Winding down

This is the end, this is the end my friend...

Ok, the day started off well: I graded 6 essays and cleaned up the kitchen. Then I graded 6 more essays. The plan is to alternate between essays and cleaning until I get an entire class-worth of essays graded. The hitch in this plan is that I have kitties napping on me now and have no motivation to move or think.

My end of semester grading hideousness:

class 1 peer review 4
class 2 peer review 4
class 3 peer review 4
essay 4
essay 4 (just barely started these)
essay 4
lit essays
figure out all attendance/participation grades for 4 classes

to arrive next week:

class 1 comp final
class 2 comp final
class 3 comp final
lit finals

submit final grades.

(cleaning, packing, running off to California and leaving my poor cats here with a cat-sitter...)

Bleah! I'm tired.

Has everyone heard back about MLA things already?

Haven't heard a thing from any of the jobs I managed to apply for. Some affirmative action forms, yes, but no writing sample requests and no calls for MLA interviews. And the wiki, and reports from the grad students I know, seem to indicate that this week was the week for interview calls.

Sigh. One of the other postdocs asked me the other day if I had thought about what would happen if we didn't get anything this year or next year in the postdoc? I said I hadn't, because having the option of extending the postdoc for a second year was supposed to give us peace of mind to carry on, and hey, maybe they would extend the postdoc longer if we didn't get jobs. But she said no, she has already talked to the chair about that and this is not possible, with the way the postdoc was created. Sigh.



Doesn't anyone want a small cat hiding behind poststructuralist theory? I'm quite well-trained. I can even teach Fruit Studies!

Ok, I guess I'll go back to grading enormous piles of rhetorical analysis papers. That'll cheer me up! Eh, not even the typo "ethos, pathos, and legos" got me to crack a smile. Though it did give me some ideas for children's educational toys. Hmm, maybe I should go be a toy entrepreneur instead.

Procrastination Excitement!!!!

Aha! I am in the magic space --- I am done with classes, yet do not have any grading to do yet. It is a magic space full of joy and wonderfulness, and I also have a new course to plan for next semester, which is similarly in a magic space of possibility and rosy hues. Mmm! So naturally I am getting all excited and starting preliminary planning for this new course, which is the best kind of planning ---- planning stuff that goes perfectly well in your head and does not have to run up against the limitations of your actual students and their levels of grumpiness and unpreparedness, or have to throw something together in the next hour before class actually starts. And furthermore, while the random class I was given (Stripey Class) had nothing to do with my academic specialty, I am more familiar with this one: Introduction to Fruit Studies.*

Now, introducing students to Fruit Studies is actually rather difficult, because everyone thinks they already know about fruit and want to talk about what fruit means to them, or why it is so delicious. They are much less interested in discussing why pineapples are an oppressed group. In fact, because pineapples, like other fruit, are usually not separated off in their own specific community but form connections with many other aspects of dinner, it is much harder to recognize that they are in fact on the bottom of a hierarchy and systematically discriminated against. And just as students tend to see fruit in the context of individual dinners, so too do they have difficulties recognizing the similarities between, say, apples, and papayas, and lychees, and pomegranates, and kiwi fruit, in a way that does not erase the very real differences in habitat between them. They are both similar and different, and no, I am not going to accept that as your thesis for your essays.

Starting an Introduction to Fruit Studies class also reminds me of the difficulties in starting freshman composition, because all the parts of an essay are stuck together and what do you teach first? Do you start with classification? Deconstructing the very idea of fruit? Rinds? Muddling and Fruit Salad, aka Intersectional Fruit Analysis? Representations of Fruit? Theories of Difference, as in vs. Vegetables? Global Fruit Systems? Grafting and Reproduction? Why oranges are not the only fruit? The trouble is that each of these areas of study has some essential tools and concepts that we need for the other areas of study, and whatever I start with will be frustrating because I will want to use some term that I haven't explained yet. Sigh. And yet it is so fun at the preliminary stages!

And I have tons of ideas for films!!!! I love Fruit Studies films --- they can be very accessible for students and really create an "aha" moment about fruit experience in a way that readings and statistics often don't. Should I have some sort of film analysis assignment, or presentations on films? I can't decide! It doesn't help that I know of a lot of great fruity films and am sorely tempted to just show the films in all of the class sessions. That would make prep easy and fun! But, probably not what is expected of me. So I'll have to do the hard work of pairing films with the readings and selecting only a few, the most exciting and important.

I haven't done anything besides lay out the dates of the next semester. Oh, and finally track down a copy of the book, which still has not even been ordered for me. Luckily my officemate is teaching Intro to Fruit Studies this semester, and now that she is done with the book I have borrowed it for the day. (I won't get in to all of her frustrations with students being horrible people and/or not doing the reading, but I was taking note all semester and I hope I remember how to get around this stuff in my own class.)

