This can't be a good sign...

I'm starting to read my students' writing samples, and the first one talks about a time when this particular student was struggling with homework and was relieved when his friend came and finished it for him.

I've gotta say that talking about how much you like cheating doesn't strike me as the best tactic for creating a first impression. In case you were wondering.

my adventurous Tuesday

Today I began teaching a summer composition class. It's a class I've already taught twice, so I expected things to go fairly smoothly. For the most part they did, although it was still kind of a crazy afternoon.

Up until about fifteen minutes before class, everything was perfect. I was wearing a new outfit (shirt, skirt, and shoes) that I really liked, I had no problem getting to the xerox machine to copy handouts, and I arrived to class early to get set up. Some students began trickling into the classroom early, which was fine. I only realized there was a slight problem when, over the course of about fifteen minutes, 9 students asked me if they could please add the class. I told them that I only had three spots left, but that they could sit in on the class if they wanted to try to get one of those spots at the end of the hour and a half. In retrospect, I probably should have sent some of them home at that point, since it turned out there weren't enough chairs in the room for everyone.

The class itself went fine, but the end of class...woah. I was still stuck with nine students who wanted to add. Two, it turned out, wanted to audit the class, which isn't allowed in our department, so I sent them away. One was a freshman whom I dismissed by saying that seniority had to be prioritized. Three said they were seniors--I said I would probably add them. The remaining three were sophomores who all said they would lose scholarships and their ability to return to college in the fall if they didn't pass this class in the summer. Ack!

I told the sophomores they probably wouldn't be able to add (although they might if some of the absent students drop), but felt really bad about it, especially since there is only one section (mine) of this particular class being offered this summer. The lack of class spaces seems like the result of very bad planning on someone's part.

I spent an hour talking with the secretary in the composition department after class, asking questions and trying to get more information about the status of some of the waitlist students. She was really nice about it, but the situation remained frustrating, especially since I learned that many of my students have previously failed this particular class multiple times, and many of them really need to pass this course now in order to graduate. No pressure there! :P

When I finally left the office, I realized I was very hungry. I decided to walk across the street to grab a sandwich, only to discover that my up-to-then comfy new shoes had caused a sudden, fairly painful blister to develop (and pop, I think) on my heel. I stopped into a trendy clothing store in the center (the only clothing store in the center) to see if, by any chance, they were selling cheap flip flops that I could wear for the rest of the afternoon, but the only flip flops they had were $50 (!!!). And I was hurting, but more like $6 worth of hurting, y'know? So I passed on buying the shoes.

Instead, I bought chocolate cookies from Trader Joe's, because chocolate makes everything better. And because they didn't have bandaids, which I had entered the store hoping they might. While there, I got extra cash, and went to the little cafe to buy a sandwich and salad.

After I ordered, I stood near the cashier for a moment to put my wallet back into my purse. Then I noticed a young woman next to me looking at me strangely.

"Hey!" she said. "I know you! I went to high school with you!"

She turned out to be a friend of mine from high school whom I hadn't seen since I was in 11th grade. Coincidentally, she was also teaching summer school (ESL), and was also hungry. We sat in the cool shade and ate and laughed and learned about each others' lives since graduation. Really, the late afternoon couldn't have been more wonderful.

So...if I hadn't had a rush of students trying to add my class, hadn't forgotten to eat lunch before class, or hadn't blistered my feet, I wouldn't have reunited with my friend! Things have turned out just fine this Tuesday.

caught on film

While leaving for the grocery store today, I saw two tiny, adorable bunnies. I ran back to my apartment to grab my camera, and managed to take a couple of photos of one of them. The photos aren't very good -- they're at a considerable distance (you sort of have to squint), and the color on the second one is strange -- but they do give a sense of the size of the bunnies compared to their surrounding environment. And, in the case of bunnies, very small is pretty much the same as very cute!

Cuteness alert!

If you dare, check out this video of a sleepy kitten from cuteoverload. (Warning: cuteness levels may be dangerous.)

summer countdown

I subbed as a proctor for a professor's exam this morning, and am now carrying roughly 100 bluebooks around campus. I knew you had to get a PhD to do this, but I didn't expect the arm muscles had to be this strong. Maybe I should have broken out my enormous rolling bag that I usually reserve for research trips to the library--it looks goofy, but it gets the job done!

