That's enough of that.
Last week was an impressive one, if for no other reason than that I went out three consecutive nights. I know. This, while grading my first-ever finals, a task I found not nearly as draining as I'd been led to expect. A happy coincidence? Further evidence that my ass belongs in a classroom? A sign I did a truly poor job as a grader? Whatever. At this moment, I'm done with the TAship (surely it's not graded?), done with Gender (A-), and not yet behind in Balkans, in that the paper was assigned yesterday and is due by Jan. 3rd. Do I still have those two papers from spring? I do. But I'm a little past halfway with Christmas cards. The first round goes out tomorrow, just in time to sit in your mailbox during the week you're gone. Brilliant.
Thursday was the exam: I was on campus by 8:30 to run through the procedure with the professor, and then spent TWO SOLID HOURS walking fitfully around the auditorium, passing out extra blue books and pens, making faces at the other TAs, swigging Diet Coke, updating the 'time remaining' on the board... Mercifully, we had two good possible cheating incidents, giving me something to do. When it was all over, we sorted the exams, handed off the likely problems to Muir, and went out. To the bar. It was practically 11:30 AM, which is practically noon, which is certainly not too early to start drinking. I mean, I'd already started during the exam, but the beer-drinkers had to wait a bit longer. We had lunch, chatted, and were quite open about our stalling, but then it was time to grab a free cookie off the bar and go home to a world of vague theses, misreadings of primary sources, and, at one point, completely unintelligible handwriting.
The best sentence, which most of you have already seen, was "The Lutheran Reformation, in addition to being enticing to the average person out of convenience, did introduce actual new ideas to religion." Perhaps some other day I will rant about these essays, but what interested me most was how often students assigned traits to "the West" or "the modern world" that I doubt they personally identify with. A simple majority of the essays on the transformations of the West dealt with a universal move from strong religious faith to reason/secular government/atheism, and yet in our very own country many people do in fact profess some sort of religion. Well, notate bene, chumps: that's so pre-French Revolution. Time to join Boyle, Voltaire, and my students in the modern era.
By Friday afternoon I'd graded a little more than half of the exams. 3-ish, I took my camera over to campus to, as it turns out, take pictures of birds. It had snowed again, you see, and there wasn't much of a wind: the big rocks out by the lake each had a perfect cap of white and looked delightfully geometric. Getting a decent shot required me to crunch through eight-inch drifts and generally make a spectacle of myself (to the extent that birds constitute an audience) trying to line up the rocks and the birds and the skyline without slipping and winding up stuck on my ass, like a cold, wet, pissed-off turtle trying to protect a decently expensive piece of photographic equipment. As it turned out, I avoided every fate worse than six inches of damp jeans, meaning I didn't have to go home and change before stopping by the art store. Then it was back to the apartment to make a quick card and put my pants in the oven (just the cuffs, actually), and then off to social engagement #1. I talked to people. I talked to more people. There was a Christmas tree, even.
Saturday morning was more grading, followed by a neo-druid cookie-decorating party (#2), if the invitations are to be believed. It was more a Religion/Medieval Studies crowd than Friday's party, but because there was stuff to do (make cookies, obviously, and there were two dogs and a toddler to be eyed and entertained and such), I wasn't overly concerned about the social aspects. Anyway, they were talking about "Buffy". I did fall madly in love with Liz's cookie cutters, said to be from the Swedish Museum: I don't see them in the online store, but you can buy one of these there. Oddly, that's the second completely random encounter with Glogg I've had recently, but let's move on. I wasn't sold a ticket on either Metra ride, saving me a solid $4.10 or so. And it was snowing again.
Sunday morning I defeated the last eight exams, made another card (a rare Happy Holidays/Thank You two-fer, which turned out fabulously), and set about entering grades into a handy-dandy spreadsheet, creating a condensed version I could print on a single page, and fudging. I knew I would still be under the others' A/A- percentages, but I figured I could at least get started; essentially, if I could change a person's final letter grade by adding 3-4 points to his/her exam, I did it. I'd get all "RARRRRRR, GRADE INFLATION," except in this case it's more like "RARRRRRR, LET'S NOT PUNISH MY STUDENTS FOR GETTING ASSIGNED TO MY TIGHT-ASS SELF". That evening it was down to South Boulevard (I've now used the bottom six stops on the purple line: in all, only Noyes and Linden remain) and Professor Muir's house for a grading party (#3). Essentially, we gathered second opinions on exams that we'd struggled with, compulsively compared our grade percentages, rounded, rounded, reallllly rounded, and ate mixed nuts.
