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So, if not a single additional student registers in one of my classes for fall, I’ll still have 142 students in my three courses.

Of course, I’m guaranteed to have more students register. Other courses on the books will be cancelled, causing a cascade effect that will surely send at least a dozen more my way and we can’t forget that a large number of first year students have yet to register.

This isn’t the largest total enrollment that I’ve ever faced, but the last time numbers soared much higher than this, I nearly collapsed under the heavy load of marking. You see, I have this funny notion that history is best taught through student writing, and a fair bit of it. But when I have eighty students already enrolled in my ancient Near East survey course, how can I keep my marking scheme including ten tutorials, a short essay, a midterm and a longer essay, as well as a final exam? (With eighty students, the conservative outcome is 2000 pages of student work to mark. Gah!)

The wise answer is, “I can’t.” But I still haven’t come up with a really awesome answer to the old marking scheme dilemma. I think I have an answer for the first year class where I’ve concentrated the formal writing assignments on steps toward a final research project and settled on eight tutorials with responses.

I’m not sure what to do with the ANE class given that I’ve already ordered The Epic of Gilgamesh with intentions of using that for a first, shorter essay assignment. And if I don’t have some sort of tutorial quiz or response that’s marked, students rarely do the tutorial readings or participate. But maybe ten tutorials in the term are overkill?

So, do I drop the free-choice essay for the end of the course (an assignment that’s problematic seeing as many students will want to write on Greco-Roman issues which are outside the purview of the course while a few others will try to plagiarize) and bump the Gilgamesh essay to later in the term (and increase its scope somewhat so that students can draw on course-long themes or make comparative arguments)? I can’t easily be comfortable in a course where there’s no research-based composition of some sort or another, so dropping the essays entirely doesn’t seem like a good idea.

What about testing (which can be marked with much more ease than any composition assignments)? Do I stick with one midterm as I’ve tentatively planned or go for two quizzes (at the end of each month)? Or maybe drop every test but the university-mandated final exam?

I’ll be wrestling with this course plan for some weeks, I fear. Stay tuned!

and my eldest will be starting high school in a few months. That’s something to wrap my head around!

For now, the kids are concentrating on all the freedom that summer offers, even if the weather forecast has shifted to the wet and cloudy.

You may be too wrapped up in the world of books when you hear that the library’s air conditioning is on the fritz and your first thought is “oh, no, all those fragile late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century books!”

Yes, seriously.

I didn’t log into the university email at all today. That’s the only way that I could ensure that I didn’t dive back into the encyclopedia work that’s been consuming all of my waking hours, non-stop, since Monday. I literally had the spreadsheet swimming in front of my eyes as I tried to fall asleep last night.

Off course, that didn’t stop me from mentally sketching out another entry that I’ll write on Monday as well as getting some work done on another writing project I’ve taken on. And I’ll probably log into email for a few hours tomorrow to get more assignments suggested or confirmed whittle down the emails that are just piling in from the various listserv appeals that I made earlier in the week.

But I spent a lot of time with my children today and, even though they’re hardly little anymore, that was beyond precious to me.

As fruits of my recent posting of the Encyclopedia of Elizabethan England CFP to more listservs, I’m inundated with emails from possible contributors. That’s great, but I’m hard-pressed to get through more than a dozen per day since I want to suggest the best possible fit in terms of possible entries for people to consider. Then, when they do find what they’re interested in, there’s still more paperwork to get them in the system. Spreadsheets have to match up with databases and tracking documents and my entire email filing cabinet.

It’s wonderfully worthwhile work, of course, but slow and laborious.

I don’t blog about my daughters as much as I once did. They’re growing up and becoming netizens of their own with very definite opinions about what’s appropriate to share on my blog. (Cute stories are just not on, anymore, it seems!)

Just because I don’t mention them, doesn’t mean that parenting’s any less central to my identity or experience, personally and professionally. I’ve found that parenting has added depth to my work as a teacher, given me new insights into my research and fostered patience and perspective that’s invaluable to my service work. I can see, as I look around me, that this seems to be much more the case for academic women than academic men. It’s not gender essentialism but, rather, the way that we tend to work things out and why I think there’s still a lot more that academia can do to acknowledge that equal opportunity is more than just ensuring you have washroom parity! As Dr. Isis has pointed out, academic mothers have some serious issues with all the underlying rules of the game.

With one child on the autism spectrum and having other health concerns, though, my experience of parenting brings a kind of constant vigilance that Mad-Eye Moody never quite envisioned. My whole life is attuned to where she is and what she’s doing at any given point.

