She's up! She's up! No, she's down...

Today's meeting of the seminar hours committee was relatively painless (though people talking over each other is always a bit of a problem), and when it was finished, I decided to come up here to the office to try to sort out the assignment schedule problem that tripped me up yesterday. I thought maybe it would make sense if I worked on the schedule document in the computer while looking at my hand-written grid, and that worked fine for the first paper--but when I got to the schedule for the second, things started to fall apart again. It feels a little like those moments in a riding lesson when the horse does something unexpected, I manage to keep my seat--yay, good recovery!--and the next thing I know, I'm lying on the ground looking up the horse's nostrils.

Backing up for a moment here: those of you who have been paying careful attention may be thinking, "Wait: second paper? Didn't she decide to only do two?" Well, yes, OK, I admit, I did--but then I realized I didn't want to lose either of the actual topics. Students may not be tap-dancing with glee at doing a paper that has an environmental focus, but I think it's important, dammit, and I don't want to boot that in favor of the social technology topic. On the other hand, students do get at least a little jazzed about the social technology thing, so I don't want to take away their lollipops. Consequently, I've been trying to figure out how to do it all--while accommodating the utterly screwed up schedule that is caused by the fact that four college holidays fall on either a Monday or a Wednesday--so we have a "Tuesday is a Monday" day and a "Tuesday is a Wednesday" day, and the "Tuesday is a Wednesday" hits just when the second paper would be reaching final stages.

Something's gotta give--and I'd prefer it not be my sanity. I'd also prefer it not be a paper topic, but I may not have a choice there, if I'm going to walk the students through more steps in the writing process.

I also was picking specific pages from the newly selected handbook to assign--and I realize there is a lot less in this new handbook about putting a paper together and revising than there is in the handbook I decided not to use. Hmmm. In a way that may be OK: most of the handbook assignments from the new book are relatively brief, so doing them should be somewhat less onerous for the students. On the other hand, I may have made a choice that means I lose the ability to turn some of the explaining over to the handbook instead of having to cover it myself in class. However, assuming the handbook will do the explaining for me includes the assumptions that A) students will read the pages and B) students will fully understand what they've read. Those may be invalid assumptions.

In any event, I've printed out the absolute, ungodly mess that is the syllabus and assignment schedule as it now stands--and maybe tomorrow, after Blackboard session 1, I can come back to the office and try to get myself out of the tangle I've created.

By the way, to my delight, Paul was here when I got to the office prior to the committee meeting. Not much to his delight, though, I'm afraid. He was happy to see me, but he's truly being hammered by the need to get up to speed on issues he has to address in his position on the Academic Senate Executive Committee (or Council, or whatever it calls itself). I do not envy him that challenge in the least, but purely selfishly, I'm thrilled to bits that Paul is in the position, because I know he'll be brilliant at it. Miserable, perhaps, but brilliant.

On a completely different note, I'm delighted that in the past week, there have been two comments on the blog: one from "The Brit" (who isn't), very charmingly explaining why his voice mail sounded so different from his voice in class, and one from an actual Brit--or at least a Ph.D. candidate in the UK--who is looking to establish contact with an educational forum. I explained that this blog isn't a forum of any kind (unless it counts as a forum when I stand on my own little soap box and rant), but I'd sure love to hear more from him, especially if he finds a more formal forum (or creates one).

And somewhat along the same lines, I've been engaged in lovely e-mail correspondence with a colleague from the biology department: I sent out an "All NCC" e-mail linking to an article about the fact that Mount Sinai is now actively recruiting undergrads in the humanities as potential med school students, and she responded with interest and warmth, I replied... and eventually we're going to meet to talk and exchange ideas, much like I did in the fall with the colleague from Marketing and Retail.

Somehow that reminds me that there is a building tucked away on campus that houses something like the "Center for Academic Excellence." My first thought about that is, shouldn't the whole campus be a center for academic excellence? My second thought is, why don't we know about this entity and what exactly it does? And my third thought is, can I join? I seem to vaguely recall that a colleague in the English department may have been involved with it at some point--and I got the sense that it was one of those "mission without a plan" sort of things: we're supposed to do something wonderful, but no one knows exactly what--or how. But I'm also thinking yet again about my long-standing desire to develop an Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies degree here--one that includes the humanities and social sciences (and sure, why not Marketing and Retail, if they're talking about sustainability, as apparently they are?).

