Safety Last

This morning, there was frost on my windshield. Cool! This afternoon, it is back up to 75, which is even more awesome. (As in, I spent the last hour "grading" outside, but really sitting there looking around and going, "it is so freakin beautiful! I love the weather!!!")

I've also been on the phone with my sister, which made me think of all things safety. You see, she is the safety manager for her plant and is thus very invested in always Being Prepared. She was chiding me about my not having a Disaster Kit (we were momentarily confused by the thought that we really couldn't call it an Earthquake Kit outside of California) and whether I should ask for emergency supplies for Christmas or go out and buy them myself now.

(My sister, being the lovable dorky one who is always Being Prepared, gave each of my young-adult cousins a car emergency kit a few years ago, including emergency food/water stuff. Since the food has expired she wants to get them an emergency kit update, but we have heard they were less-than-happy about the gift they got last time. Me, I think that I'd like to get emergency supply stuff, since I want to have it but don't want to spend my money on it. That makes it the perfect gift in my mind.)

We were also stymied by what healthy people put in their emergency food rations. I was looking around my place and telling her, I have rice, dried beans, lentils, quinoa, lots of fresh unpeeled vegetables ... and an electric stove. How the hell would I eat anything? Just hold lentils in my mouth until they softened up and then swallow them raw? Eeew! I'm also not too fond of raw veggies, so the thought of subsisting on carrots and raw beets is kinda disheartening to me. So I went out to get some granola bars at the very least (but it is not easy to stock up on those if you have a nut allergy, let me tell you) and some tortilla chips, to go along with gnawing on raw carrots and beans in the dark. (heh!) Thing is, I don't keep convenience food in the house at all, because I'll eat it, entire bags worth. So the whole "creating an emergency food kit" part is just confusing to me.

Looking on the web I see people suggesting I always have my wood-burning stove and camping stove ready... sigh. Ah the troubles of renting. Maybe I should ask for a fancy propane grill to put on my back porch! I'm not sure how often I'd really use a grill or a camping stove, but being able to heat up a can of soup sounds nice. And if I had a gas stove I'd probably be worrying about gas leaks instead ---- I am a worry-wart.

So in the spirit of avoiding grading, I ask you, what's in your emergency kit? What sort of weather-related stuff do you have stocked up? Can you add anything to my list below? (I'm going to try and get my family down with the "ship me early Christmas presents or gift cards" plan)...

I've got the basics of flashlights and candles ... and somewhere packed away is my ice-scraper. I should unearth that today.

What about these things? Are they any good? Do I need them? It says I should keep some in my car.
I'd like a battery-powered lantern so that I could read and also not burn down the apartment:




And I should probably have a news radio/charger/emergency warning thingy:
And I was looking for some way I could just cover the windshield instead of chip off the frost every morning ... or else I'm going to have to add even more time to my morning commute. Sigh.




And I need a little flashlight for my keychain. Actually that would help a lot with when I come home late after drinking, too, since I never remember to turn on the porch light. A win all around!

Any further suggestions?

Um, thanks?

In conferences today, one student is not very talkative. So I say to him, Student, I see you're not very talkative. Do you have any additional suggestions for Other Student?

He shakes his head and says, "This English stuff is just not for me."

"What?" I say.

He shakes his head again. "Man, I hate English."

Me: ...?

Him: No, I mean I hate English. I've tried to hate you so hard but I can't.

Me: ????

Him: I tried so hard. I hated all my English teachers, so much, but you're standing up there in front of class with your laughing and your smiling and your Jay-Z jokes and silly dance and I just cannot hate you no matter how hard I try. I still don't like writing essay drafts, though.

Me: Oh. ... Okay? ... Don't forget to turn in the final draft online on Friday.








____________________
The good news: I saw one of my students from yesterday's conferences signing up for a session at the tutoring center today, as I pointed the reception area out to the current peer review group sitting with me. I don't even care if it was for my class or not. I'm just glad someone who didn't know about the center is now using it.

Updates and Epiphanies

First, thanks everybody for the coat advice ---- this may be the most comments I've gotten on a post! (does this say something about my academic-related writing? hmm.) Now I'll have to contemplate things before I actually do anything in the coat category. (looking at coats online and asking advice is way more fun than grading, but finding the time to actually go anywhere and try stuff on will have to wait.)

