A Little of This, A Little of That

Calling the bank has only assured me that they will "examine" the situation. Calling Bellsouth was a waste of time. They handed me around to 4 different people, all of whom said since I don't have an account with them, there's no way they could have charged me $162.47. Thanks, that was so helpful. Hopefully, the bank will figure out what happened. Meanwhile, I need to alert the credit bureaus... I wish I knew how to do that.

The new semester is alright so far--only two weeks into it, it's hard to say. I do have two former students whom I liked before, so it's nice to see them again. I'm hoping good things will happen this semester. I can't stand any more badness...

...like the student who missed an A by 6 points because of her attendance (it was poor), who then went to my supervisor and demanded that I change the grade. And I had to change it, even though I objected being coerced. See, that's what I hate about teaching. If a student bitches enough to the right people, it doesn't matter that she earned a B--she can go above the professor's head and the professor has to change the grade. How fair is that? Not fair.

Oy.

Gahh, Students!

The last few days, b/f has been in town, and so I haven't had the opportunity really to go online or check my work e-mail, but I did that today, and man, am I sorry. There were 12 messages from students bitching about their grades--though, granted, four were from the same person. I hate that they think they can bully me into changing their grades. And I have to admit that I am particularly cranky right now anyway, and their complaints after the fact really irritate me. Frankly, after the semester is over (or a week before it's over, in the case of one student) is NOT the time to be pestering your teacher about how the grade can be improved... You know how the grade can be improved? DO A GOOD JOB THE FIRST TIME AND TURN IN YOUR WORK. Gee, how hard is that?

This is the BS that makes me HATE being a teacher. I am so sick of their dramas and trying to guilt me into fixing their grades. One student who got a a C in the class wrote me a note telling me how suprised and disappointed he was to receive a C. I wrote him back and said that if he had turned in the second annotation assignment and received at least an 78% on it, he would have earned enough points to get his precious B. I'm sure he's going to e-mail me back and try to convince me that he turned it in--but the fact is, students have to turn in a hard copy for me to grade, and an uploaded copy into a anti-cheating database of student work, and when I checked it, there was only 1 out of the 2 annotation assignments there. So he won't have a leg to stand on--but the fact is, he's going to e-mail me any way and bitch some more. I just hate this stuff.

In other news, I'm leaving tomorrow to visit my Mom. It will be a welcome respite from this hellhole city I live in.

I Do This Every Semester (DAMN ME!!)

I am sitting on my bed, surrounded with about four bazillion student papers and wondering how the hell I'm going to get it all graded. Now granted, I've got a whole week before grades are due (I think--I best check that out!), but I'd rather get them done sooner rather than later (like I usually do)--which if I had done the grading for the annotated bibs ontime, then I wouldn't be having this problem. On the other hand, half the classes turned them in late, so that also put me behind--but that's no excuse. The truth is, I suck when it comes to grading. Plus, I still have to grade reading journals --which I mostly just spotcheck--and the webpages--which won't take long, but it's still ONE MORE THING--and then do all the GD adding of points and blah, blah, blah. Well, you know how it is. Maybe one day I will not procrastinate like I do. But let's face it... the habit is ingrained. And I never change... I mean, hell, speaking of procrastinating--I'm here writing this blog, aren't I? It's hopeless. Oy.

I guess what I really ought to do is when they turn in their work, I should just stay at the office till I get at least 2-3 hours of grading done. If I did that every class day, I'd be in a better place than finding myself at the end of the semester inundated with work. Part of the problem too is that the first part of the semester, the workload is light, and then in the last month of teaching, I get in 500 points worth of work to grade for each student. For instance, I picked up the annotated bibs on 4/13; their final reading journals on 4/18; and had final projects from 4/23 to 4/27. It's easy to get behind when you get so much work at the end. But the long and short of it is, is that I procrastinate like a maniac. Because I suck.

In my only defense, I have to say that I've had terrible migraines for the last two weeks, and the only thing I can do when that happens is crawl into my bed and sleep. Which is also not conducive for getting work done.

And finally, I'm PMSing bigtime... bleah.

Teaching Tech Writing Next Sem

Initially, I was assigned Comp 1 for next fall, and had been planning on teaching it as an argument/ ecofem class, and I was really looking forward to it, because for one thing, it's something I cared about, and for another, I thought it would be cool. But they have since reassigned me to teach technical writing, which theoretically will be a lot less grading, and that's a good thing. But I'm afraid that I'll be bored. And I'm not much of a lecturer. I am mostly just a book discusser. That's what matters to me--that people think (and think well).

I think that's probably why I'm a bad comp teacher (ok, I'm not bad--but I'm not a Comp Queen like others I know)--because I'd argue it's more important for students to think well, than it is for them to write well. I'm probably in a minority. I'm sure most comp teachers want students to do BOTH. But I don't think it's possible to construct good arguments in writing until students can really understand the material on a deeper level. I think they should teach a class on thinking.... and I'm not talking a class on philosophy (which to me, was excruciating). But just honest and true critical thinking. I'd love to do that. But I doubt an opportunity will come up for that, because I think I'm in the minority when it comes to articulating pedagogy as "thinking first, writing later." And more than that, I'm not at a liberal arts school.