My hatred of course evaluations has been somewhat mitigated by the first comments I (recently) received on ratemyprofessors.com. Yes, the site has many flaws--it tends to attract students who have very strong feelings (often negative) about a teacher, and it can sometimes digress into a discussion of a teacher's mannerisms, gestures, etc. Still, it's gratifying to receive some genuinely nice comments there. Oh, and the goofy chili pepper icon next to my name has totally made my week. ;)

Summer is almost here! Even though I know I still have to do work in the next few months, I'm really excited by the prospect of a full week off first, and by a vacation I get to take in the middle of the summer quarter to attend Andrea and Adam's wedding. I want to see friends and go swimming and maybe even finish that novel Justin lent me several months ago. (Reading for fun? What...?) Does anyone reading this have exciting plans for the summer?

My summer begins Friday if I can finish the grading on time. Only 2 days to go! :)

Pride and Prejudice music videos

If you search for Pride and Prejudice on YouTube, you can find amongst the movie trailers several music videos compiled from clips of the newest P&P movie. My guess is that most of them were made by very young people (high school age, perhaps?), since the music they use tends to be recent pop songs. Some of these videos are generic (and often silly) Darcy-loves-Lizzie videos, but several are more interesting. Like any good work of literary criticism, they make arguments about point of view, tone and thematic material in the novel (or, at least, the movie). Some of them, like this one, work from Darcy's perspective, but most are presented from Elizabeth's. Two of my favorites present very different interpretations of Elizabeth's character; one presents her as a young, vulnerable woman trying to decipher the mysteries of social life, while another argues that Lizzie is an independent woman wondering how much of her independence it's okay to sacrifice in a relationship. Their readings of Elizabeth vary widely but are both well supported by a careful organization of the movie's "text." It seems like this kind of project might be one useful way of introducing analysis of literary adaptations--if done correctly, it would encourage students to move away from summarizing plots and toward a more thematic, topical analysis of a movie's rhetoric.

Looks like I'm a survivor!

Which of Henry VIII's wives are you?
this quiz was made by Lori Fury

end of quarter complaints: a trilogy

I

I may not be consciously aware that I'm anxious about the class that I'm teaching, but I woke up this morning aware that I had had a series of frustrating dreams all set in my classroom. The first was a fairly routine annoying-situation-dream: a colleague of mine was sitting in my class (she kept telling me before I began how good she expected it to be) and I couldn't find any of my handouts or notes for the day in my binder, which was full of old student assignments and syllabi. The second was a little weirder: my students turned in drafts of their paper, only many of them chose instead of completing the full five pages to write 1-2 pages and then finish their argument with an interpretive piece of abstract visual art (a.k.a. "a doodle"). I remembered getting very panicky in this dream, asking myself how I was ever going to comment on these drafts.

The final dream that I remember involved only four students since fifteen were absent. These were four of my best students, I remember, but in the dream they didn't want to talk about Dracula; they wanted to color on the whiteboard. And they demanded snacks. They had apparently abducted the minds of the third graders I taught last summer; it all made a lot of sense while I was sleeping.

II

A very stressed-looking student asked me last Thursday, when the final paper's drafts were due, whether she could have an extension and meet with me the next day to discuss her paper topic, which was confusing and frustrating her. I said sure, we could do that, and we met the next day for a meeting to which she brought no notes, no tentative thesis, nada. I tried to be as nice as I could, but I admitted I couldn't help her much until she did some more independent work that I could comment on. She promised to e-mail me that night. She did...with a request for an extension for her e-mail. She sounded upset and frustrated, so I said sure. She finally e-mailed me late last night (Sunday) with a tentative thesis and the beginning of a body paragraph. Because I myself was in the middle of writing a paper for a seminar, I put off responding to the e-mail (or going on the Internet, period) until late tonight.

When I signed in to respond to her e-mail, she had sent me an abrupt, angry note saying that she "guessed I just hadn't received her first e-mail" and implying that my comments were very late. I understand her frustration. I understand that I could have replied this morning when I checked my e-mail. But really, I'm not the one who's late here, right? Yet I'm the one who gets the angry e-mail instead of sympathy and an extension. Moreover, this is the kind of anecdote that tends to get blown out of proportion by students, which leads me to...

III

I HATE COURSE EVALUATIONS. I hate the fact that they stress me out. I hate that students sometimes circle zero on everything and only write the comment, "she was running ten minutes late once during conferences and I was late for my next class." I hate the fact that even if I receive 85 percent glowing evaluations, I only can remember the frustrated 15 percent.

*******

On the brighter side of things, today is the last Monday of the winter/spring quarter one-two punch. To which I say, to quote Napoleon Dynamite: yesssssssss.

(All appearances of this post aside, I'm actually in a really good mood. The air is warm and a week of vacation is so close I can almost gobble it up. Sleeping! Reading for fun! Getting a haircut! Hooray!)