In other news, I am tired! It's been a kinda shitty week. Last week I lost my phone ---- or actually, I think that I set it down on campus and someone took it. :( Grr. So a lot of time was taken up last week hunting it down and retracing my steps and then I took a lot of time on Sunday going to the apple store place to get a new phone. Which is another expense I wasn't wanting to shell out for. Double grrr.

Now I am knee-deep in group conferences all week. Bleah. I hate conferences --- they take a lot out of me and I get stressed very easily managing all the time and scheduling stuff (I'm a control freak and this isn't something you can control very easily). Also, repeating myself with the same advice over and over again annoys me ---- I know on one level that I am telling different people, but I still find myself getting increasingly snappy at people as I repeat myself throughout the day.

But! talking to smaller groups does let me really hear what people are getting --- and doing conferences right after peer review means we can talk about how to do those as well. Also I held them in the tutoring center (everyone in my shared office is holding conferences this week, so I had to vacate the premises), so I am able to make Dire Pronouncements and then advise them to make appointments with a writing tutor before the paper is due.

I don't know why so many of my students are putting their thesis as the first sentence of the paper (is someone teaching this?), especially after we spent a lot of time on that formulaic "funnel shaped introduction," but the good news is that it was not just me telling students; some of their peer reviewers were pointing this out. And I had a couple people actually say "when I did the peer review on this person's essay, I noticed that my essay had the same problem and went to try and fix that." Hooray epiphanies! I just have to remind myself that having the aha moment and seeing what is wrong does not necessarily translate into successfully fixing a problem. Another of my difficulties, I think, is that I might have maybe 5 people really seem to pick up something from the conferences, and I can't help but get discouraged when I look at the vast majority of papers afterward that have no signs of learning.

I must say though I do like doing the conferences with the second paper, as they feel kinda burned and like they have to prove themselves (more accurately, that I'm a hard-ass who won't let them get away with things), and they are trying much harder with this round. It's always easier to deal with long days and lots of groups when they are putting in effort. And some are taking it really seriously and are very worried --- doing multiple drafts, revising between peer review day and conference day, etc. It helps that the school makes us post midterm grades and the only thing I had was the first essay. *evil grin.*

Unfortunately, not everyone gets "scared straight" and buckles down --- some behave like light-struck forest animals and run straight into the traffic. And when freaking out consists of panicked, self-destructive behavior right around group conferences, it always causes huge problems. Like borrowing a group member's anthology and then disappearing from the face of the earth problems. That wasn't here, though. But I have had a sizable number of no-shows for the peer review and people bailing on conferences, as if going into hiding would somehow erase their previous bad grade. If I knew beforehand which students could be scared serious and which will spook and trample fellow students, I would be able to do a targeted attack. Ah well. The mysteries of teaching.

Also, an update from my previous questions: this "sequence" I drilled them --- beat them over the heads! --- on paragraph structure and quotes. I tried both writing up some sample topic sentences and having students write the paragraphs in small groups, and writing up a series of softball questions and having students create paragraphs in small groups. I'm not sure if the topic sentence exercise didn't work as well because it was first, or it's just not as good. (It was much harder to come up with topic sentences while not writing an essay than to come up with some semi-directive questions and ask them to find quotes that answered the questions.) I also had them writing something, like these exercises, in class every. single. time. we met. I did almost no discussion (which I could ask as a separate post: how much emphasis do you put on discussing the reading vs. doing writing assignments in class?) and we either wrote or workshopped something every day.

The result? Well, I'm still not getting consistent topic sentences or conclusion sentences, but you'd be amazed at just how much stronger their arguments get when they are forced to be specific and bring in quotes into every single paragraph. And I had them do (again) a highlighting assignment on their peer reviews and then examine the color patterns, so I did have some students point out essays lacking topic sentences etc. They also were better at adding analysis of every single quote than on introducing or formatting any of them correctly, but since I prioritize that so much more I'm ok with that.