Then we all sat down at a dining-room table and ate salad and pizza off, I swear to you, gold-rimmed china. It wasn't as alarming as that sounds, but you still deserve to know. Likewise, I must inform you that he has a collection of horrifically tacky religious figures and icons on his kit(s)chen counter. The centerpiece, unmistakably, is a large framed portrait of Jesus, with LED-illuminated radiating halo, burning heart, and dripping stigmata. He calls it the 'bleed-for-me Jesus'. As in, "When you're having an awful day, you come home, plug in the Jesus, say 'bleed for me', and he does!" Prof. Muir is not himself a Catholic, shockingly enough. The Jesus is surrounded by a cluster of smaller devotional objects, including a picture of a cheese sandwich with Mary (or Jesus?) on the toasted bread. How all that fits with my students' insistence that religion is, like, so over, I have no idea. Assuming, that is, that the market for these pieces is not entirely composed of ironical types.
He offered to drive us home, and we accepted, proposing a plan that just coincidentally left the male TA for the last leg. There was immediate tacit agreement among the three of us that we should do it that way, even though the guy is clearly adopted-uncle material; is it sad that our default behavior is so unattractive? Is there any way to blame grade inflation?
Tuesday I met with MY ADVISOR about the Balkans writing component, handed the commented blue books off to Muir, and washed my hands of the history building for the week/month/year. I'll be on campus, certainly, for library runs, but for the time being I have no classes, no office hours, and (presumably) no urgent interdepartmental mail. That night I went over to EM's to get instructions on keeping her cats alive over break and return all the books I borrowed for Gender. I was rewarded with her quiet comment "Ignore them; they're both high", said of her roommate and the one kid in the program I think I might really dislike, provided we ever spoke to one another. That would explain why the latter guy kinda waved at me when I came in.
I was delighted to see, upon returning home, that The Muffin Car was still parked in front of the building. I first noticed it last week, before it was The Muffin Car: then it was merely a car with a dangling passenger-side mirror. A few days later, some [for God's sake, what adjective goes here?] soul stuck an entire muffin, still in its wrapper, in the top of the broken mirror arm. Since then, the snow's been piling onto the muffin, the mirror, the world, and the car has not been moved. I think it's waiting for something, but for the life of me I cannot fathom what it might be.
Thursday was the exam: I was on campus by 8:30 to run through the procedure with the professor, and then spent TWO SOLID HOURS walking fitfully around the auditorium, passing out extra blue books and pens, making faces at the other TAs, swigging Diet Coke, updating the 'time remaining' on the board... Mercifully, we had two good possible cheating incidents, giving me something to do. When it was all over, we sorted the exams, handed off the likely problems to Muir, and went out. To the bar. It was practically 11:30 AM, which is practically noon, which is certainly not too early to start drinking. I mean, I'd already started during the exam, but the beer-drinkers had to wait a bit longer. We had lunch, chatted, and were quite open about our stalling, but then it was time to grab a free cookie off the bar and go home to a world of vague theses, misreadings of primary sources, and, at one point, completely unintelligible handwriting.
The best sentence, which most of you have already seen, was "The Lutheran Reformation, in addition to being enticing to the average person out of convenience, did introduce actual new ideas to religion." Perhaps some other day I will rant about these essays, but what interested me most was how often students assigned traits to "the West" or "the modern world" that I doubt they personally identify with. A simple majority of the essays on the transformations of the West dealt with a universal move from strong religious faith to reason/secular government/atheism, and yet in our very own country many people do in fact profess some sort of religion. Well, notate bene, chumps: that's so pre-French Revolution. Time to join Boyle, Voltaire, and my students in the modern era.
By Friday afternoon I'd graded a little more than half of the exams. 3-ish, I took my camera over to campus to, as it turns out, take pictures of birds. It had snowed again, you see, and there wasn't much of a wind: the big rocks out by the lake each had a perfect cap of white and looked delightfully geometric. Getting a decent shot required me to crunch through eight-inch drifts and generally make a spectacle of myself (to the extent that birds constitute an audience) trying to line up the rocks and the birds and the skyline without slipping and winding up stuck on my ass, like a cold, wet, pissed-off turtle trying to protect a decently expensive piece of photographic equipment. As it turned out, I avoided every fate worse than six inches of damp jeans, meaning I didn't have to go home and change before stopping by the art store. Then it was back to the apartment to make a quick card and put my pants in the oven (just the cuffs, actually), and then off to social engagement #1. I talked to people. I talked to more people. There was a Christmas tree, even.