I probably don't have the energy or interest to make it happen, but, well, one never knows. In any event, it's lovely to know there are like-minded faculty on campus--and to find more of them all the time. I wish more of the students were like-minded (and educated, or educable), but hey. That's why I don't want to give up that topic in the 101s--which, not so parenthetically--are still woefully in need of students. At this point, the only class on my schedule that I'm sure will run is the Mystery and Detective course. Everything else is a waiting game. Oh, Bruce and I are going to have so much fun in August. I suspect I'm going to start the semester already frazzled.

Which is all the more reason for me to get the schedule for the 101s at least worked out now: one less thing to fret about later. And in the count-down before I head off to the conference, I've entered the period of time in which things start to roll faster and faster until I feel like the White Queen in Alice and have to run as fast as I can just to stay in one place.

On which note, feeling rather breathless, I'm going to try to locate one file, then fold my tents (tense?) and steal away. Perhaps there will be another blog post tomorrow....

You know, it's the little things...

I've spent today working on my reconfigurations of ENG101, the first-semester freshman comp class, and as I was trying to keep straight in my own mind what information students would need at each stage, I kept getting confused and forgetting what I've done where and how I wanted it all to work--and how to get it all to work the way I want it to.

I started to feel, "OK, I've got all the individual parts sorted out"--but when I went back to look at the calendar, I realized I'd forgotten one little detail: that I need time to evaluate the students' submissions and return them. I can't ask them for a response to my comments if they don't have my comments yet. (Duh.)

What this means is that I need to have all the assignment bits printed out next to me, my 17-week calendar grid next to that, and a very large eraser, so I can juggle things around.

Some bits I think I can have the students do in class. That's another thing I tend to forget: If they're submitting completed work on a specific day, that's great--but how are we going to spend the class time? One day for peer review, yes, but then ... well, it all sort of falls apart in my head.

As I'm writing this, I'm also thinking it through: maybe the in-class work on X date can be that they get their papers back with my comments and they write their responses and revision plans right there in class...?

The most maddening bit is to have felt like I had it nailed and then realizing that I didn't, that I need to very carefully and methodically work through step by step.

It almost makes me wish I'd decided to work on the Betrayal and Fidelity chapter instead--except that Wednesday and Thursday of this week, I'll be on campus, trying once again to understand Blackboard, the online course platform, and I want to have real material that I can use when we play around with it. The last time, we did just "make believe" sort of exercises, and that approach doesn't work for me: I'm not very good at the abstract; I need concrete. I want to put my syllabus and assignments up online: how do I do that? I want students to access Turnitin through the online platform: how do I do that? I want to have a discussion board online: how do I do that? As I've mentioned before, I really don't give a rat's ass about most of the stuff that the IT folks want to show us: they get all excited about various bells and whistles that I think will be of zero value to my students, or my courses. They're used to dealing with the kinds of classes in which there is a body of information to be mastered--specific facts to learn--which is decidedly not what composition classes are about: there's quite a significant difference between learning even a complex set of interconnected facts (as well as the interconnections) and learning a process that underlies a skill. I can't even quite express what teaching writing really is: yes, it's a skill that needs to be mastered, but it's not like learning to knit or something; it's a great deal more complicated than that and less mechanical.

No wonder a lot of our colleagues don't "get" what we do: how the hell can one explain it? I probably told this story before, but it's in my mind again: I met with a friend last week at a largish gathering of people I didn't know, one of whom asked me why I needed to provide guidance for students to read The Left Hand of Darkness. Because, I said, they can't read. "What do you mean, they can't read?" "They can understand individual words on a page, but they can't put them together in their minds to form anything that makes sense." She was utterly, completely incredulous--though my friend, who's taught freshman comp in the past, backed me up--and she asked how that could possibly be. As my friend said, "Well, there's a long answer to that...."