But I have decided to teach ecofem this summer. The independent bookstore where I order my books has assured me that it can get 25 copies of the out-of-print book of essays on ecofem that I love, and so I'm looking forward to that. I'm also having students read a book on women's nature writing--kind of blind, because I haven't been able to get a hold of a copy--but it sounds good from what I've read. Probably in 6 weeks, I'll have to do a lot of squeezing in, and not get to teach everything I want, but it will be ok. I'm going to make it ok. Last summer I taught an intro to pop culture, which I don't know how successful it was, but I enjoyed it. I'm hoping that this intro to women's ecology and ecofem will work out all right. It will have to sustain me through my dance with tech writing until I get back to teaching real stuff.

In other news, because my first class finished their project presentations, I don't have a 9:00 class this morning, which is good. The bad thing is, I didn't really get to say goodbye to them, as today is the last day of classes. But I'll probably send them an e-mail to tell them when they can expect their grades, wish them well on finals.

More Disappointing Student Projects--and Other Crap

As my students gave their presentations on dystopias today, I was saddened to think that, in a composition class, where they were given free reign (within reason) to come up with a website that allowed them to imagine and create a culture (and all its parts--politics, social welfare, health, race, class, gender, geography, etc., etc., etc.), that the best they could do was envision Hitler as the god that one dystopia prayed to. Technically, we're not supposed to allow them to do creative work in the comp class--the department is very strict in that sense.

But to me, how better can students demonstrate that they've learned and understood the class concepts by having to develop a web project of their dystopia/utopia? It seems to me, if they have to consider all the myriad things it takes to create a culture, then surely they could come up with something much more impressive than what they did. Last fall, some of the dystopias or utopias that students came up with were amazing--I mean, knocked my socks off. The ones I've seen both Monday and today are just generic and hohum. I was really disappointed in them. They could have done much better. And more than that, they SHOULD have done much better. These students are supposed to be the cream of the crop--the average incoming GPA at my school is 3.75. I was prepared to be impressed with their work, and just wasn't.

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In other news, I got another rejection letter. I don't know what would make my poetry publishable, but clearly, I'm not doing it. Sometimes I think that I just don't write what people care about--and then when I see all the work I have, that nobody wants, it makes me question why I even bother a) writing, and b) sending stuff out. I've had as much success getting my poems published not sending them out as sending them out--which is to say, none.

Of course, when I read Poetry (Magazine), which is the PREMIER literary journal for publishing poems--and if you publish here, you have ARRIVED--I always stumble over how unintelligible the work is to me. Am I stupid? Or do I just value poems that are open and clear? Forgoddessake, I have a PhD in poetry--and most of the poems they print every month I just don't understand. If I had creative writing students who wrote like that, I'd be the first to tell them that they need to consider their audience more carefully and write with language that is clear and concrete and visual. Most of the time, I have no idea what those writers are talking about--and it makes me upset. Because I think if I could write like they do, maybe someone would publish my work. But I don't know how to write in fragments like they do. I don't know how to--and more than that, I don't want to. But sometimes I think, if I want to be published, maybe I have to reconsider my sense of aesthetics? Because what I'm doing is not working. And goddess knows, I'll never get a job in academia if I don't start racking up the pub list.

And yet I still wonder--do I have to sell myself this way?

I Don't Understand My Students

It always happens that when it comes to final projects, some students do an amazing job, and some depress me with their lackadaisical approach. It happened on one of the projects in my second hour class--it was a lame website, with few of the features that I asked my students to consider as well as few of the concepts I asked them to discuss. I was so disappointed in the absolute lack of work that they did. In fact, I wound up asking them all of these questions about why they made the choices they did, because they didn't answer any of the questions I thought they should have. As the students were leaving, I heard one say, "That was a really hard project," and I wondered what he could have meant. Because it didn't look to me that they spent more than a couple of hours putting it together.

Then another group did a project that was racist against Muslims, and I hoped desperately that there were no Muslims in my class. I asked them about why they approached their dystopia with such virulent anti-Muslim racism, and they said they basically extrapolated on the current way society is structured.... Granted, dystopias are often founded on racist principles, but I've spent 15 weeks talking about why that stuff is bad. I wish they would have framed their racism against people who don't exist--that is, I wish they had imagined some other planet, not the Earth, and had expressed their xenophobia toward a race that didn't have members that we could recognize. I tried to frame their racism in these terms when I called them on it... but I don't think they were aware of how, by reinforcing this current hate, even if we are to read their work as dystopic, there are still real-world implications.

Sometimes I think I'm a terrible teacher. Especially when I see the kind of work I saw today.