(Another benefit of the group conferences is that I can make Dire Pronouncements like this: "Now I notice that both of your peer reviewers marked your quotes, because none of them are connected or have page numbers. See this? I am making a note, since I just told you the same thing, and I will be looking for that to be fixed on your final draft." Unfortunately, the people I made Dire Pronouncements to today looked quite unimpressed, and are either apathetic or have a good poker face. But when they get an explicit warning like that I have no qualms about hitting their grades hard if I don't see improvement.) Now if the students already seem scared into revising things I try to be Highly Encouraging, instead. But one of the drawbacks of mixing my strong and weak students in a group is that then I have to both play the heavy and seem sweet and encouraging and nonthreatening, all in the same group. Tiring.)

I have also come around on assigning personal essays, since I did that (very reluctantly) this time. I didn't allow them to write personal essays or bring personal experience into this one, though ---- they had to compare or contrast two of the other essays. But they did find the memoir-type stuff very accessible and nonthreatening. There's no academic language in these personal essays, for example. But then they aren't getting any models. I think if I were here longer and had built up a bank of sample student essays and theses I would be able to have both worlds. But the few essays I have on file just don't work as sample material for them. Oh, remind me to photocopy some of the final drafts --- and find out what I have to do to get permission.

The bad news? Apart from the fact that I am swamped with more conferences and also need to find time to get groceries? I get my final drafts and the midterm revision option I gave the lit students at the end of the week. This weekend is gonna suh-huh-huck.

More Coat Questions

I'm just gonna put this all here in case people don't go back to look at the comments for the last post.

Tell me more about coats ---- if I follow Absurdist's advice and zip up a snuggly sweater underneath, does that mean I should go up a size when trying stuff on? How do I go about getting it to fit well with layers? (And then isn't there the problem of becoming too roly-poly with too many layers and then a big wool coat thrown on on top of it?)

Thank you for the advice to get something lined with "thinsulate" --- see? Now I have a new term to look for when I go sniffing about in the stores.

Right now I only need the coat for going from home to my car to school on teaching days ... I'm out of the house by 7 and it is already cold and dark (bleah!) ... so I'm looking for something that will not look too awkward with nice teaching clothes or dresses. I have a camping-rain-gear coat that is bright orange, and besides being too thin already (though great on the days it has rained), I feel odd running around in something that orange and casual with my teaching clothes. Inside is pretty good since they keep the building on pretty high heat already. I hope they don't up the heat more when it gets colder because I hate bundling up and then coming indoors and stripping back down to a t-shirt or blouse ---- for one thing, it's hell on my hair with all the dressing and undressing and static. For another, I have thrown up in the past when I get too overheated. Don't need to be experiencing random nausea on winter days, thanks!

You all suggest black but I do have my old pea coat and the insane floor-length rabbit-fur collar one from mom --- what about something in that caramel color? Do those show dirt and not wear as well? Something like this? (I also quite like the floppy look of this but alas, I'm sure a red coat would limit my clothing options too much. Useful for if I got lost in the snow, however.)

I am continuing to look about. At the rate I move from "looking" to actually going to stores and trying stuff on, however, I fear it will already be the dead of winter before I get a good coat. Alas!



ETA: Ok, is this a possibility? (In the camel) I notice it's not really wool. And that it has shoulder pads (loathe!) I notice that this is only available online, erm. And it has polyester. And it has those sideways bars around the waist that make me worried. And I don't know if "polyester lining" is the same as "thinsulate lining," but I am guessing it is not. And then this seems so cute and yet totally nothing like what I need. Sigh. The perils of shopping.

Edited to add again: Where did it get the name "car coat"? And is that a standardized length? Cars come in all different lengths.

Coat Question

But first, too short?


Not me --- I mean, it's a given that I'm too short --- I mean the skirt. And I liked this outfit but looking at this pic the tights seem to be too light of a green. Hmph. Anyway, it's too late cause I've already worn it to teach. (I like that this is a cat action shot, too.)

Haven't figured out how to attach the mirror to a door without drilling holes yet. I thought they had a holder for it at Target that hung over the door back, but no luck.

Anyway, it is lovely weather here --- a beautiful California winter. It's chilly at night --- maybe getting down to 40 --- and warming up to beautiful pleasant weather in the middle of the day. Thing is, this is not California or winter. I think it's gonna get colder and become a winter winter. Already I'm going in to teach super early in the morning and it's quite cold.

