Adieu,
Cats and Dogma

Come on over and say hi, and tell me that's you've been, so I know if this pointer post has been successful.

I'm taking a break from the blog for a bit...I'll be back in a bit, though I hope to stop by other blogs in the 'sphere.

But before I go, one last little story...yesterday, I taught "THe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," one of my favorite poems and one of my favorite lessons...we talked about modernist anxiety, and the ways that it is connected to masculinity, communication, the possibility of action, the possibility of meaning, etc... When I return to my office, a flyer awaits me...

"Feeling Anxious or Nervous?"

Maybe Prufrock needed the counseling center...

Here, I am featured prominently talking about RMP...

Maybe I'll be blogging more soon, but right now, just very very very busy.

As i walk in, I see she's behind the counter, talking to another student in my class (both of whom I respect immensely, BTW). Neither noticed me, though they were clearly discussing Wednesday's impending midterm and today's review session.

The first full comment I heard was, "Well, he's pretty good at covering the stuff on the syllabus."

"I try," I interjected.

Red faces around. At least they were saying something NICE about me.

Why do they try so hard when they know I'll just delete them?

egads.

But ...

While the early returns were not promising, there are a few jobs out there now that are pretty attractive...some are bigger name schools where I'd likely collapse under the research pressue, and a few are SLACs where I might feel a bit under the microscope in the small school environment, and for some reason, a few are evidence of the fact that Canadians are inordinately more interested in drama scholars than American institutions...but there are one or two out there, only one or two, mind you, that in other circumstances (like, if I didn't actually have a good job) I'd be salivating over.

I can't tell if the job search season is still (in my second year on the tenure track) part of may seasonal rhythms, or whether my ambition is somehow getting the best of me, or maybe I just want to be closer to a city, but despite all rational reasons to the contrary, I sorta wanna throw my hat in the ring, just in case, maybe, just maybe, they might...pick...me.

The results:

• The lump in my hand is nothing to be concerned with;


• My foot is not broken;


• The kidney stone is about 1cm in diameter and needs surgery.

“Please note: I am seriously troubled by students who fiddle with the physical appearance of the paper so as to achieve the illusion of length. This belief assumes that I cannot tell the difference between quantity and quality, and I find that personally offensive. A paper that is shorter than the assigned length but presented in an honest way will earn far more respect.”

Now imagine your paper was a page short of the minimum page length.

Would you make your right margins 1.5 inches? What kind of response would you expect?

Ooof.

That's the sound of me hitting the wall. Papers to grade, heavy reading loads in both the undergrad and grad classes coming up, writing projects that are behind schedule, demanding committees just kicking into gear. Plus my body is revolting against me a little bit--what is probably a stress fracture in my foot, a strange cyst in my right wrist, and a big ol' pain in my neck from sleeping on it funny (there's more, but, really, TMI). And to add to the general suckitude, Hem just canceled their Morgantown date. phooey.

Another friend from grad school used to call this "the fat part of the semester": after the five week slump, but before the rush of finals and the promise of the end of the semester. What's worst is that it's the beginning of the fat part of the semester. I think I need to get outside some this week.

And yet it's so, so important. A friend of mine once said that she considered that her grading was the best one-on-one teaching that she could consitently do, and knowing how infrequently students come to office hours, I'm inclined to agree. Of course this means grading is worse for me.

Right now a tyipcal paper has three major comments on every page. Here's an example:

OK, to make this significant claim justified, you need to really present much more evidence to illustrate each of these. Without quote evidence, your claims are simply hypotheses.

I've taken that logic to the end comment as well, where I typically type a half to 3/4 of a page of end notes, and with particularly tricky papers, I'll type up a full page.

Here's the thing. I've been told, "Oh, you'll overwhelm them with comments," but that's never what my students themselves tell me. On the student evaluation question about the usefulness of feedback, my aggregate score over five sections was a 4.79 out of 5. And the best indicator of all: students use the feedback on this first paper...they read it, and they implement those suggestions in their future papers, admittedly to varying success, but they're reading.

This means for me that I spend more time commenting, and therefore more time procrastinating on the commenting...that's the kicker. I've had this batch of papers fo almost a week now, and I've graded two. It was a busy weekend, but still, I'm procrastinating, and it's only going to delay the response further. At least I can justify it by saying the trade-off is detailed feedback.

technorati tag: teaching-carnival

In the meantime, this was the comment I tried to post...

No, wait, now that comment is there...ack...OK, well, at least I'll try to fix the comments...

ugh.

I'm really happy I made this cd, and glad that Collin is responding to it, but I may not have needed to compile it in the first place if I had known about these. Radiohead, The Cure, Metallica, Tool, Led Zep, all on the glockenspiel and vibraphone...the result? Well-rested, but anxious, angry children. Make sure you click on individual albums to get MP3 clips of these gems: Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" is a winner.