class, I was enormously comforted to see how similar our experiences have been. I'm relieved to discover yet another colleague who shares my views on the standard to which we must hold our students. Many don't (witness the lack of preparedness among so many students), but enough do that I can feel secure in my position. I'm not the only one in this trench, facing the bombardments from all sides--including some "friendly" fire.

Just noticing how quiet the building gets at this hour. Not as quiet as it is on Saturdays, but still. The little dust-pan thingy that the maintenance staff uses makes a distinctive noise--and the slight reverberation of that sound down the hall is evidence of how little other noise there is to interfere. Very quiet walking across campus at this hour, too; little traffic, few students, occasionally the avian calls of geese or (at certain seasons) plovers on the quad. A breath, a small peaceful moment at the end of the day.

Yesterday

Couldn't pull my brains together well enough to report in last night--although a couple of things happened that I think are worth reporting.

In the KB 101, I put the kids in groups, as I had done with MB on Wednesday, to have them work on thesis statements. One group simply would not work. Every time I listened in on them, they were just chatting about whatever. One young man in particular was a lot of the problem: he is a nice enough kid, but in groups he just talks nonstop about anything and nothing. However, the problem was worse because he was also in a group with a young woman who doesn't seem invested in anything having to do with school--but especially not group work. It was luck of the draw that they ended up together--and that the two other students in the group didn't have strong enough personalities to rein them in: in terms of a personality combo, it was a disaster. I kept going over to get them back on task, with increasing firmness. Finally, I said, "OK, if you don't want to work, you can split. Go ahead and take off." A minute later I looked back and saw that no one was moving but no one was working, either. I said, "I'm serious: you can split--you can go. If you're not doing anything productive, there's no reason for you to be here, so you might as well leave." I didn't say it in an angry way (I don't think, though their perception may be different); I was just matter of fact. The young man explained that they had thought I meant they could split up into pairs instead of a group of four--but I reiterated that no, they should just go away, and then I heard him say, "Well, I want to work..." and lo and behold, they did. Not terribly well, perhaps, because the "I don't care" girl pretty much did her own thing and didn't interact with the rest of them, but it did make me wish I'd resorted to that tactic before, as they might have gotten productive earlier if I had. It's very strange, psychologically: sometimes students act like they don't want to be in class, but if you tell them to leave, they want to stay. Go figure.

The other thing was a nice little interaction between me and Monkey Skulls--a name I know use with some affection rather than the hint of bitterness I felt previously. He was working in a group--not being very effective, I have a feeling, as I don't think he'd done the reading, but at least he was there and participating in some way. At one point, another student in his group had a question, so I was standing next to him, explaining--and out of the corner of my eye, I saw him imitating my hand gestures. So without turning my head, I whacked him (gently), a little backhand across his shoulder. He laughed, as did the rest of the group. I then looked at him and said, "Would you like to just get up and teach this?" (Shook his head, did a little "no, no" waving gesture with his hands.) "Are you sure, since you seem to have my hand gestures down exactly, maybe you want to just take over for me?" (Laughing, again, shook his head, and mumbled something about it being OK, I should just go ahead.)

It was all very light-hearted and fun--and then at the end of class, when I was returning papers, he said, "Did I do OK? Were you proud of me?"--and I think he genuinely wanted the reassurance, the approval. It was lovely that I could give it, and tell him his paper was indeed much improved, and that I was, in fact, very proud of him. Today I got an e-mail from him: he had asked in class if he could use a Penn and Teller video as a source for his paper: at first I said yes, but today he sent me the link--and I had a moment to consider--so I had to rescind the permission. But he signed his message, "your favorite hand-gesturing student." The funny thing is, he is becoming one of my favorite students, simply because of the transformation in his attitude. Now I just hope he does enough work to pass....

There were other things going on that I could probably dig into and explore, but I'm just not in the right frame of mind. Sea cucumber time rapidly approaches.

9 more...

First, correction to yesterday's post: Pollan's essay was published in 2007, not 1997. (What millennium is this again?)

And the title of today's post refers to the papers yet to be graded for tomorrow's 101RB: I've got a zillion miscellaneous homework things piled up, but only 9 more actual papers to grade--until next week. Very sad today: one of my best students in RB--the young woman who first started following this blog--had to withdraw, not just from my class but from all her classes. There is a family crisis going on, so she has to leave school and move, probably upstate. I'm very sorry to lose her. When she appeared at the end of my class today with the withdrawal slip, I said, "Oh, Laura no! Oh, please no!" She started to cry; made me feel awful. I didn't want to add to her distress, as what she's going through is hard enough, but I genuinely am very sad to lose her--and I'd welcome her back into any class of mine, any time, should she return to NCC.