So, how to set up the course? Easy first, or hard? The "accessible" fruity desserts first, or start with the less tasty yet antioxidant-rich dishes? Do I alternate between the fun and the depressing issues, or group them to end the course on either a saddening or uplifting note? How to balance all of the important concepts and histories of the discipline, mentioned above, with being inclusive of all the different fruit varieties? I wouldn't want to slight the berries, or the stone fruit, but really, you could have an entire class on the intricacies of each! And what sort of assignments do I want to include? The course is designed to be a writing-intensive class in the course catalog, but I love the fun and creativity of alternative-type assignments traditional to Fruit Studies. And clearly I need to put quizzes into the syllabus and really hammer students with them regularly, as I saw with my officemate's class. I'm not really big on reading journals, and I like the idea of some sort of big activist project or proposal, though I don't have any experience in setting those up. Really, though, I think one of the best ways to get students excited about Fruit Studies is through wacky and off-beat assignments that really push students to explore their creativity and originality.

Kind of like this post.




* clearly, a pseudonym.

"Victor Hugo would write naked..."

There are so many great quotes in this article I had to post it up.

Later: What We can Learn from Procrastination

Akerlof, who became one of the central figures in behavioral economics, came to the realization that procrastination might be more than just a bad habit. He argued that it revealed something important about the limits of rational thinking.

What's fascinating is that I actually rarely procrastinate, if you define procrastination as this guy does:

Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you’re simply saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” you’re not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that’s the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people.

Sure, I procrastinate a lot, but I also do a lot of "aww, fuckit," which seems to go with the eat, drink and be merry bit. I often do the whole "staring at the stack of essays and suffering while changing tv channels, one eye on the essays and one on the tv," (and I am completely miserable), but I also often go, "no, I did one essay and I need a mental health break and I will now refuse to acknowledge the fact that they exist." Then I, I dunno, live in the moment, only focusing on the nap or food or pleasant activity I'm taking part in. But, yeah, there's definite benefits to just being unapologetically bad rather than beating oneself up about what one is not doing. It's like what Yoda said: "Do or not do. There is no procrastination."

Viewed this way, procrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict. ... Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves not as unified selves but as different beings, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control.... Similarly, Otto von Bismarck said, “Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.” In that sense, the first step to dealing with procrastination isn’t admitting that you have a problem. It’s admitting that your “you”s have a problem.

"My yous have a problem" would also make a nice post title. Will save it for when needed.

The essay also has an explanation why we, as teachers, exist, and why our ability to set limits for students is vital even at the college level:

Instead, we should rely on what Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson, in their essay in “The Thief of Time,” call “the extended will”—external tools and techniques to help the parts of our selves that want to work.

And finally, the story that starts my post:

(Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.)

At some point I should get up and cook some dinner, but I'm enjoying myself here, reading stuff, watching a Dave Brubeck documentary on tv, relaxing. Tomorrow is another day? Nope, I'm just gonna seize the now.

Snow

Hey, it's snowing! The cats do not approve. First Loquito was staring out the window with his ears flattened, watching the flakes come down. Then he tried hissing at it. Then he scratched at the window the same way he buries things in his litterbox or "covers up" his food. Now he is at the bargaining stage, meowing at me for more food because the stuff in his bowl is a whole hour old. I am not moved.

Timido watched the flakes for a little while but then I raised the blinds more to get a nice view and that scared him. He came back later to watch from more of a distance but the wind changed and some flakes flew against the window and now he is completely in hiding.

And I hear Loquito eating now. Cats --- they are quite predictable, aren't they?

So anyway it's a nice day and I don't have to go anywhere, so I am watching the snow fall but not stick. I see my car, which is quite covered. My plan was, as it is every Saturday, to go to the next town over and eat a breakfast bagel sandwich and drink a fancy coffee while grading, as a nice way of getting out of the house and motivating my work. But I decided not to bother with the car and potential driving difficulties today.

Of course, you see me working hard on those essays right now, don't you? Heh. It helps to have a productive routine --- when I am at the coffee place I associate it with working, while I associate this couch with being comfy and lazy --- and it helps a lot too to only have the essays with me, so that I can't check the internet for distractions even if the wifi is working.

If you remember, a while back I posted about making an emergency kit and having supplies and stuff around the house. Well, as part of that project, I got some of that Starbucks instant coffee, both the hot and the cold versions. I totally don't want to sound like some sort of testimonial or whatnot, but I am drinking the instant stuff right now, and it is pretty good. So soon I will be nicely caffeinated and hopefully that will prompt some good work habits. And the cold stuff you can make with cold water, so even if we were to have a power outage I could have my coffee ... and probably grade all day by the light of a lantern. Wow. Suddenly my life sounds very 19th-century prison, or maybe like the 10-year-old pieceworkers who would bring home sewing for while they watched all their younger siblings. Ok, it's totally not like that. It's just depressing that my teaching load is so high I have no time off grading and even if I were to be snowed in and with no power I'd still have to try and keep caught up.

