Of course

Because grades are due tonight, the email system at Metro State seems to have gone down - and I need to check my email to find the obscure password that I need twice a year to submit my grades.  I've been trying for a few hours.

Sheesh.

On another note: I've finished all the grading for that class!  I had 25 essays, 12 reading journals, and 14 final exams.

I've also finished creating the exam for my Intro to GLBT Studies course (and graded eight reading journals and six fifteen essays for that class - about a third of almost all the students).

I've also graded 10 of 36 portfolios for my writing students (five or six essays in each!).  A few students stopped by my office today to pick up their portfolios: naturally, the students who stopped by are not the students whose portfolios I've finished.

My tech writers are still working on the final exam (three submitted - two are definitely A exams), so I won't grade them all until they're all in.

The end is in sight.

All College Day

I suppose I'm a bit weird, but I kind of like getting all the folks from my college together for a day of thought-provoking conversations and presentations (today's wasn't that thought-provoking, disappointingly: it just repeated what we already know because community colleges are like canaries in the coal mines -- we see all the stuff research institutions eventually get around to observing . . . we see it at least five years earlier). My conversations with colleagues were good, though.

Although I like these days, I do wish that it wasn't the only way we heard about important initiatives at my college. We have the *worst* communication I've ever seen, anywhere, ever.

Personally, I think it's because we've doubled in size since I've been there, but we haven't figured out how to keep up with the infrastructure. We still operate with the "Mary is the person who does that" mentality, when it's tough to know who "Mary" is or what her position is . . . we still operate as if we all saw each other in the "lunch room" once a day.

The simplest things are impossible to find because our college website is rotten: just try to search for an org chart so you can know who answers to whom, who might be responsible for something if you have a question: impossible to find, or if you do, the information is out of date. (We even have courses listed on our class schedule that do not even exist at our college!)

So for me, it's important to go to these all-day events to see people and hear what the administration has in mind. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd say that our communication is rotten *on purpose* to force us to go to the all-day retreats!

Good work

I'm in the middle of the kind of work I love: editing a document that will be used at our all-campus development day. I get to compile a bunch of people's contributions, make them uniform, and then them into "user friendly" (does anyone even use that phrase any more?) break-out session activities.

At the moment, I'm having the most fun developing gender-neutral names and constructing sentences to avoid personal pronouns. Rosalie Maggio's 1987 classic, The Nonsexist Word Finder: A Dictionary of Gender-Free Language, would come in handy -- if my copy was at home instead of on my office bookshelf.

So far, here are a few of the gender-neutral names I've come across in my teaching: Adrian, Alex, Aubrey, Cameron, Casey, Chris, Dana, Devin, Jamie, Jess, Kim, Lee, Merritt, Morgan, Pat, Quinn, Reese, Remy, Robin, Rylish, Sandy, Shane, Shannon, Shawn, Terry, Tracy.

Anyone else have any others?

What a week

I have to say that I've been nervous since my last post: I wasn't sure about the Presidential election outcome. I still remember the shock of 2000, of going to bed confident that Gore would be our President and waking up to the horror of Bush. Some friends had asked what I would do if Obama didn't "win"; I would joke about moving to Canada, but seriously I started quaking when contemplating a non-Obama future.

(This week, I've had a seriously hard time focusing on work, and I'm behind grading student assignments. I haven't talked with them at all about the election specifically (too many students with huge McCain Palin stickers on their notebooks), but we have had many discussions and exercises about detecting argument moves, conducting rhetorical analysis, uncovering logical fallacies. That's the most I could manage; I suppose I was fearful I'd have to engage in some kind of argument with a person whose strongly held values come from their parents.)

This year, I watched the formerly-red states turn blue on the big screen TV at my friend's house, watching the numbers roll in with my politic son and his smart friend (masters degree from Brown in public affairs and public policy). It's terrific to see history happening with smart, like-minded people, to watch a Harvard law grad give a calm, intelligent speech that suggests the calm, intelligent decision-maker and leader he will be.