One is that my hands are tired from writing all those comments, which means I don’t feel like typing.
Another is described in this brief video.
Category Archives: Personal
Under the weight of the semester.
It’s the last day of November. I have three more meetings with each of my classes before finals. I have oodles of grading to do before finals. I have one big administrative task and at least a dozen smaller ones to do before the end of the semester.
And, at the moment, I feel as though the weight of the semester is pressing down on me, like the stones used to press to death that one man so sentenced in the Salem witch trials.
Weekend diversion: Happy Thinksgiving.
The younger Free-Ride offspring’s soccer team has been playing in a regional tournament this weekend, and we’re girding our loins and guarding our shins to go out and play a second day of tournament games. I’m happy that they’re playing so well, but I have to say, watching games in late November is a different experience than spectating in mid-September. (Bone-chilling cold + bad sunburn = some kind of tangible sign of a parent’s devotion. If only one’s child took it seriously.)
Anyway, in the meantime, I wanted to test your knowledge in the identification of some turkeys.
Specifically, the turkeys currently adorning the door to my department’s main office.
Here they are one by one:
One of the reasons I prefer a whiteboard to a chalkboard.
Chalk dust thigh:
Indeed, this was the state of my pants after I walked partway across campus from my classroom to my office, so the level of chalk dust had decreased from its maximum level when I snapped this picture.
Random YouTubery video-tainment.
It’s been a long day, between teaching and attending to committee work, giving a colloquium talk, dealing with an emergency drill, and coming home to make a later-than-planned dinner for the kids (since my better half had to help a sprog with an arithmetic emergency during the anticipated dinner hour).
Tomorrow is a day off from school … but for the sprogs, too, and me with piles of papers that must be graded and returned by Thursday.
What I need right now is to see Stephen Colbert dance:
An observation about the student papers I’m grading.
Because, as it happens, I tend to notice patterns in student papers, then end up musing on them rather than, you know, buckling down and just working through the stack of papers that needs grading.
In my philosophy of science class, I have my students write short essays (approximately 400 words) about central ideas in some of the readings I’ve assigned. Basically, it’s a mechanism to ensure that they grapple with an author’s view (and its consequences) before they hear me lecture about it. (It’s also a way to get students writing as many words as they are required to write in an upper division general education course; sometimes assignments need to serve two masters.)
Anyhow, because these papers are focused on the task of explaining in plain English what some philosopher seems to be saying in the reading assignment, there are plenty of sentences in these essays that contain phrases like “AuthorLastName {claims, thinks, argues that, writes} …”
And, in at least 5-10% of the papers turned in to me, the author’s last name is spelled incorrectly.
Among other things, I’ve noticed:
Snapshots from our weekend.
Remember how I mentioned that we had some soccer tournaments this weekend?
Well, it looks like we’re going to need a bigger shelf.
‘I’m not even supposed to be here today!’
Since being tenured, I’ve tried to shift to a pattern of only coming in to campus three days a week, working from home on Mondays and Wednesdays (and giving the earth a little break by not doing my freeway commute on those days).
However, today, a Wednesday, I figured I should go in to campus to catch up on committee-related work. I envisioned a day where I’d make good progress on some things that needed doing, plus maybe get a chance to go out to lunch at a local eatery (something that never seems to fit in my teaching-days schedule).
Suffice it to say that there was barely enough time to grab a cup of decaf and a muffin, let alone to sit down and enjoy a burrito.
Why I’m not grading papers tonight.
After my last class today, I participated in a Future Faculty Seminar at Stanford. I was on a panel about negotiating faculty jobs, dealing with the two-body problem while on the academic job market, balancing work and life once you have a faculty job, and so forth. It was a fun panel, and lots of good questions were asked.
But then I had to race home through a bunch of really slow traffic so I could play the sprog zone and let my better half out of the house for a Thursday night class.
And, not surprisingly, the stress of trying to get home in time while traffic was stop and go done wore me out, leaving me with next to no will to plow through the ten to fifteen papers I had hoped to grade tonight.
My eldest offspring expressed skepticism about my fatigue thusly:
“Come on! How much energy does it take to work a steering wheel and yell?”
How many papers can (or should) I grade in a sitting?
Oh joy, it’s time to grade more papers!
At the moment, in fact, I have two batches of papers (approximately 400 words each, approximately 100 papers per batch) to grade, since I hadn’t finished marking the earlier ones before the next ones came due. And of course, owing to the piles of smoking rubble that constitute our budget at the state universities right now, there are no funds at present for graders.
I’ve blogged before about my strategies for grading fairly and consistently without taking a million years to finish the job. I’m still more or less using these strategies. But today, I’m trying to work out a more specific question:
What is the optimal number of papers for me to grade in a sitting?