Dread

 I can't get the poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" out of my head...

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

   Someone had blundered.

   Theirs not to make reply,

   Theirs not to reason why,

   Theirs but to do and die.

   Into the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

 

I'm not in a war zone, and not in nearly as much danger as your average roofer, I'm sure.  Still, I'm worried.

 

I did my first class observation as chair the other day.  The class was super, as I'd expected, but I couldn't help feeling a bit on edge.  As chair, I'm going to be doing a fair number of class observations this semester, most in person, sitting in an empty chair amongst the students, all of us masked, all of us socially distanced, and still.

 

The administrators tell us that the public health people assure them that the masks and social distance works really well to make the risk of transmission really low.  But sitting there for over an hour the other day, I was still worried.

 

I'd be a bit reassured, I supposed, if the administrators were making their presence on campus felt, walking between classes with folks.  But I see on effbee that some are working from home, and others are hunkered in their offices, staying far from the rest of us plebians.

 

Most of our students are being reasonably careful in classes, but what of the weekends?  The bars?  I doubt they're empty these days.

 

And the dorms are already a concern.

 

Several of my students have decided not to come to class, but to attend virtually, and since I organized my class so that they could do that, thinking that there'd be some quarantined at some point, it's fine by me.  I did a check in with the class on Friday, and most were feeling anxious, overwhelmed, and worried, pretty much like everyone I know.

 

I'm hearing from colleagues that they're hearing from students who want to attend virtually, too.  And some are able to accommodate that, and willing, and some aren't.

 

One colleague resents that students feel that they should get to stay safely at home when my colleague doesn't get to do that.  But officially, none of us is supposed to be so worried that we feel staying home is imperative.  

It feels like we instructors are caught in the middle between administrators tucked in their offices insisting that we all have to teach face to face, and students who don't want to be face to face, and the administrative pressure to help those students who are quarantined keep up, but not caring about the students who are anxious...

***

I went to a training session by our teaching center folks, the ones who act like they know so much more about teaching than anyone else, even though most of them have never stood in front of a real class to teach it.  Anyway, they said we could take attendance through our streaming system.  That sounded good.  But I couldn't find my notes, so I went to their site to try to find the ppt they'd used, which is supposed to be available.  (They're not.)  So I asked in a 9 am Q&A session.  And the person showed me.  So I went to do it, and it lists students by first name and then last name, and some with middle names.  Unlike EVERY other thing done by any large organization ever...  So I went back to the Q&A session, and the facilitator sounded like she'd never even thought of how to move from the list to the official attendance record.  So she decided to show me on her fake class of five... and started taking out the middle names, one at a time.  I stopped her and said she couldn't do that because it wasn't practical for a large class (where about 20% of my students show middle names).  And she was befuddled.  I wanted to say: put 150 students in there, and then come back to me and show me how to do this without a massive work around.

There's no way to do it without a massive work around, apparently.  So I suggested she needed to contact the provider and let them know this would be a good feature.  And she said no, she couldn't do that, that they weren't going to change things.  

But here's the thing: I bet thousands of instructors would find that useful across the country, and if the company doesn't get told, doesn't have customers INSISTING, then they're going blithely on with crap.

***

I dropped by some friends' house yesterday afternoon to drop some stuff off, and they invited me to dinner, so we had lovely hot soup in the back yard, socially distanced and all.  But it was chilly.  And soon it will be far to chilly for dinner outside to be pleasant.  I'm so going to miss that.

 

 

Research Meetings

My writing students are working on a research project.  Basically, the writing course is prescribed, and this is a sort of lit review type project.  So we faculty folks tend to do lots of conferencing for these.

We spent last week working on developing ideas about what to research, looking at a variety of sources, talking with a librarian, and so forth.  We read several sample projects from previous students.

And this morning I had my first conference meeting of the week.  The student came in and said she wanted to show me her outline.  So I asked her about what she'd read.  She hadn't actually read even the two things she found in class last week.  But somehow, she was going to make an outline. 