My scaredy-cat just came out of hiding. Loquito jumped him and they wrestled for a minute, then when Loquito won, Timido ran off and went into hiding in a different place. So funny.

And now the snow appears to have slackened. Does this mean I have to start grading? Oh, coffee, let me prolong your sweet liquor just a little longer!

Grading Guilt

Well, I did not get the essays back to all of my classes this week. Sigh. This makes me anxious, and I hate dealing with the aggro responses of students who are anxious and whiny about not getting their essays back yet --- especially the ones who think they are being cute but are really coming across somewhere between obnoxious and threatening. So this means I don't have a weekend to catch up on life before I get the final set of drafts. Ugh.

And while deciding not to do a grading marathon made life easier in certain ways, it didn't lighten my to-do load much. And I am teaching a set of readings and a type of essay that I don't really have prior experience with, and prepping some sort of brainstorming/peer review worksheet for it sucked up a lot of my time and energy. I just can't half-ass teaching prep when it means a potential shitty class is on the line. Sigh. I wish I could. And the past few days have involved me snapping at my students because the lesson plan wasn't going quite as well as it should and on top of that they were being totally disruptive assholes. I'm torn about whether to scrap this last essay sequence and try a different set of readings in the crappy anthology next semester or try to tweak them into something more workable. On the one hand, more work, but on the other hand, I might get a sequence together that I don't hate and that doesn't suck to teach. And I'm just worn out and grumpy by the end of the semester anyway.

You know, when I taught at a place that did portfolios I didn't like it, especially because all the TAs/lecturers had to meet and pass or fail each others' student portfolios in a multi-day grading anxiety nightmare, but looking at that now, I do like the way I kinda stopped teaching new stuff after Thanksgiving and just taught portfolio revision instead. It was easier to plan, and you could throw in some pretty easy days (today we pick which of your essays you will revise!), although I don't remember how I managed to squeeze in four essays and portfolio revision. So maybe it would be worth trying again somewhere else.

Here, however, we don't do portfolios, but an in-class final and evaluate those. Blearrrrrrgh! So one of the things I've been thinking about the past couple days is what sort of short little article I could grab to have them respond to it in a final exam's amount of time. I do not like this system. I know it's to test students in an unplagiarizable environment, and I guess that there's a problem here that students get so much "help" and do so much guided revision to get passing essays that they are still unable to write a coherent sentence or complete an in-class essay without help, but still. Ugh. I've spent the entire semester trying to break my students of writing glib, seemingly presentable, yet completely stream-of-consciousness unsourced essays, which they can already do. (I presume because of all the timed essay tests from the SAT and No Child Left Behind?) This assignment will just undo all the training I did.

And all you profs in other departments will regret it when you get my students producing an essay on, say, the causes of the civil war, that starts off by asserting a lot of common wisdom that they already knew, never once refers to any of the textbooks, veers off into a discussion of the student's favorite cat and closes by returning to some of the causes introduced in the beginning, but this time directly contradicting the earlier assertions! Ahhhhhh! See, a portfolio project, maybe one where they have to go find a good outside source or two as part of the revision process, would reinforce the principles I have been teaching all semester: how to organize, how to revise, how to construct a logical and consistent argument, how to back up one's claims with support from other texts instead of pulling random generalizations out of one's ass, how to introduce and analyze that support properly. And the students have learned a bunch --- although I haven't gotten them beyond a very basic argument to an actual sophisticated argument --- but I fear that a timed in-class essay will bring out all their old bad habits. Sigh.

So I have to plan that --- pick an article, write some instructions, consider how much I'm going to nag them to do some brainstorming and outlining before writing (do I put that explicitly in the instructions?) and how much practice/prep I want to do for it next week. Meh. I mean, I have tons and tons and tons of other stuff to do, too (go back to job apps? piles of grading? making the lit final for stripey class? laundry?) --- but if you have any suggestions for how to reconcile my pedagogical goals with the department's goals and requirements, please have at it.

End of the Semester

I will not kill my students.
I will not kill my students.
I will not kill my students.
I will not kill my students.
I will not kill my students.
I will not kill my students.
I will not kill my students.
I will not kill my students.
I will not kill my students.
I will not kill my students.
I will not kill my students.
I will not kill my students.


Sigh. I have so many freakin' essays left to grade!


Maybe I could just kill the ones whose essays I haven't graded yet...?