I have some peacoats from the Gap --- heh, I went shopping with another grad student at Chicago MLA and she said something like "Oh, it's been a long time since I've seen the full Gap winter collection" and I said "they have a winter collection?" --- but they are not lined, and while they are cute, I'm already kinda cold when I go to school in the mornings. The middle of the day, it's nice and warm and fine.

Then I also have one really old, really heavy coat, and a really looooooong jacket I stole (em, borrowed) from my mom. It's floor-length and has a rabbit-fur collar. It's a little ... extreme for my everyday winter wear.

So I need coat-related advice. I guess I want some sort of ... coat? Well, ok, I want some sort of heavier coat, but I've been looking at down parka-type stuff and it looks too casual (and possibly bulky around my waist). Can you buy a dressier type coat (cloth, not down) that still has decent warmth? I'm looking at stuff online but can't tell if it's lined, or if it's going to be heavy enough without being too heavy, or how bulky it is. Help! Tell me what I should be looking for, and how to go about buying a coat.

If you're really nice, I 'll give you a cat picture.

Yecccch!

Well, I finished going through the midterms for a first pass. Oh, they were terrible! And there were many strange notes in there too, both heartfelt-sounding apologies for being slackers and very angry attacks on me as a teacher ... a very chatty class, which is odd, considering the sheer number of IDs they left blank.

And I really really hate giving credit for crap. If someone does not identify the work correctly and then writes "this was important to our class because it shows that we can relate to just about any piece of writing from olden days" or "This was written in a difficult style to really make the reader slow down and think about what is being said" AND THAT IS THE FULL EXTENT OF THE ANSWER, then NO, you are not getting ANY credit!

However, giving zeros instead of Fs for individual answers really tanks the student's midterm grade. I gave out a lot of F-level points for bad answers, too. It's just that I really really hate giving partial credit to a blank page or the answers listed above.

But these answers are so bad and the tests skew so low that I got paranoid and did a quick rundown of the IDs, answer by answer:

So in this first picture you can see this first three IDs. The pencil line is the cutoff between passing and not passing for an answer. We spent an entire week on # 2 and I swore to them that there would be a midterm ID on it since it was right before the midterm. # 3 is back from the first week of class so it makes sense that even when they ID'd it, they didn't have much useful to say about it. And do you see the number of zeros???

Number 5, interestingly enough, had an image next to it on the PP slide. That's about where I want all of them to fall in terms of quality. Number 6 is completely bimodal --- and not only did a lot of people leave that blank, even more totally misidentified it as something that sounds nothing like it. I spent an entire class period on that text (and every single one of the IDs was up on a powerpoint slide and we proceeded to close read it), but I am willing to say that this was just not a good ID and give the points out for it.

Thing is, giving an extra 12 points to someone with a grand total of 31 (out of 100) isn't going to do much.

My total midterm breakdown was as follows:
5 Bs
8 Cs
7 Ds
16 Fs
(9 of those Fs are 40 % or below)

So I'm still pondering what to do next, partly because I can't really tell what was going on in the students' heads: to what extent were they lost and to what extent were they blowing it off because it is a stupid GE course and they are about to have fall break? I'm inclined to go in there next time and give them a stern talking-to, a heads up that the quality of their tests was terrible, and that even if I were to give them credit for one of the IDs because so few got it, many of them would still be failing. Then I could give them some stern reminders about working harder and maybe do a practice question or two later in the semester.

(Thing is, I am about to do a zillion comp conference hours next week and will once again be down-to-the-minute on class prep. I haven't taught this course, or even this locale and time period, before, and I spend a lot of time just reading the stuff I've assigned (which I've never read before) and figuring out how to give a basic lecture on this crap. I never have the time in my schedule to then go back and make the effort of figuring out some quiz questions or additional sample practice midterm questions. Since I'm teaching it again next semester (oh joy!) I'll be able to use my frantic prep time for actually working out some activities and quizzes and stuff, but really I can't do that on a first time teaching a course. Maybe I'm a crappy teacher, but whatever. Them's that hired me'll have to deal with that.)