What are they teaching students in high school?  It's like many of them think research is a matter of having an opinion, writing an outline, writing the paper, and then looking for support for your opinion. 

I did try to argue against that as a strategy last week, but obviously, I didn't do a good enough job.

Waiting for the next student, and hoping that one has actually read their research a bit.

The Faculty Development Instructor Tries to Gain Points, and Fails

During a break today, one of the faculty development instructors decided to chat me up, and suggested that I must find Project Gutenberg really useful for teaching Shakespeare.

No, I said, explaining that the copyright free texts used in such editions are often 19th century Bowdlerized editions, and so not useful.  And a good modern edition has notes.  But if I want an earlier edition, I use EEBO.  Which she'd never heard of.  (No reason why she should, except that if you're going to try to make points with your cool technology stuffs, at least think first!)

Then I showed her EEBO.  And I showed her how some texts have a transcription, some digital images, and some both.  And then I had to explain how about transcriptions a bit.

And I explained that while EEBO is great, for some things it's more useful to bring in a facscimile text (assuming one has one, and I have a number of Shakespeare facsimiles) because having a printed text is easier for looking at in class.

And she asked if I could get Beowulf on EEBO.  So I explained that EEBO only does printed texts, but that she could look at the MS of Beowulf at the British Library site, and showed her that.

I get that she was trying to show how neato it would be if only we Shakespeare people would use technology! in our teaching, but I'm so tired of academic who haven't given a single thought to basic print technology, or manuscript technology (and both of those could be plural) and why it just might be useful to think at least a little about both of those.

***

I trust that these faculty development folks are basically good teachers, but I want to say: if you're going to talk at us for 20 minutes, take the time to think through the lecture so that those 20 minutes aren't just rambling around.

Bardiac in the Smart Classroom: Are Instructors Bad Students?

I'm taking part in some faculty development stuff today and tomorrow, and this morning we're meeting in a "smart classroom" that's supposed to promote "active learning."  I taught a couple of weeks in this room last spring, filling in for a sick colleague, and it was sort of like theater in the round.  Theater in the round is great stuff at times, and challenging in all sorts of cool ways, but it's not the be all and end all of all theater experience or performance.  Neither is this classroom.

At any rate, I never felt like I got the hang of teaching in the room, but I'm told that some people love teaching in here when they use specific techniques.  I'm ready to see that!

The room is a big rectangle with six seating areas around the edge, each a sort of rectangular table with a rounded side.  The unrounded side is against the wall, where there's a big computer screen.  And there's a wireless keyboard thingy under each screen that can be moved around so that different people can type.

Each seating area has a small white board.  There are two bigger screens, on opposite sides of the room, so that, I think, everyone's supposed to be able to see whatever's put up on the screen.

At each seating area, on the hard drive thingy, there seems to be a single electric outlet (one outlet, not a typical double wall outlet).  Other than that, the only outlets I see are under one of the big screens in an otherwise unoccupied area of the room.

***

20 minutes of traditional lecture sort of presentation.  There's a comment about how you could use technology to give students a map of the Canterbury pilgrimage route for Chaucer. 

I'm the only person in the room who ever teaches Chaucer, so far as I know, so that's directed at me.  (I think I make some people nervous, so they try to reach out.)  But the thing is, a little map of the Canterbury pilgrimage is fairly traditional on the syllabus of a CT course, but other than a 10 second comment, it's not really worth much for understanding the tales or their contexts, is it?

***

We spent 7 minutes on group work, and put up stuff on our little boards, but I can't read all the boards and couldn't hear some people.

***

And now we're sort of getting talked at about what we put on our boards.  It's really hard to hear in here. 

We just got the "oooh, here's a cool app thingy."  Why would you use it?  "Oooo, it's so cool!"

***

More lecture.  Still hard to hear.

One really good question that came up: an instructor talked about trying to get her students to use Diigo collaboratively, but found it difficult.  Students don't tend to go log into a special program just to log in, so if you require it, then how?  Students are busy in all sorts of ways, and unless they find something really useful, they won't use it because it takes too much time. 

