Oooooh this semester! Quelle suprise, quelle horror, quelle....
Am I even using the correct form of quel? Oh well. Hey, listen! This semester is nearly over. Very quite nearly. It's close, okay? Final grades are due 12/14.
This is both good and bad. I have loved this semester and my kids very much, but it has been a lot of work. Grading 75 papers just about every other week has been something else.
I'm not complaining though. I love this job and I'm lucky to have it. A job I have that I'm not happy about? Being my parent's computer guy sometimes. I was just on the phone with them, trying to help them upload a picture or something. That kind of stuff, especially over the phone, with the added soothing quality of our neighbors' hammering and hammering and hammering, can make one despise computers. I'm talking the deep seated urge to throw all computers within reach into the walls, windows, or to the tile. Dash their motherboards to pieces.
Grading sometimes inspires the same feeling, however not as often. The kids are endearing in ways computers fall short of, somehow.
I'm looking forward to winter break. I need to plan for my classes next semester, read more books, and write. I have fallen incredibly short of my writing goals this semester. For which, I think, I can give myself a pass (adjusting to teaching new classes, taking on the extra class), but that seems a bit dangerous as making excuses seems to lead one to making more excuses. Snowballing excuses.
A lot like the kids as well, really. I think I could relate nearly everything in my life right now to some situation in one of my classes, or to particular students. They have the strangest and most interesting excuses for everything. Sometimes they are late, absent, or don't have a paper for mundane reasons, but other times they are brilliant. Simply brilliant.
Example one: I open a student's paper (they turn everything in online) and find they (I'm being grammatically awkward to preserve anonymity) have changed the font to symbols and numbers. I know that there is no way this would happen except on purpose (or that they at least must know the paper "is corrupted"). They think I know nothing about computers.
Example two: "I'm sorry, Ms Sheffield, but I don't have my paper because I have my sister's laptop? And it has a really bad battery? Like the battery doesn't work and I was working on my paper and the cord got unplugged and I lost everything that I was working on except for what I sent you earlier."
Example three: Attached to this email, please find my doctor's note excusing me from class today.
Really? Do they do that now?
Anyway, that is just a sampling. They totally know when I don't believe them and then they get all defensive. It's kind of cute.