Students are not adequately taught to incorporate written language into their own minds. They are even less adequately taught to use written language for clear expression of what is in their own minds--or anyone else's. And that's the world in which I work, trying--very belatedly--to give students the ability to do both. And yes, it's shocking and frightening that that is what I need to do, that I have to approach language with them on such a fundamental level. But that's where our educational "system" has brought us. There are, of course, the wonderful students who belie everything I just said: they can read and write with intelligence and creativity and deep engagement--but they are in a minority.

Ach, if I go on like this, I'll get too discouraged to go on. So, let me reframe: what I'm doing is working on breaking down the writing process so it feels more manageable to them. What I'm struggling with is finding a way to make each step clear and just challenging enough that they'll learn without being so challenging that they'll give up in despair. And much as there is some sense of despair behind my cheerful reframe here, I have to admit that the attempt, taking on the challenge, is the kind of brain work I love.

Now, however, what I will love is packing up my stuff--I'm at the library--checking out the books I've pulled off the shelves, and walking home through chilly, almost March-like weather. Tomorrow, seminar hours committee meeting (o joy!)--and maybe I can get some work done around that. Time will tell (as opposed to "we'll see"). One thing's for sure, it will, in fact, be another day.

Whoof

I spent some time today working on the Betrayal and Fidelity chapter: I realized I needed to do what I recommend to students, which is to simply get ideas on the "page"--well, actually, page without the scare quotes, as I did print the bugger out: I very quickly get to the point where I can't see what I have unless I see it on paper, and even just a random bunch of jottings won't go anywhere until I wrestle with it in physical form.

But I'm still struggling with focus, concentration, so I turned my attention for a while to getting some stuff pulled together for my fall classes--mostly the 101s, which I am, as I have mentioned, revamping yet again. I find I'm having a hard time letting go of the idea of three papers, despite the fact that I want to spend a lot more time working with their papers in class--and do not want to ask them to read about one topic while writing about another: I think it's important that they can put all their time and attention into taking the information they already have and continually refining how they write about it.

To that end, I've already changed the focus of their first writing assignment. I've always been frustrated that I see their initial self-evaluation as a little, simple homework exercise, but they see it as an ESSAY--but it occurred to me that the students have actually presented me with a great opportunity: I can use that initial "essay" as the springboard into their first real essay (in my terms). So the first thing they write is going to be a personal response to an article I'll have them read, how it relates to their own experiences. It's an article about education, and expectations--and we can use those responses to gradually shift into actual academic writing.

But reconfiguring all that is going to be more complex than I realized before I started working on it. Similarly, my brilliant idea about having them track their grades numerically--subtracting from a total as the semester goes along--is going to take not only some careful thinking through of assignments and how I've weighted those assignments in the past but also the simple math of the thing. I still think it's a good idea ("brilliant" may be an overstatement), but making the shift is going to be more challenging than I anticipated.

I hope I can get some work done tomorrow, too, and Monday (Sunday is "life maintenance" day), and that I can make myself stay at the office and work after my meeting and tutorial sessions, learning the online platform. It's important to me to have some of the class stuff worked out before I head out of town at the end of June, so I'm not utterly frantic in August.

Now, however, I have to go be a student of equitation. It's a gorgeous day to be on horseback, beats hell out of sitting at a computer, so off I go.

Been a while...

It's remarkable to me how easy it is to lose momentum on anything work related, and how hard it is to get the momentum going again. I promised myself that I would get some work done today, and I came very close to breaking that promise, but I did work ... a little. I finally read that last critical essay that I had uncovered to my dismay some time back and wrote up the annotation for it--and I read through the rest of that particular chapter, fixing embarrassing typos and clearing up awkward language (though I know that if Paul were to go over it, he'd be able to tighten up my prose significantly: next to "verbose" in the dictionary is a picture of me). I did not, however, look at the chapter in which I analyze one of the themes in the novel--and that's the part I most want to finish and yet have the hardest time getting myself to do.

I'd give myself a harder time about slacking off if it weren't for the fact that I've gone two nights in a row now with nowhere near enough sleep; given how groggy I've felt, it's actually quite an accomplishment that I managed to get anything done at all. So, I'll give myself a little pat on the head for doing more than nothing.