But the lectures aren't really addressing that.

***

Now there's a disagreement about whether an instructor should take time to teach students to export files or should just send a link to a how to video.  We've now spent ten minutes on this.  All very polite on the surface, but sort of not so much.  The discussion is very much happening on/to the other side of the room.  Of the four people at my table.  I'm typing; someone else is checking a phone, another reading, and one sitting looking at the conversation.  Oops.  Probably not good.

The instructor seems completely unaware that some of us aren't engaged.

Now we're discussing different High Schools.  (The question is how much tech students know or not.)

***

I had originally turned off my computer after the presentations started.  Then I reopened it out of  boredom. 

My question is: is an audience of teachers easier or harder as an audience than an audience of students?

***

I'm going to try again to pay attention.  Dog help me.

Midterm Grades

We're required to give students a midterm grade report here at NWU.

So I use mail merge to write a short letter showing what grades they've gotten for what assignment, and putting it all together.  Handily, this time it worked out so that they've done just under 50% of the total graded work for the class already.

I'm filled with despair at how many students can't figure out basic percentages.

And I'm filled astonied at how many students are totally and completely flabbergasted at where their grade stands at this point, even though I've given back every single graded piece of work and my syllabus lays out how much each assignment is worth.

The good thing is that the estimate right now tends to underestimate their grade a bit, so they can improve if they finish the short assignments well.  So I can reasonably comfort some of them who are aiming for As and will probably get there, and some of them I've given a realistic sense of alarm, so maybe they'll work a bit harder.


I'm also irritated that our administration doesn't think our students are capable of keeping track of their grades.

(And yes, I know that some instructors are woefully bad at returning graded work in anything like a timely manner.  I do indeed think that students need to get back work reasonably quickly, and that instructors need to explain how they grade.  I just think it's not unreasonable to expect college students to do percentages.)

Avoiding Despair

I'm teaching an intro to the major course this semester, and one of the small assignments I've given involves asking individual students to each do some minimal research and write a short (like a page) paper explaining a particular period or literary/intellectual movement.  And then they do a short presentation in class, so that everyone gets the idea.

I made up a timeline that we're filling in, and gave each student a copy to fill in as we go.

The idea is to give them the beginnings of a framework about literary movements and such.  So, for example, they should know that the Romantics didn't just pop up out of nowhere, but responded to industrialization, the Englightenment, and so forth.  If they have a basic, rough, narrative, they can learn more start to understand more subtle ways of seeing things in other classes.

So, they handed the printed versions in, and I started grading them on Tuesday, thinking I could get through the pile in a day, since they're fairly short.

I got through about a third of the pile before I was driven to despair.  Some were confused a bit, but mostly my despair was driven by the almost complete lack of acknowledgment or connection between what they'd gotten from their sources and what they'd written.  So, for example, there'd be a paragraph about Romanticism (I don't think I actually read the Romanticism one, so I'm making this up), with now acknowledgment of sources, and then at the end, a numbered list of sources.  Or maybe a "Works Cited" section with two URLs.

I couldn't even bear to read further.  That doesn't often happen to me with grading, but this just really bothered me.  I think of the third of the pieces I read, one earned a passing grade.  (Because I can't in good conscience pass a written piece of college work that uses sources without acknowledging those sources.)

This wasn't plagiarism in the sense of stealing ideas, but, I think, plain confusion about how to acknowledge sources for this sort of assignment, or laziness, or something.  That didn't make it acceptable, though.

I spent a lot of time Tuesday afternoon pondering, and being frustrated, and by Tuesday evening, I came up with an idea.

On Wednesday, I started our two hour class session by asking them to freewrite about why we cite sources, about what the point is.  And then I had them take their freewriting to groups, and they made a list, which we compiled onto the board at the front of the class.

So, I did my best to make sure that they had good reasons why we might want to cite sources, and that they knew they knew the reasons (at least collectively).

