Grading!

Grading was actually done in the wee hours of the morning on December 1. After pushing so hard, I naturally crashed afterward and only posted it now. Now back to the write-up for the Armenian genocide.

Grading!

Damn, this is dragging on. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Grading!

Ugh. I hate being behind. The essays are always a bitch.

Grading!

I'm not even going to feel slightly glum over needing to crash for the next four days on grading. I was very productive dissertation-wise last week. So I'm going to make breakfast, hit the gym, shower and then do the short answers today. Essays always take more time, so they get Saturday and Sunday. I'll plug, chug and print on Monday, return the papers on Tuesday. So let it be written; so let it be done!

Fallen off the Wagon

Wow! The past two weeks have been a bad time for this blog as an ordering device. First week of grading, I was feeling under the weather. Aches, pains, slight fever here and there. Sinus headaches, no phlegm or post-nasal drip though. The next weekend Craig and I had to fly to Vegas for Nelly and Simon’s wedding. This weekend, I’ve been grading. Being a low-energy person with weak attention span means that it doesn’t take much to throw me off.

I’m already late returning my grading. I’ve made good progress this weekend, however, and hook or by crook, the papers go back on Tuesday. Then I can start thinking about Lebanon for a little while. My mom is visiting at the end of term, however, then I start Arab-Israeli again.

I’m getting a really clear picture about why my dissertation is going nowhere fast. I need to find a way out of teaching for a while. That’s easier said than done and I miss it when I’m not doing it, though.

Once More unto the Breach

In the morning, it all starts again. Gotta get some shut-eye.

Ding Dong, the Wicked Witch is Dead!

Rejoice in Munchkinland! Grading is over. Fuck, I’m so tired. I gotta be up at the crack of dawn to print their comment sheets out, too.

Setback (Again)

I’m a little behind. I had a setback. One of the annoying things about having little ability to suppress my emotions is that when irksome things happen, I need to take time to get over it. Even when I know what the correct emotional response to the situation is and I have developed the proper strategy with dealing with it, I’m pretty helpless to “just get over it.” That is the reason we suppress emotion. Well, not being able to suppress emotion, I have to be “good” with things before I could move on.

I’ve come to realize that before I was 26, I rarely was ever “good” with any of the shit that life threw at me. I just stated, “There’s nothing I can do. I won’t let this slow me down,” and then suppress the hell out of any negative emotions. Yeah, I’d whine and bitch to my friends, but I’d always get the job done. I’d adapt. My rule was I felt what I wanted to and suppressed the rest of my feelings. And negative feelings had their uses. I could channel them into other tasks. Emotional conflicts were rarely resolved. “Emotional resolution” was for the weak. Victory justified any annoyances along the way.

All of that is now completely beyond me. I have to be “good” with anything I have to deal with or I’ll fall apart dealing with it. This means when the emotional shit storms come, I have to clear the shit before I go on. So I lose a day or two. As my focus is shit, it may be a while longer before I regroup, if something else hasn’t turned up in the meanwhile. Well, at least my desire to post progress here helps me refocus on the task faster. Plus, if this were a normal class, my current progress would have been sufficient for finishing on time. As it is, I’m turning back papers on Thursday instead of Tuesday. And I am ready to teach Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality tomorrow. So things aren’t so bad. Plus, the Wings beat the Avs 5-1. Life is good.

Going into Halftime

Week 4 is done. Goodbye Locke; Hello Rousseau! Although I am a liberal, I’ve just never cared for Locke much. He’s just so clumsy.

This blog seems to be working. I lose focus when I’m grading. I did timeline a little on Wednesday during my office hours. I miss it. I’m doing fairly well this term. Jamie Mayerfeld, my prof, doesn’t make us come to lectures if we’ve already done the course with him once before. So I skip Mondays and Fridays so I can work. I teach three sections on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I attend the Wednesday lecture and have my office hours on Wednesdays. I have done pretty well for timelining when I’m not grading. If I had previously been as disciplined about grading as I had been in the past week, I think I’d have performed far better. I’ve gotten roughly 30 done in a week’s time. The difficulty is that I need the “at-home” days if I’m to actually get anything done. The three days I’m on campus are very unproductive. My focus is shot by the time I get home. I also see that without the blogs to force me to see the pattern of my progress is that when the grading is done, my mind will wander to something else before I return to timelining. I need to make sure I hit timelining immediately after grading is over.

Grading is my biggest distraction. I really understand why we’re seeing such a rush to the bottom in terms of education quality. Without good grading, the students can’t improve. But the students themselves don’t really care if they improve. They just want to be entertained. So the dominant, if utterly unethical strategy, is simply to be an entertainer. Make the grading easy, be entertaining, and you’ll get good evals with minimal work. You’ll have plenty of time for research. Well, I don’t have the heart for that. I just don’t.