Saturday morning was more grading, followed by a neo-druid cookie-decorating party (#2), if the invitations are to be believed. It was more a Religion/Medieval Studies crowd than Friday's party, but because there was stuff to do (make cookies, obviously, and there were two dogs and a toddler to be eyed and entertained and such), I wasn't overly concerned about the social aspects. Anyway, they were talking about "Buffy". I did fall madly in love with Liz's cookie cutters, said to be from the Swedish Museum: I don't see them in the online store, but you can buy one of these there. Oddly, that's the second completely random encounter with Glogg I've had recently, but let's move on. I wasn't sold a ticket on either Metra ride, saving me a solid $4.10 or so. And it was snowing again.
Sunday morning I defeated the last eight exams, made another card (a rare Happy Holidays/Thank You two-fer, which turned out fabulously), and set about entering grades into a handy-dandy spreadsheet, creating a condensed version I could print on a single page, and fudging. I knew I would still be under the others' A/A- percentages, but I figured I could at least get started; essentially, if I could change a person's final letter grade by adding 3-4 points to his/her exam, I did it. I'd get all "RARRRRRR, GRADE INFLATION," except in this case it's more like "RARRRRRR, LET'S NOT PUNISH MY STUDENTS FOR GETTING ASSIGNED TO MY TIGHT-ASS SELF". That evening it was down to South Boulevard (I've now used the bottom six stops on the purple line: in all, only Noyes and Linden remain) and Professor Muir's house for a grading party (#3). Essentially, we gathered second opinions on exams that we'd struggled with, compulsively compared our grade percentages, rounded, rounded, reallllly rounded, and ate mixed nuts.
Then we all sat down at a dining-room table and ate salad and pizza off, I swear to you, gold-rimmed china. It wasn't as alarming as that sounds, but you still deserve to know. Likewise, I must inform you that he has a collection of horrifically tacky religious figures and icons on his kit(s)chen counter. The centerpiece, unmistakably, is a large framed portrait of Jesus, with LED-illuminated radiating halo, burning heart, and dripping stigmata. He calls it the 'bleed-for-me Jesus'. As in, "When you're having an awful day, you come home, plug in the Jesus, say 'bleed for me', and he does!" Prof. Muir is not himself a Catholic, shockingly enough. The Jesus is surrounded by a cluster of smaller devotional objects, including a picture of a cheese sandwich with Mary (or Jesus?) on the toasted bread. How all that fits with my students' insistence that religion is, like, so over, I have no idea. Assuming, that is, that the market for these pieces is not entirely composed of ironical types.
He offered to drive us home, and we accepted, proposing a plan that just coincidentally left the male TA for the last leg. There was immediate tacit agreement among the three of us that we should do it that way, even though the guy is clearly adopted-uncle material; is it sad that our default behavior is so unattractive? Is there any way to blame grade inflation?
Tuesday I met with MY ADVISOR about the Balkans writing component, handed the commented blue books off to Muir, and washed my hands of the history building for the week/month/year. I'll be on campus, certainly, for library runs, but for the time being I have no classes, no office hours, and (presumably) no urgent interdepartmental mail. That night I went over to EM's to get instructions on keeping her cats alive over break and return all the books I borrowed for Gender. I was rewarded with her quiet comment "Ignore them; they're both high", said of her roommate and the one kid in the program I think I might really dislike, provided we ever spoke to one another. That would explain why the latter guy kinda waved at me when I came in.
I was delighted to see, upon returning home, that The Muffin Car was still parked in front of the building. I first noticed it last week, before it was The Muffin Car: then it was merely a car with a dangling passenger-side mirror. A few days later, some [for God's sake, what adjective goes here?] soul stuck an entire muffin, still in its wrapper, in the top of the broken mirror arm. Since then, the snow's been piling onto the muffin, the mirror, the world, and the car has not been moved. I think it's waiting for something, but for the life of me I cannot fathom what it might be.