Then I talked about my despair at reading their papers.  And then I asked them to help me avoid further despair by revising their work and turning it in again, with full and appropriate citation, which I would then grade for real.  And I wouldn't look at what had been turned in, or count it, unless they felt they'd already done so well on the assignment that they didn't need to revise, in which case they could let me know.

We spent the next chunk of time working out how to resolve specific citation questions or problems using OWL at Purdue and examples.

They agreed.  Next Monday I'll get the results, and I sure as heck hope they're much better.

The Professor's Dilemma

Let's imagine, say, a professor is teaching an advanced underwater basketweaving class.  And let's imagine, too, that the class grades are based primarily on a presentation, a portfolio of several baskets, and a self-evaluation of the basket portfolio.  Just imagine.

Now imagine that there's a student enrolled in the class who appeared for a couple of weeks, and did the group presentation, and did a fine job at that.  And then the student pretty much disappeared.  But the student emailed occasionally saying that zie was coming to class the next week.  And then that zie had had to miss class, but couldn't drop because [fill in excuse], and zie would do the work for the class and turn it in on the last day, because that's what the grade depends on.

How should the professor handle this?

Not that I'd be asking for a specific reason, because, of course, I don't even teach underwater basketweaving.

When a Thesis Doesn't Have a Thesis

Back at the beginning of the semester, I wrote about a problem I've had in the past with MA students who disappear for a couple of months and then send a chunk of work and hope for a quick response.  And despite my request that it not happen, it's happened.  I sent the student an email last week, asking about hir disappearance, and zie sent me a short apology and a revised chapter and a new chapter.

I'm so frustrated.  I've been slowly reading, stopping when what I really want to write on the paper or in my response how frustrated I am to be reading a thesisless, argumentless hunk of writing.  I don't know what to call it, but it's irritating.

And then, of course, I wonder about the quality of my own dissertation draft chapters.  I don't think I was so aimless in my writing, but it's hard to tell retrospectively.  I hope they were better.

I resent the amount of energy I put in to responding and then get a new chapter (or revision) that doesn't seem to have taken anything away from the previous responses.

Begin Again, Finnegan

There's a lot I enjoy about my job.  I get to teach great literature, work with wonderful people (students and colleagues), and always have new challenges.

But there are, of course, also frustrations.

We're just about at the midpoint of the semester, and that means that some of the students who've been getting by are beginning to take notice.  This happens in three waves, I find, roughly.

The first wave happens to a lot of first year students about the third week of classes, when they realize that the strategies they used to get As in high school aren't going to work in college.  And some of them get themselves in gear and work on figuring out what it takes to do well in college, usually better time management and a lot more self-discipline about learning on their own time.

This second wave comes with midterms, when students realize that they really aren't getting some work done, and now they want to, but it may be too late to totally catch up.

The third wave is yet to come, of course.  Those are the students who realize at the last minute that they're in desperate straits.


The good thing for the folks who are in the second wave is that there's mostly plenty of time to actually do pretty decently in a given class.  They may not be able to earn the A they were used to in high school, but they can probably pass, or even earn a B.  That's often not true for the third wavers.


The thing is, after the first few semesters, the student's sudden, new to them realization is just the same old thing, same as that last time, and the time before that.

And then there are the students who seem to have the same sudden realization every single semester, but who never quite carry the learning from one situation into the next.  And you're pretty sure that they've found this a useful strategy, and that other instructors have enabled it in the past, allowing them to turn in stuff way late, or do extra credit, or whatever.  No?

Despair in Grading

I'm grading some papers, and so far, they're really poor.

We did a preparatory assignment (reading and discussion together), and these papers are the next step in the way to a longer, semester-capping assignment.  That, at least, means there's time for students to learn from this set.

But, damn.  The level of vacuity is high.  There are all these empty words.  It's like reading a political speech, except they're supposed to be writing about something they've written.

I find responding to poor quality papers really hard.  But I need to respond well, because they'll have a very similar assignment as the next step, and I want them to really improve.  And if they improve there, then I'll have some hope for the final assignment.

Until then, though, I want to scream.

My Crazy Pet Peeve

I hate grading double-sided assignments.  There.  It's out. 