Oh, and speaking of papers for RB: remember Monkey Skulls? He wrote a lovely evaluation of my comments, in which he said he'd expected our conference to consist of me telling him to withdraw but that instead, he said, "All I got was positive re-assurance and a guideline of which [sic] I should follow." He ends his report saying, "I believe that I did infact [sic] improve upon my repertoire, making myself not sound like a high school boy, but a college man." And he turned in a paper that was appropriate on all levels. If he'd done that for his first draft, he'd have been able to get a fine grade in revision, I'm sure--and even with the flaws of his second attempt, I'm tremendously proud of him. He may not manage to do enough work and attend enough classes to pass, but he's learned something possibly more valuable, which is how to gain respect. I am thrilled to my socks--and, quite honestly, pretty damned proud of how I handled that whole situation.

But apparently it was a day for withdrawals: I lost a student from 229, too--again, he wasn't withdrawing just from my class but from everything. Family issues there, too, I believe. He's a sweetheart, so it's a shame--and he made a couple of buddies who hugged him goodbye, which I thought was lovely. I find it gratifying when students make friends in my class (and my classes are responsible for a couple of long-term and very close friendships. I don't think a class relationship has led to a marriage yet, but who knows.) The class itself went OK. We cranked through a bunch of poems, so we only have two more to do on Monday, plus starting in on Ceremony.

But there are two students in the class who are starting to get my goat. She is the one who, on Monday, suggested that my standards/assignments were responsible for the uniformly low level of papers on the first one. He is her boyfriend. They are patently in the class only because they need an English class to graduate and this one fit their schedules. They equally patently hate being there. He doodles or writes notes to her; she reads them and smirks. Monday was the first time she ever said a word (to complain, mind you, not to get clarification). Today was the first time he ever said anything: one student remarked that it was pretty ridiculous that Europeans thought they could claim someone else's land simply by planting a flag--and he flung his hand up in the air to say it wasn't ridiculous because it had been going on for thousands of years, ever since the Greeks and Romans. (I don't think the ancient Greeks and Romans did the whole flag thing, but never mind.) If we follow his logic, slavery is also OK because it has been going on for thousands of years, as has subjugation of women (though he'd probably agree with that one)....

He's of the "we [Euro-Americans] won, so they [indigenous peoples] don't have any thing to complain about" school. Not worth trying to argue with him. I did point out that just because something was ancient didn't prevent it from being ridiculous, and then I moved on. But her smirking is starting to crawl all over me. I have to think about how to handle it. The nasty bitch in me wants to call her on it: "What's funny? Do please share it with all of us." "You're smiling; what's occurring to you about the reading?" that sort of thing--every time I catch a smirk, ask her about it. Or I could tell them to sit on opposite sides of the room, but I suspect I'd encounter resistance, and the showdown would just make a bad situation worse. If their behavior were more egregious and affecting other students negatively, I'd take them aside after class and politely tell them that they would not be coming back. As is, the only person who is being bugged is me--and theoretically anyway, I'm adult enough to figure out a way not to be bugged. So, stewing about that one. I'll consult with Paul. Somehow we always find it easier to deal with each other's classroom problems than to handle our own.

101MB went great. I walked in with zero plan, no clue what to have them do. The homework didn't provide a clear focus, so I figured I'd let them decide, and if they decided they didn't want to do anything at all, I'd let them go. I asked if they'd had any problems with the homework: no takers. I said I'd help with the sentence-level stuff they were supposed to locate in their papers for in their homework: no takers. I finally reminded them that their second papers are due Monday, and said they know what they need: help with research, help with thesis statements: suddenly, enthusiasm. Yes, please, help with thesis statements. So, I put them in groups according to which topic they had chosen and had them work through a thesis, then an introductory paragraph, and from that, search terms to fill in the blanks they discovered. I told them that it's OK if all the students in a group used the same thesis/intro, as I know the rest of their papers will be unique. And I emphasized that even though they'd worked hard on coming up with something in class, they shouldn't consider them final: those statements are still works in progress. If the students write the paper and suddenly realize (as often happens to all writers), "Oh, that's what I'm really talking about," they need to be willing to go back and change the thesis. Or if their research turns up something. Or whatever. But they were very engaged in the work--and actually came up with pretty good theses, as far as I could tell on the fly. So, now I do know what I'm going to do with the 101s tomorrow--and we'll see if it goes as well.

But I don't have it in me to deal with any more papers tonight. I'll be a lot more productive after I've slept--and eaten something at least vaguely nourishing. I wish I could fax myself home: right now, walking to my car and then driving the 20 minutes home seems a journey of epic proportions. However, it is the only way to get home, so....