Comments(1) Whenever you say, “Great, this is finished! I’ll just email it out in the morning.” you will inevitably be confronted with an email server bork-up the next day.
*sigh*
Things what I’ve done: finished some course planning, a book review, a modest but important service obligation, a meeting, some data extraction, some project planning.
Things still to do: a modest pile of marking, another meeting to attend and my own research material which lies languishing. Never mind that pesky revise-and-resubmit: it’s in progress but not going to be complete any time soon!
Things that I hope will get done but probably won’t: hair cut, filing cabinet reorganization, new research material collection and review.
Things that are ongoing: Hallowe’en preparations (we carve pumpkins tomorrow!), youngest’s birthday preparations, dog-walking and driving the car all over hither and yon on a regular basis.
Comments(1) Service obligations can be fun! To wit: Given a pool of around 150 names, fill a few dozen set of small assignments to cover about a dozen different disciplinary panels. Furthermore, ensure that no panel has duplicate institutional representation and also makes provision to bring in some new people to the service activity.
What could be more engrossing on a Saturday evening at home than mixing and matching the possible combinations? If you think of this as if it were a game of Tetris, say, or Sudoku, it becomes almost entertaining. Some combinations just don’t work, or lay the ground for the next panel to be in conflict so that then you have to unpack a couple of others in the same discipline in order to get a balanced result. It also gave me the opportunity to break out my colour-highlighting function in MS Word as I tracked panel composition back and forth between the various documents.
Extra bonus points for giving me something to engage my mind while watching the wholly insubstantial Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Comments(4) I just taught my last class until November.
Yup, it’s fall break! Pity I still have some marking to do. Otherwise, I’m focused on the article revisions and my encyclopedia project.
And maybe, just maybe, a haircut!
Comments(2) I finished grading all the short papers for my Reformation survey, handing them back in class today, two weeks after picking them up. Which I feel is pretty darned good since the papers averaged between 4-6 pages in length and there were an awful lot of them (just as there are an awful lot of students in that class).
No time to savour the accomplishment since, upon my return to the office, I had to pick up the folder of tutorial responses turned in last Thursday so that I can fruitlessly attempt to surely get them all marked for Thursday.
Reading week is coming soon. Not soon enough, eh?
And we had our first snowfall last night. Harrumph!
Comments(4) Brought to you by a recent request to revise and resubmit an article I sent off for consideration in March, my take on Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief, academia-style:
Denial: No! They can’t be asking me to revise this article that I thought was finally done and over with.
Anger: How dare they dispute my brilliant prose and scholarly insights?
Bargaining: Okay, maybe I was a little off course: I’ll change this and that if you’ll let me please keep this reference and that conclusion!
Depression: It’s going to take a mountain of research and rewriting to answer all of these comments. I’m never going to get this stupid thing accepted anywhere, am I?
Acceptance: All right, I can do this, somehow. Wait — you want the revised version how soon?
Comments(2) The NDP has taken my riding, marking the first time since 1968 that this seat has not been held by the Liberals.
Interesting times! (Now, back to the seemingly inexhaustible pile of Reformation essays. Why do I always believe it’s better to have no quizzes or midterms and assign essays? Sure, there’s pedagogy and all, but marking essays takes a lot more time than marking quizzes or midterms! Ah, well.)
Comments(0) the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow! (European, not African.)
Comments(0) the texts for tomorrow morning’s senior seminar, I’m reminded, yet again, how much I enjoy these books. Not just for their excellent scholarship, but also because they’re fun to read and re-read!
Comments(0) I remember back in the old days, when you gave an assignment, you often set yourself up for a round of late-night phone calls at home from students who were panicking about their work. (This was also back in the days when few of us had computers and were forced to compose using typewriters or, gasp!, pen and paper. At least it wasn’t cuneiform!)
Nowadays, phone calls are happily passé. It’s all about quick contact though: thank goodness, nobody is texting me with their essay queries. That’s probably because the students figure I’m too old to get that technology! There’s not even been a single request for IM contact information which is good because IM is, to me, so 1990s. Been there, done that, have the six-digit ICQ number to prove it. Anyway, I’m AFK as much as at the keyboard at any given moment. Instant gratification is nothing to encourage when you’re talking about more than a hundred possibly needy students!
No, I’m happy enough that they’ve settled on the intermediate technology of email to ask their questions. Read more »