I know it's stupid, because I don't want to encourage more trees into paper.  But still, I do.

I write in bold on my assignments, Please do not double-side assignments for this class.  And still, I get a lot of double-sided assignments. 

I fantasize about not reading the verso side, and just grading based on what's on the front of any page.  I bet that wouldn't go over well, would it?

I just want to read by flipping pages, and not have to pick it up and reverse the whole thing, on top of the pile of many, many papers.

Yet I know I spend more time fretting and feeling frustrated than it would take to reverse the whole thing, even for every paper.

I want to write in big letters across the double-sided page some comment about how they must have thought I put my request on the assignment because I really like writing in bold print or something.  That wouldn't go over well, either. 

Still, it doesn't seem like it's a huge thing to ask, does it?


While I'm at it, I'm also tired of questions about whether I "took off points" for this or that.  No, I didn't "take off points."  The work you turned in didn't earn a better grade.  Putting ink on a page does not guarantee you an A or a 100 or a brownie point.

Speaking of brownie points, one of my colleagues has taken to handing out something akin to a sticker for completing a class with him.  So, if students have him for basketweaving 1 and 2, they get two different stickers.  He's very proud of his innovation.  I'm appalled.

Being a Jerk

I really try not to.  I do.  But today, I failed a bit.

I didn't go out and beat people up or anything, but still, I could have done better.  But I was too tempted.

We were going over the syllabus, and I'd just talked about a sort of short assignment, multiple repetitions.  So think, a typed journal once a week assignment, but shorter.  Still, you get the idea.

And a student asked, "So we just write it on a piece of paper?"

And dog help me (because I couldn't help myself), I said, "As opposed to, what, turning it in by ESP?"

Which, I still think is funny, sort of, in that desperate English professor way.  But it didn't really treat the student nicely.

(In my defense, I think the student was wanting to hear, yes, just write it on a piece of paper during class and turn it in late, because it's not that important to me.  And I really do not want it written in class while other things are supposed to be happening.)

But still, I shouldn't make it about my defense, right?

So, I'm a bit cranky at myself because I didn't handle that as well as I could have.  (And no, it's probably not something to beat oneself up about, but I do try to treat students reasonably well.)

On another note, I've now taught the first class for each of my courses this semester, and they all went well enough.

In Chaucer, we spent less time on the syllabus than usual.  I had them do some freewriting (about what it means to make art from violence, and to consume art made from violence, which is something I want the students to think about, especially as we get into some of the tales).  And then we read "Adam Scriveyn" aloud, me first, then them, and talked a little about the final couplet (and how it imagines the violence).

Chaucer and Shakespeare in the same semester.  It's hard to get any better than that for me.

Three-Ring Circus

I was working in a class the other day, and asked students to get out their copy of the assignment handout, which I'd given out several days before.  Most of them opened up a binder of some sort, or a folder thing, and started flipping through loose sheets, trying to find the paper, with varying degrees of success.

And suddenly it struck me, in one of those "holy cow, how can I not have seen this before" ways, that their binders looked pretty much exactly like my junior high binder had looked, with no organization, just piles of loose papers through which I'd flip and try to find whatever it was I'd lost and forgotten about until I was in trouble for not turning in homework.  (Yes, I was that student.)

At some point, though, I switched to an organizational system which basically included a light cardboard folder for each class that had bendable metal pieces to form basically a two ring booklet to which I could add stuff easily (or take it out less easily).  And that system pretty much got me through college.  It wasn't perfect, or at least my use of it wasn't, but I used a hole punch to punch holes in handouts, and dated them, and every few days would put things in order, with handouts, my notes, and so on in the folder.  And at the end of the term, I had a little booklet that included my notes and such for the whole term.

My students, though, even the most prepared students, have no organizational method for handouts beyond just putting them loose in the pockets of a binder or something. 