On the other hand, there’s quality teaching time and shit teaching time. Being a TA is shit teaching time. I’m willing to teach any of the courses I’ve already designed. I’m willing to teach Arab-Israeli or Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict. Unlike being a TA, I don’t have to absorb any new material—the courses are designed. I get a grader and only have to grade 30 papers at a shot. I do a commitment matching thing with the grading. Students who participate in class get put in my stack the first time around. Then students who participate and students who made above a B+ get put in my stack the second time around. Then students who participate, students who improved from the first paper to the second and then students who made above a B+ get graded by me for the final. For the most part, those who care get a lot of attention. Those who don’t, don’t. The grader gets paid a completely ludicrous wage of $600/term. So I try to give them as low a comment burden as possible. First cut, everyone gets comments. As students fail to meet teacher commitment in terms of comment output, they get downgraded. It’s a time-efficient deal for me. I get maximum satisfaction for my efforts.

I’m thinking I need a respite from being a teaching assistant. There’s a job that’s come up with the graduate school, being a graduate student advisor for a program to advise minority undergrads to help them get into PhD programs. It’s twenty hours a week and the shifts are eight hours, so I could pretty much guarantee a three-day week. If I got the job, if the department wants me to teach independently, I’ll take it during the unpredictable, off-term when they offer it. Otherwise, I’ll be out of the TA loop.

I don’t know if I have a shot at the job. But I think I’ll shoot them an application and see what happens.

Setback

The rest of the weekend didn’t work out as well as I’d have liked. Craig needed to move offices at work and, with the commute, that took about six hours. We were moving file cabinets, desks, etc. I’m a pretty low-stamina guy and I was feeling low energy anyway, so it wiped me out for Sunday. I had to go into campus today (Monday, I just posted after midnight) to deliver two graded papers to Jamie and I stayed for the lecture since I had to go in. I crashed and had a three and a half hour nap. With making dinner, I only got five papers done on Monday.

So I’m fifteen behind. Let’s see if I can handle five a night over the next three nights. That will give me the weekend again for the last 29 papers.

I miss timelining. It’s been too many days since I thought about Lebanon. Grading is such a bitch. But, damn, the extra pay is handy.

Another Ten Bite the Dust

Wow. I seem to be doing this faster. I’ve noticed a few changes in grading over the past two years. While I’m as concerned with helping to write comments that can lead students to actually improve, I’ve gotten better at standardizing comments. At first I was just standardizing comments like “Excessively colloquial language” or “Writer does not present prima facie case—essay does not draw on reason to advance its thesis.” I realized though, that in writing individual comments, I would often repeat myself as well. So I made a rule this year that any good individual comment I wrote, I would keep and integrate into the comment sheet. If you want to see what the whole thing looks like, follow this link.

I notice that my feelings are changing as well. I used to suffer quite a bit when they wouldn’t get it. Now it doesn’t bother me quite as much. I still work like the dickens to get them to get it; it’s not that I don’t care. But I guess I don’t look at it like it’s my personal failing, especially when I have given them a lot of support and structure. I’m really a lot better at matching the student’s level of commitment. Moreover, the tension of dealing with the same set of problems with a new group after having struggled so hard to get the old group past it used to depress me. It doesn’t anymore.

Posting the meter to this blog seems to help. I know nobody reads this silly dull blog, but it at least makes me accountable to myself. I realize a great deal of my problem has been that I get lost in the fog of my mind. Having a graph seems to keep me focused and in context. It ties me to time usage.

Anyway, more papers tomorrow, Insha’ Allah!

Ha! I Did It!

Ten down. Fifty-nine more to go!

Grading!

Okay, I have 69 papers to grade. The gradesheet was all ready to go last week, so I can start plugging and chugging this afternoon. The goal: ten per day on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday for a total of forty this weekend. I don’t know if I can be this consistent, but I’m hoping this “post the chart so the world can see your progress or lack thereof” approach can keep me focused. If nothing else the method is providing documentation for exactly when and in what kinds of circumstances I fall off the wagon with the timelining. I hope this will help me improve. I really want to graduate and I need progress.

If this method (ten at a shot on weekend days) works, I should be done grading by Sunday of next week and be back to timelining again. I have to go to campus on Monday and that may throw me off. I have to give Jamie Mayerfeld, the prof running the lecture, two graded papers and if I go to school, I might as well stay for the lecture. But, we’ll see what can be done.

Nelly and I had a productive talk about the “Institutionalization” paper. More on that soon.