Then the question is: do I do an additional curve/bump on top of that? I dunno. I have to go talk to the chair anyway, because the angry email was not the only complaint about identifying terms or "hard stuff" (like themes. Or literary movements. The ones I have as a running title across my slides.) And the other complaint was that there were too many IDs to have time to write anything on them ---- but those are the blank midterms. I don't want to dumb this shit down! If you have no clue what these passages are, then having 1 or 6 or 10 won't make a difference!

Clearly I need to be more clear that I am an evil bitch of a grader (because I am) and that I need to be harsher on my "diagnostic" close reading essay (what I think Lucky Jane called a "handshake essay"). But really, since they were soooo much better than the comp papers, I was ok with grading them all in the C and B range. Nope. I need to just rip those early fuckers apart and warn them that I will be even meaner on the midterm, and if they don't like it, they can drop the class in week 3. Then I may actually be pleasantly surprised come midterm time, instead of have a heart attack when I open up the blue books.

Midterm Moanings

Mmm. Not so good. It was the usual practice for my profs to make their TAs create the midterms, so I actually have lots of experience with that. And because TAs lead the discussion sections and review sessions, I feel like I have a stronger handle on what students can say in X amount of time and have been good in the past holding the midterms to something fair and manageable.

That was not the case with Stripey Class.

I'm not even going to comment on the nasty and horrible email I got that I read when I stupidly checked my school email on a Friday evening. Ugh. It ruined the whole night. I didn't respond and now I think I'm calmer and that it says way more about this student than about my teaching; but I think I still will need to go in and talk to the chair about this. I hope the student regretted it as soon as the student sent it, and it's really about blowing of the student's frustration at not having studied for the midterm than actually about me at all.

But then I went through the ID section of the midterm and it wasn't so solid. A handful of perfect scores, a smattering of Bs and Cs, no Ds, and then F minuses. Like 3 points out of 25 F minuses. I'm not even sure what I could do about it, as there is no way I can bump up grades on answers that were left blank. And I picked terms that I brought up repeatedly and that students suggested when I made them come up with ideas during the review session, so I thought this midterm was pretty damn easy. I'm afraid to even look at the other part.

Basically I hate reading in-class essays and find them useless if you have lots of non-majors because nobody will quote or connect things to the text, so I just did a bunch of ID passages instead. I said I wanted a sentence of the definitions and a whole page explaining the significance of the IDs. Then every single student went and bought the small blue book.

Does your school have two blue book sizes? My old school did and maybe 1 person would buy the wrong size --- or the bookstore would run out and you could see the late people buying the small size because the sizes would change as more students trickled into the room. Here they sell both sizes and everyone brought in the small one. I was also surprised at the sheer number of people who had never heard of a blue book.

But basically a small blue book is about half the size of the large ones, and I was expecting a full page on those. Instead, as I'm flipping through the pile, I got between one sentence and a half a page on the small blue book pages.

True, content is way more important than size, but if you want someone to make multiple points and to examine actual language used in the quote, they'll need to take some space to work that out. I'm afraid to grade any further tonight. I'll just drink a beer and sit in dread of them instead.

I dunno --- I could have modeled more of what I wanted for the ID part and written and displayed a sample strong answer... maybe I'll do that next time? I'm very resistant to dumbing it down from "doable in a short time frame" to "painfully easy." Maybe it's just the angry email that has me shaken. Maybe they will just need to be shocked into the recognition that this class is harder than it looks and they need to take it seriously. Or maybe, because it is a class that fulfills a requirement for non-majors, they do not care and just want to put in the minimum effort to get a passing grade and they are ok with whatever terrible midterm grade they get.

I should add that, though it was a short time frame, everyone was finished with five minutes to spare (that's when the last kid turned in the midterm) and a pretty substantial number turned in their stuff within 10 minutes. Although there's no point sitting around if you don't recognize any of the passages or terms. See, I'm a terrible judge of understanding students, since I never did that in high school or college --- I don't think I failed a single midterm. I know I had brain farts where I would blank on a name or occasionally just not recognize a passage, but never for the whole midterm.

Yeah I don't know. I guess I need to learn more about how to toughen myself up and not second-guess myself than re-learn how to make tests. It's just sucky because I want them to enjoy my class and learn useful and enjoyable things and be able to explain those things back to me. Sigh. Gotta keep in mind Dissertation Buddy's mantra: I don't need them to love me and I don't need to be their friend.