And after all, tomorrow is another day. Maybe I'll be able to get a solid stint of work in before I head off to my riding lesson.

Maybe. Don't hold your breath.

Next week I have to be on campus three days: once for a meeting of the seminar hours committee (ugh), and then two days to try to learn--again--how to use our online course platform so I can do more work electronically with students. If I can get things set up, I may ask for them to respond to readings on an online discussion board, rather than handing in stuff on paper. I can actually ask for a little more from them that way--including that they respond to what classmates have posted (and more than just "I agree" kind of responses). We'll see. I'm not sure how much ambition I have for further reconfigurations of the classes, but it's worth thinking about.

I just went on Banner, however, and checked the number of students registered in my courses. One of my 101 sections has gone from having two students to having zero; the other section has three; the MDC course still sits at zero, and there are still eighteen in Mystery and Detective. I know that incoming freshmen are still taking placement tests and trying to figure out where they want to go, but from what I just saw--looking at 001, 100, and 101--enrollment is frighteningly low across the board. I hope like hell that there is a surge of enrollment in June and July, or my August, finalizing adjunct schedules with Bruce, is going to be a cluster fuck of epic proportions: we'll be canceling sections left, right, and center, and even highly senior adjuncts may have to go without work.

Of course, this is why the Board wants to essentially completely do away with placement testing: you have a pulse, you can take a credit-bearing course. They think students will be encouraged to come to NCC if we make it ridiculously easy for them to get what they think they want--just like going to the mall. I don't know what accounts for the drop in enrollment (which, by the way, may well mean I get paid significantly less for my evening supervisor position, as my pay is based on the number of "full-time equivalent" students enrolled), but I am pretty damned sure that the problem isn't that it's difficult to get into NCC....

Time will tell. (Oooo, another cliched expression: maybe I should start using that instead of "we'll see.") Meanwhile, nothing intelligent is coming out of my brain for the remainder of today, and it's gloriously sunny with a lovely breeze outside, so I'm going for a good walk. I'll post again whenever I have anything remotely post-worthy to say....

Surprising

I was so sure that today was going to be a cluster fuck of epic proportions that I tried to reschedule this afternoon's doctor's appointment. We finished before 1:00. Amazing. As we realized we were nearing the bottom of the stack and weren't losing our minds, we started to try to figure out why it was so much easier this time than last. Factor 1: we were able to give people 3-day schedules, which actually we could have done last time, but somehow a rumor that 3-day schedules were a thing of the past had become fact in our minds (or in my mind anyway). Now that we know 3-day schedules are OK--even for people only teaching one online course (or two hybrids)--that made life infinitely simpler.

The other reason is great for scheduling but more problematic for the department as a whole: six people retired--and word has already come down that even Bruce won't be able to get more lines. In the past he's worked miracles and gotten the administration to agree to more full-time lines even when they've been saying "no way, no how," but them days is past. In fact, some time back I got access to a huge online bank of applications from potential adjuncts; turns out (as I may have mentioned) that, since I was on sabbatical, I wasn't responsible for reviewing any of them--but the other members of P&B are, and I think they're having (or already had) at least one meeting after the end of term to talk about new hires.

On the other hand, we had way more adjuncts than there were classes this summer, and enrollment was so pitifully low that a lot of the classes have been canceled and people who were originally given a class now get nothing. Fall may be more of the same. I anticipate that Bruce and I will be pretty frantic in August--but I don't have to worry my pretty little head about that this red-hot moment.

Tomorrow, Sabrina and I will come back in to check through everything carefully, make sure we didn't make any huge mistakes or forget any steps. One thing that will be interesting is that we gave a schedule to a full professor, grousing about the fact that she didn't submit a preference form--but it turns out that she didn't submit the form because she'll be on sabbatical in the spring, so now we have some very nice courses to distribute to people who may have less than lovely schedules.

Oh, and the problematic professor called Bruce today; they had a long and apparently somewhat difficult conversation (hard for her to realize that the rotation of courses trumps seniority--in fact, that's why we have the rotation rule, is so senior faculty can't "own" a course that people lower down the ranks would like to teach)--but the upshot was that she has provisional approval for one of the electives she wanted; she just has to provide the documentation of her qualifications to Bruce--and the scheduling committee is now out of the picture.