One of my students was in my office this morning, just a few minutes ago, digging through her binder for her class stuff, and I thought to ask if she would put things in the binder if I gave them to her already punched.  And she thought she would.  And then I asked her why she didn't punch them herself.  And she looked at me like I was a total idiot, and said she didn't have a three hole punch, and didn't have a car to go get one.  Which, of course, I said was a poor excuse, since she could get one cheaply at the campus store, which is between my office and the dorms, and so not something she'd need a car for.  And she looked at me like I am a total idiot.

Now I'm wondering: should I start doing the three hole punch for handouts in hopes that students will actually keep them in some sort of minimally meaningful order in their binders?  Can they really not manage this minimal effort themselves?

Should someone (me?) tell my students that actually keeping notes in some sort of minimally meaningful order might be useful, and give them some hints on how to do so?  Have they never been told this before?

Pain and Doubt

I was reading a longish written piece today, and it was really hard, mostly because it wasn't well written.  In some ways, it was painfully badly written, with sentence, paragraph, and organizational problems.

I procrastinated about reading it (not horribly, but enough to mess up most of the day), and kept getting frustrated as I was reading it.  But I finished and responded.  I hope my response was helpful.

It's so much harder to respond to a longish piece that's poorly written.  Usually, say, in a writing class, you start students with fairly short papers, and while they are sometimes painfully badly written, it's three or four pages of pain.  This was considerably longer.

And those three or four pages, as you're reading them, you think about the most important things to repond to, and the things you'll be teaching the class as a whole, and you try to focus on a couple things, starting with big picture stuff.  But this piece needs to be right, and it's rushed, and it way harder to know what to respond to.

That's where my doubts come in.  I've read papers before where I felt that maybe I just wasn't smart enough to understand, and wasn't sure that wasn't the problem more than bad writing.  This paper wasn't like that.  Instead, my doubts come in about whether I can help this writer to do a better job writing this argument.  I have such doubts about how good I am at this part of life.

I did my best, focusing first on the bigger organizational stuff, and then including the lesser stuff to the extent that it absolutely has to be at least competent.

Now it's late enough that I'm going to put my bike on the indoor trainer, put food in my face, and then spin myself tired.  (The new week starts today, so I need to do 20-25 miles to feel good about my chances for another 100 mile week.  That also has to do with rain potential, and not just whether I can ride 100 miles.)

Blearg

I was responsible for presenting some student awards today. It was a small thing, and I tried to do a good job, but it wasn't as perfect as it might have been.

A retired prof was there for officialdom reasons, and let me know that I did a lousy job.

Thanks.

Yes, I just met this person, and she needed to criticize my awards-giving. I know I'm not the best at such things, but after a long and busy week, I really, really did not need some person I've just met to come up and criticize me.

FML.

And the week isn't over.

(We've had this big activities week here; my students were responsible for nine activities, which meant I went to all of their stuff. And I went to other stuff, and I participated in another thing. I think it went well. Some of the stuff my students did was beyond cool.)

No, Really

sonnet #60 isn't really about how grateful the speaker is to God, unless you can explain how you get there a whole lot better than you do.

Despair in Another Form

I was talking to one of the powers that be here, someone I like and respect a lot, about how our department might do the evaluative work that we're under pressure to do, with the constant threat of "if we don't do it, they'll do it to us."

We were talking, and I asked if we didn't already have a sense of how well our students did X task by grading a given kind of paper.

Well, yes, my colleague said. So, why don't we use that?

My colleague said we might be able to do a special form so that it all looked alike so we could analyze it together, and that what we really should do is take random samples, say 5 papers from each of the courses in question, and all get together and read them all so that we make sure we are all on the same page about the quality thing.

Seriously? We have, say, ten of these classes, and you want me (and any number of other colleagues) to read and evaluate 50 extra papers about this one aspect?

I said I might be talked into spending an hour together with some colleagues to norm ourselves on the form, but there was no way I was reading an extra stack of papers.

Not even for money, my colleague questioned?

This school can't pay me enough, I said.


We're doing a separate program and there's going to be serious faculty development, and it's built into the program that faculty involved with spend about a week on faculty development and be paid $500.

