The quality of posts here has been nothing but crap this week, and this one won’t be much of an improvement. Rambling lies ahead, reader!
The week has been brutal in terms of my time and responsibilities, and I have been averaging about 2-4 hours of sleep a night. Today, for example, I got to school at 7am after two hours of sleep and spent literally (literally!) every minute between then and the moment I got done with my last class engaged in a frantic crush of last-minute grading and preparations. None of those last-minute preparations were for my lit class, I have to admit — the lit class where I was being observed.
My continued employment and advancement at Wordsmith is contingent on these classroom evaluations, wherein a million things can possibly go wrong. The faculty observing us note everything from how many minutes we spend on each activity, how many students out of the total number speak in class (one colleague had 16/20, which is kind of awesome), and they analyze the paedagogical approach behind every last thing that happens.
I went into this scenario without having prepared much of anything for the day, and once again I was teaching something that was not only outside my field in terms of period and language but genre, too. I hadn’t prepared because I was up all night (and all day, and all night the night before, and all day before that) grading the eighty bajillion horrible freaking essays that had to (had to!) be handed back before the drop deadline. We all are required to do this so the little asshats can decide if they are sticking with the class based on their performance so far. Let’s put it this way: I gave a lot of Ds.
It’s been one deadline after another this week. Or one deadline on top of another, actually, since the aforementioned drop deadline by which I had to have about 100 essays graded is the same day as the deadline by which my dissertation committee members have to receive their reviewers’ copies. Monday. Fucking Monday.
Needless to say I was, as my students would write, calm, cool, and collective. I was feeling no stress or pressure! HA. Actually, class seemed to go fairly well. Fairly well, in that it was completely awesome. Honestly, the dude could not have picked a better class to visit. My early class is a little awkward (there are some issues I have with teaching in a stadium-seating room) and they are all lazy no-’counts who can’t be bothered to even read the assignments or get there on time. My afternoon class is the horrible writing class that inspires mostly anger and frustration from me, but the class he visited, the midday class, is a bunch of chronic, obsessive over-achievers who ask questions and constantly seek validation. Perfect for observation day, no? I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I told them beforehand that “the class” was going to be observed, ominously implying that they might somehow care about what this unnamed observer might see. Ambiguity and surveillance must scare the crap out of them, because they were on top of their game the entire class.
After the week of sleepless nights and stress and the overwhelming feeling that reading these student essays was slowly killing my brain cells one by one and rendering me an inarticulate lump, I rewarded my brain with a little vacation. I spent my office hours alternately staring at the wall and catching up on my Scrabble games on Facebook. (People, I made my moves, so quit remindin’ me!) Tonight it was happy hour and dinner with the department friends, and now I am having a glass of wine and enjoying the fruits of my TiVo’s labor. Ahhh, marathons of America’s Next Top Model! If student essays won’t turn my brain to mush, Tyra will.
In the interest of bringing this bit of rambling nonsense to a close, Here is a T’ang Dynasty poem by my favorite Chinese poet, Li Po:
Drinking Alone by Moonlight
A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For he, with my shadow, will make three men.
The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.
To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.
May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.
There are thirty-three more translations, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Tomorrow, I begin the final crush of Dissertation Thunderdome. Wish me luck getting that shit the fuck done.
Latest Comments
RSS