I don't recall if I mentioned that another professor also wanted a course for which we didn't have evidence of qualifications. I wrote to him about it, and we got a beautiful response from him today, demonstrating that he is qualified--and the course in question is Nature in Lit. He got it.

Part of why he got it is that the time when P&B traditionally has met had to change because of a conflict in Bruce's meeting schedule. If P&B had met at its traditional time, I'd have been able to go to P&B and then teach Nature in Lit--but now P&B meets when the class is scheduled. Bruce would have moved the class for me, which is sweet, but I'll be teaching another elective that I like--right at the moment I can't remember if it's Modern Poetry or American Short Story--and I'm delighted that Nature in Lit will go to someone who genuinely is qualified to teach it and who has wanted to teach it since he was hired. Wins all around.

I notice that I'm still avoiding work on my own classes for fall, or cleaning out my files (writing e-mails and blog posts instead), but eventually, I'll get to that, and get back to the last piece of the sabbatical project. Mostly, I'm just delighted that I have this little bit of "down" time before I head out to the doctor's appointment and then into the City for dinner with Paul. Today is turning out to be much less frantic and flurried than I was anticipating--and that is a truly pleasant surprise.

Ye gods and little fishes

I had absolutely no notion that I would still be here at this hour--and I'm still completely wired; it's going to take a while to let my hair down, metaphorically speaking.

Scheduling was remarkably bumpy, despite the running start I took at it yesterday. Part of the turbulence was caused by the usual issues: senior faculty making requests that we had to check with Bruce about, whether we could do X or Y contractually, whether Prof. Z or Q was qualified to teach the course he or she had requested--and the usual groaning and tearing of hair over the people who can't figure out the grid, or say that their first priority is Friday off and then request classes that meet on Fridays....

We ended up working until 4:30, which is later than usual, but since I have to leave early tomorrow, and since one of us can't be there at all on Thursday, I figured we should wrestle through as much as possible--even though I realize we may end up spending an inordinate amount of time tomorrow backing up and knocking down another long chain of dominoes. We haven't even gotten to the tough part, where we have to start making two- and even three-way swaps in order to give people low on the seniority lists any kind of schedule at all; we get to start having that fun tomorrow, as we're already completely out of some sections of comp. Well, fun and frolic.

After we wrestled our way through as far as I thought our brains could hold up for today, I ended up spending at least an hour, probably more, combing through an e-mail I'd drafted to one colleague, a full professor who has already treated me to a pretty snotty complaint about a previous schedule and who made requests that we cannot grant--because of regulations in the bylaws or union rules. I wrote an initial draft, which I ran past one of the members of the scheduling committee (while the other, bless her, was in yet another committee meeting in the room next door), and he pointed out that what I'd written suggested the possibility of an outcome that was not, in fact, possible. After we wrapped up the collaborative work, I returned to the office to revise the e-mail--and the endless revisions were my attempts to cover every single possible contingency that she could use to complain about what's going on and at the same time to be absolutely clear that no matter what she does, we can't guarantee she's going to get anything remotely resembling what she wanted. (What she wanted, for the record, included two English electives--which we can't give anyway, to anyone, under any circumstances.)

It will be very interesting to see what response we get--and when. (I copied Bruce, Cathy, and the other members of scheduling on the e-mail: I've got as much ass coverage as I can possibly manufacture.)

I also spent a fair amount of time--both during "lunch break" and since finishing up the scheduling for today--grinding out an e-mail to an ASLE colleague who agreed to look at the sabbatical project and give me some feedback from his perspective. I got a message from him about it this morning, in which he asked some very good questions, and it was rather a challenge to answer them, explain my thinking--and I hope I have, in fact, addressed his concerns, though I may have misunderstood what his concerns actually are. His questions did get me thinking about the challenge I face getting the damned thing published: it does not slot neatly into any textbook publishers' already existing format for "critical" editions. In fact, it doesn't really slot into any of those formats at all. I'm hoping I can "sell" a publisher on my particular approach--maybe create a new format (and, sure, do the same kind of edition for other Le Guin novels or other SF or fantasy: wouldn't that be heavenly?)--but reading my colleague's e-mail I did feel a slightly sick, sinking sensation: "Oh, fuck, I've done all this work and no one will want it." I keep saying that even if I end up just getting packets made for my own students here on campus, it will be worth it--but I still hold on to that dream of having my edition actually published, a real book, produced by a real publisher, purchased by real professors....