I'm one of the lower paid folks in my department, but my paycheck grosses (for 9 months a year) at about 5K. So paying me $500 is asking me to work for a week (during summer) for less than half of my regular pay. So I have an idea of how much this place is willing to pay me for extra work. (Or not pay me, as last summer's fiasco of administrative incompetence demonstrated.)

I expect that faculty development to be useful to me, so I'm willing to do it despite the low pay.

BUT, given that that's the sort of pay this place is willing to give us, and given how torturous reading a stack of papers is, and given how utterly useless I have found all such processes in the past, I'm really not willing to spend my time reading an extra stack of papers.


We were talking about this stuff because that evaluative work might get tacked onto my little cheese administrative thing I'm doing this year. And if this evaluative work gets tacked onto the work I'm doing as interim next year, I sure as heck won't be putting my name into nomination to do the job again. That's an easy decision.


I have to say, I'm so sick of the threat that "if we don't do it, they'll do it to us" that I could spit. The they of that threat isn't doing diddly that's of use. There's no serious evaluative stuff happening here, despite blathering and spending money up the wazoo to talk about it. And what is being done is being done to us already, in ways that make me lose a class day in intro writing every fall.

I've never yet seen anything useful come out of all the money they've spent and all the crap they've made us do. I have seen viscious nastiness happen, however. And I've seen threats of more to come.

But right now, there's a bigger threat, and it sort of makes me want to say no to the evaluative stuff that doesn't seem useful. (If and when it seems useful, I will be happy to help and to get help.)

Syllabus Hell

Sometimes it feels like writing a syllabus is an exercise in trying to prevent students from finding loopholes so that they can blame me for whatever goes wrong.

It's the "but you didn't say on the assignment sheet that we had to cite the text, so how can you grade me down for that?"

And, "but you didn't say I couldn't copy from S*notes to do the assignment, and it's too hard to do myself!"

Or, "but I emailed it to you before midnight, how could you count it late?"

So then I end up writing in the syllabus that I don't accept work by email but then there's a student who has a health issue and needs to email things and doesn't think I'll accept it, so I add a phrase about "without express permission," and before long, I'm handing out a 6 page syllabus that sounds like bad lawyer language and doesn't convey anything about how exciting it is to study Shakespeare. The next phase is that I cut out a bunch of the lawyer language, and try to get across my excitement about the texts, but them someone insists on handing in scrawled assignments and complains that I didn't tell them that they couldn't handwrite their work, and the legalistic stuff starts in again. And around I go.

But it doesn't matter, because even if I put in there that I don't accept emailed assignments, students still email me assignments because they don't remember seeing it on the syllabus or going over it the first day, and why would they, since it's an 8 page syllabus by that time.

And we're all supposed to tell students on EVERY syllabus what the goals of the school are. (Does anyone else have to do this?) Because somehow, if students know what the goals are, then they'll tell the assessment folks that yes, they know what the goals of the school are, as if somehow us telling them that they're supposed to learn critical thinking skills actually contributes in any way whatsoever to their actually learning critical thinking skills.

I wonder how much paper we collectively waste every semester with our goals statements? I'm less bothered that we put in statements about accomodating people with special needs or how to get help from the deans' office. But I hate the goals statements. At least no one is telling me I have to put a FERPA statement and a full explanation of their FERPA rights on every syllabus. (Just wait, though, some assessment person will read this and think, hey, what a great idea!)

I have one class pretty much done, calendar, syllabus, and all assignments.

I have another class partially done, calendar, assignments thought of but not written down. Syllabus can be partially canibalized.

I have another class hardly worked on. I got to the point in the calendar when I need to do a library day, and I don't want to have to totally rearrange things if the library can't do the day I've requested.

I have one big committee task done, two thank you letters (one more to do) and some office cleanup.

I wish it would warm up enough to make going outside minimally pleasant. (While it's in the teens, the wind chill makes it closer to 1F. That's minus 11 and minus 17 for the Celsius folks among us. Celsius always makes winter sound much tougher, doesn't it?