Exam week bullets

-- Exam week schedules always discombobulate me, and I think I am degenerating into the stereotypical absent-minded professor at an alarming rate. I almost gave an exam to the wrong freaking class today. I walked into the room at what I thought was the correct time, and was surprised to see that the seats were filled with about twice as many students as I was expecting, and they were (mostly) the wrong ones. Fortunately, it turns out that the actual exam time for my class is tomorrow and not yesterday. Whew. Now I just have to get through the next two days, which will include giving the real exam for that class, proctoring a different exam for one of my colleague's classes, and keeping appointments for two students to take make-up exams. Oh, and taking my car in for repairs. I'm going to be so confused.

-- I had a dream last night in which I was teaching Northanger Abbey in Brit Lit II, and then I woke up and read this, and now I really want to teach Northanger Abbey. I can't do it in the fall because I already ordered North and South, but maybe the next semester after that? Would it be bad to go way out of chronological sequence and read Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story" first, since that strikes me as a way better introduction to what Gothic fiction is all about than the two tiny, out-of-context slivers of Radcliffe in the Norton Anthology? And as long as I'm going crazy with the sequence, should I follow it all up with Stoppard's Arcadia?

-- It's a gorgeous day, clear and crisp and faintly magnolia-scented, and I so don't want to grade. I don't even want to grade the three remaining Shakespeare papers, which are probably all going to be quite good, and I REALLY don't want to grade the rest of the comp papers, which almost all suck. (Seriously, did it occur to any of these students that the reason why we did annotated bibliographies right before the final papers is that they would be expected to, you know, cite sources? Or that if I suggest a change after reading a draft, it would be a good idea to MAKE that change before they turn in the final version? Based on the papers I have read so far, I think the answers are "no" and "no.")

Courseblogging: The end / the beginning

OK, that last post was rather boring and whiny. I'm in a happier mood now, as the exams are over and I don't have to start grading them until the weekend. I baked cookies for my 11 a.m. section of Brit Lit, by way of thanking them for being the sort of class that made me happy about going to work on Monday mornings. I wish I were going to see more of them next semester; right now, I have one enrolled in the Shakespeare class and one in Brit Lit II, while the 8 a.m. students, most of whom didn't show any obvious signs of liking my class, are signing up in droves. Go figure.

We finished off the semester with Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," which was a new text for me. It taught pretty well, I thought (much better than I was expecting -- it's one of those poems where you wake up at 5 a.m. thinking "GOOD GOD, WHAT POSSESSED ME TO TEACH THIS?" after which almost anything is a pleasant surprise). And I passed around a handout with "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways," and we talked a bit about the common threads and differences, and why the Brit Lit survey sequence splits where it does. (Well, mostly it splits where it does because the Norton Anthology splits where it does. Which came first, the survey course or the Norton? I haven't the foggiest.) Anyway, teaching the whole sequence is odd because you get a bunch of repeat students, for whom this is like the second half of the same course, and a bunch of new ones, many of whom haven't taken the first survey. I don't know whether to think of it as a continuation or a change.

I spent most of the exam period working on the syllabus for next semester. I'm trying something new, loosely inspired by Dr. Virago's Crux Busters and Sisyphus's Close Reading Homework: replacing the first long paper with a series of five mini-papers, which will require students to focus very tightly on a small part of the text. I have a feeling grading these will be a huge time sink, and I wouldn't even attempt it if I were teaching two sections instead of one, but I'm hoping it will get them in the habit of thinking hard about word choice and the like.

random bullets o'xam week

-- Fondue and weird asparagus-wrapped-in-ham thingies from the faculty Christmas party count as dinner, yes? Particularly when washed down with large quantities of free wine.

-- Have written the exams for Brit Lit I (8 a.m. tomorrow) and Shakespeare (11:30 tomorrow). I wrote them after the party, so I don't know if they make sense or not. I'm not sure I care.

-- As of this morning, I have met with my third plagiarist in three weeks. The first one groveled, told a long story about how she was in a car accident and had two pins in her shoulder and didn't remember things too well, and asked "Is there no understanding?" in plaintive tones; the second one said very little; the third said "Okay!" in an oddly cheerful tone and walked off. I liked the second one best.

-- The final presentations for advanced comp were ... interesting, particularly the one where I ended up having to explain my views on euthanasia to a bunch of highly religious Deep South State students, and the one that ended with half the class arguing over the death penalty. I'm not sure that was how the final was supposed to go, but on the other hand, it's a rare experience to have comp students who show this much passion, and I rather enjoyed it.

-- Is the semester over yet? Sweet Jesus, I want it to be over, except I really don't want to have to read the evals, particularly from the Shakespeare course. Ugh.