I met with a new advisee today, someone coming back to school after messing up the first time and working for a couple of years in between. My experience with students who return a couple years after messing up is that they generally do quite well; they're focused and ready to work hard (or they wouldn't be coming back), and they've usually matured a bit. We had a nice talk and framed out the next couple of years with some room for exploration. I hope this student will kick ass, because my other returned-after-a-mess student is about to graduate with a nearly four-oh gpa in classes since the return.
After that, I cleaned up my shelves a bit (returning books to their regular places after a semester on the "in use for a class this semester" shelf) and putting some over in the free book area.
I wrote a couple of thank you letters to faculty folks who came to talk to my class this semester to help my students understand stuff I didn't know well. (In poetry and drama classes, I teach up through the 20th century, and that's a stretch for someone who thinks the world got a lot less fun when they closed the theaters in 1642.) I need to get better at these, and certainly need to make sure to do them every time. Anyone have a good structure for these? (They get cc'd to the appropriate department chair, too, of course, so they can't just be me saying, "thanks, you rock!") I still have one more to do, but forgot about it earlier.
Then a colleague and I went out snowshoing for a while in the fresh snow at a local park. It felt great, and tiring. The fresh snow resting on the pine and spruce trees was just lovely; it's like walking through a Christmas card, only way better.
I got home and realized that I had a good bit of digging to get my driveway clear, but I got bonus puppy therapy from my neighbors' dogs. Is there anything much better than dogs playing in fresh snow? One of the dogs is an aging golden, but in the snow, he must have felt just great, because he was running around having a great time.
All in all, it's been a good day, and now, it's 8pm, and I'm so ready to sleep.
One of our all-time best English majors was a returning student who screwed up the first time around. I learned from her that our college has an interesting policy for returning students: if they stay away long enough, their earlier grades no longer count toward their cumulative gpa, so they can start over with a 4.0 even if all their earlier grades stunk. I think they have to stay away for at least a decade, though.
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