It’s in-joke in my family that I never get lost because I always “know where my fireplace was” (i.e. that I orient myself around the world with a constant mental compass needle that points toward the fireplace in my childhood home — that would be SSW of my current location if you really want to know). Today, I think, the in-joke that would be more relevant is that I am always aware where my youngest child is and keeping an ear out for the call that would alert me to her needs. I turn down some opportunities to travel or work on involved projects because I have to juggle her care with my work. She is the magnetic pole that unfailingly draws my compass needle (nearly due north at the moment, at her school) and I will forever be putting her need for care and support first.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t feel guilty or sub-standard as an academic for failing to be that “always-on” academic who’s available to jet around the world and be on campus all hours of the day. It just means that I can be more easily guilted into over-compensating for that by agreeing to a ridiculous number of service obligations that can be shoe-horned in around the family obligation.

The other day, an academic administrator acknowledged my daughter’s need without any recrimination. It was just a fact of my life that came up in our professional planning. And that matter-of-fact-edness was such an enormous relief, I still can’t even begin to express how grateful I was that someone just “got” the situation.

We attended a friend’s wedding this afternoon. (The reception follows at five but since the in-between hours are taken up with photos of the wedding party, we took the fifteen-minute drive back home where eldest is minding youngest.) It was a sweet service and I was much entertained by the young daughter of friends who quietly worked to catch my eye on and off during the ceremony, itself.

The venue is a lovely hall in the older township on the western side of town. It’s very much in a mish-mash of historical styles (think mock-Tudor without the wood-panelling) but perfectly lovely for all of that. Much better than the generic banquet hall that seems to be the only alternative for many other weddings and special events.

It’s no coincidence that the best department Christmas parties I can remember were the ones held at this venue. It’ll be a pleasure to return for the reception.

The budget cuts are starting to nibble away at what we hold near and dear. Monograph acquisitions for the library this year have been cut back by 2/3 (yes, I meant by two-thirds) with further cuts on the serial subscriptions budget still to come.

Tenured faculty positions are safe, but we’re watching as a raft of contract positions are lined up for the chop and any sort of overload pay becomes a laughable prospect. (Honestly? I’d rather see permanent positions take a cut so we can keep some very needed term positions. But nobody asks me!)

My course outlines have shrunk from eight-page handouts that detailed objectives, outcomes, policies and assignment details to a single sheet that can only hold the daily class schedule, reading list and a précis of the assignments. Why? Because it’s all we can afford.

We’re robbing Peter to pay Paul and that’s still at a cut-rate, I’m afraid.

My M.A. student successfully defended her research essay this morning: “Mad as Bedlam: The Nature of Women and Insanity in London, England, 1843-1913.” Her work draws from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey to show how legal and medical experts were joined by community members in defining and redefining the ideas of insanity and criminal behaviour during this period with particular regard to gender. Eighty-six cases of women charged with killing and found either not guilty, non compos mentis or guilty, but insane, gave her a rich pool of cases from which to work, almost all of them situations of child-murder. Very good work, all around!

Once again, evidence for equal male and female mathematical ability shows up on Slashdot. And, once again, a certain large chunk of the /. readership goes wild with anger and outrage to assert that women get all the advantages these days in schools and scholarships, that women just use their wiles to get ahead and, oh, that men really are better at all this stuff than women. *sigh* As usual, xkcd has already skewered that mentality perfectly.

But, in the meantime, let me just say that, as I gear up to teach my fall senior seminar on gender history, I’m thrilled to see that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has published such important material under such a kick-ass title: “Gender, culture and mathematical performance.” And the important, inescapable conclusions from this research review is best summed up in the words of Janet S. Hyde and Janet E. Metz who write:

Thus, we conclude that gender inequality, not greater male variability, is the primary reason fewer females than males are identified as excelling in mathematics at the high and highest levels in most countries. Of course, gender inequity is complex and multifaceted. It can encompass dynamics in school classrooms leading teachers to provide more attention to boys; guidance counselors, biased by stereotypes, advising females against taking engineering courses; mathematically gifted girls not being identified and nurtured; scarcity of women role models in math-intensive careers leading girls to believe they do not belong in them; unconscious bias against females in hiring decisions; and hostile work environments leading qualified women to drop out in favor of friendlier climes.

Of course, we had much this same discussion, only about women writers, a few generations back when Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, and indulged in the wonderful thought experiment, drawing out, in chapter three, the imaginary life of one Judith Shakespeare, a sister to William with equal ability bred in her bones. Woolf mercilessly itemized the ways in which Elizabethan society would have hemmed in the female equivalent of Shakespeare — denied education, employment and even the vehicles for expression that came comparatively easily to her brother. Read more »