And while I'm speaking of publishing things: in scheduling, we got into a conversation about the new and more stringent requirements for teaching creative writing courses, as the discrete AA in Creative Writing has been approved by every necessary body on this campus and just needs the final stamp of approval from SUNY before it's a real deal. I mentioned that I now am no longer considered qualified to teach Fiction Writing--and Sabrina, who is not only on scheduling but is also one of the co-chairs of Creative Writing, said, "But Tonia, get some of your stuff published! We need you!" One of the qualifications, you see, is--in lieu of an MFA that focuses on the workshop process--a "proven track record of publication." I have at least three, possibly four, stories that I think are worthy of being considered for publication--but I told Sabrina that it's been so long since I last collected rejections letters I have no idea where to even start submitting things. She said she'd try to remember to send me a link to a list of online publications to which I might submit; I'd sure be grateful if she does. I would love to have more of my creative work published (apart from my one lonely poem, published several millennia ago), but I really simply haven't felt like I had the time, energy--or impetus--to go through the necessary steps that could lead to publication. However, with that boost of enthusiasm from Sabrina to generate some impetus, perhaps I'll find the time and energy.

It's been that kind of day. And there's some stuff going on in my family that needs some careful thought and attention, some e-mails that need some time and attention on that front as well; I started to work on them this morning and then realized I couldn't take the time, as I had to get my butt here, to campus, and now I'm thinking, "Oh, fuck, I can't spend more time writing blog posts: I need to get my butt home to work on those e-mails about the family thing."

Ye gods and little fishes. Oh, my giddy aunt. Yikes and likewise zoiks. Whatever exclamation is appropriate to the feeling of having suddenly been sucked up into a whirlwind. And more to come tomorrow--though, thank heaven, at the end of the day I get to look forward to a dinner in Manhattan with Paul. I might even decide to postpone a good night's sleep and go dancing for a while after, despite the need to be back here on campus the next day for the final throes (throws) of scheduling. Wired for sound, man, I'm telling you.

(Cue sound effect: microphone vibration and feedback....)

Probably won't have time to write tomorrow, but more soon....

Hah.

Well, I feel oddly triumphant about today. I'm in the office--leaving soon, but I ended up spending a lot more time than I anticipated prepping for scheduling tomorrow and then, instead of trying to put in a few minutes here and there on fall class prep or the sabbatical project, I thought I'd take the time to write the "remarks" I'll present at the Board of Trustees meeting on June 9.

Yes, I'm going to the Board of Trustees meeting.

Yes, I'm going to speak. Try not to fall over, or hurt your jaw when it hits the floor.

When I came in on Thursday, I had cheerfully forgotten that--it being the last Thursday of the term--there would be a department meeting. I avoided the meeting for a while, but since I really needed to talk to people who were in the meeting in order to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, I hung around in the back of the room--and heard, once again, the impassioned plea for us to at least show up and scowl, even if we don't do more than that.

Paul and I were just talking about it (of course I ran my remarks past him), and he mentioned that it's not only important for there to be a large number of us at this June meeting--and one of our colleagues is beating up bodies for that--but that we need to sustain the large presence as much as possible come fall.

Still thinking about that. I know it's important; I'm not sure my stress levels can take it (not to mention that the meetings often go very very late and I am very jealous in guarding my sleep).

And I just got distracted by talking to Paul about personal stuff, not the political (though god knows there's a lot of that we can now talk about, since he's on the Academic Senate Executive Committee)--and suddenly I'm out of time. I have to race off for some evening life maintenance, and I'll be back here tomorrow morning before 10:30, when we start scheduling.

Hasta manana.