tales from a mental health day
I have a brief respite from all the work craziness in my life, and not a moment too soon. My brain and body has decided to respond to the fact that I've been working an average of 10 hour days, seven days a week, for the past three weeks solid, by refusing to go anymore. No illness, thankfully, but I spent about five hours last night lying on the couch watching television, and then managed to move myself to bed, where I slept for 12 hours straight. Feeling somewhat more human today but more in a "now maybe I can face going to the grocery store" sense rather than in a "back to work" sense. Hopefully the latter will come by tomorrow, and in the meantime, I have all the ingredients to make emmiere's butternut squash, sweet potato, and apple soup for dinner, so I'm looking forward to that!
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On the subject of the television I watched last night, HOW AWESOME IS CASTLE, Y'ALL?!?!?!? It is fast overtaking Bones as my happiest of happy places (though perhaps that's an apples and oranges kind of comparison), and I think it's fair to say that Castle himself has quipped and punned and awesome-father-ed his way to somewhere near the top of my list of top fictional character crushes. He's not quite taking the top spot from Cameron Mitchell, but he may be number two. And the opening sequence of last night's ep was ABSOLUTE GOLD!!! *squishes show*
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In case anyone who would be interested missed it (because in hindsight, Sunday night is probably not the best time to post something you'd like people to see), I posted TSCC fic over the weekend. James Ellison and Sarah Connor, post-finale: a bailar.
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And finally, a signal-boost on a couple of links you've already seen if you read cofax7 but that I thought were worth passing along myself:
A piece from Vanity Fair (of all places) on the paucity of women writers on the staffs of late-night comedy shows.
And a long but nice piece by a writing teacher on the relationship between teaching, grading, and learning. I've had every one of the conversations he describes with my own students at various times, and there's a lot of what he says, especially about grading and the way writing is a difficult beast when it comes to assessment, that I wish I could somehow make my students understand. This bit particularly resonated:
I recognize that students want good grades; I acknowledge the emotional validity of feeling like, if you are paying for an education, part of what you should be receiving is a roadmap to the grades you want to receive; and I certainly appreciate that there are students for whom the practical value of their grades outweighs, legitimately and reasonably, whatever value I might place on some ideal notion of what teaching and learning ought to be about. As I see it, though, my job is not to show students how to get A’s. My job is to teach, to help students learn, which means that, on one level, it doesn’t really matter to me if a student moves from a D to B, or from a C to a C+, or from a B to an A. What matters is that they have moved, that they are better writers when they leave my class than they were when they entered. It’s not that I am indifferent to students’ desire and/or need for good grades, but learning to write is not like filling in a blank or coloring in a circle on an exam where there is only one right answer to each question and so the formula for getting an A is clear. Rather, learning to write is a lot like growing up. No matter how much advice and guidance we get, the fact is that we all grow up in our own way, at our own pace, and some of us never manage it at all.
**
On the subject of the television I watched last night, HOW AWESOME IS CASTLE, Y'ALL?!?!?!? It is fast overtaking Bones as my happiest of happy places (though perhaps that's an apples and oranges kind of comparison), and I think it's fair to say that Castle himself has quipped and punned and awesome-father-ed his way to somewhere near the top of my list of top fictional character crushes. He's not quite taking the top spot from Cameron Mitchell, but he may be number two. And the opening sequence of last night's ep was ABSOLUTE GOLD!!! *squishes show*
**
In case anyone who would be interested missed it (because in hindsight, Sunday night is probably not the best time to post something you'd like people to see), I posted TSCC fic over the weekend. James Ellison and Sarah Connor, post-finale: a bailar.
**
And finally, a signal-boost on a couple of links you've already seen if you read cofax7 but that I thought were worth passing along myself:
A piece from Vanity Fair (of all places) on the paucity of women writers on the staffs of late-night comedy shows.
And a long but nice piece by a writing teacher on the relationship between teaching, grading, and learning. I've had every one of the conversations he describes with my own students at various times, and there's a lot of what he says, especially about grading and the way writing is a difficult beast when it comes to assessment, that I wish I could somehow make my students understand. This bit particularly resonated:
I recognize that students want good grades; I acknowledge the emotional validity of feeling like, if you are paying for an education, part of what you should be receiving is a roadmap to the grades you want to receive; and I certainly appreciate that there are students for whom the practical value of their grades outweighs, legitimately and reasonably, whatever value I might place on some ideal notion of what teaching and learning ought to be about. As I see it, though, my job is not to show students how to get A’s. My job is to teach, to help students learn, which means that, on one level, it doesn’t really matter to me if a student moves from a D to B, or from a C to a C+, or from a B to an A. What matters is that they have moved, that they are better writers when they leave my class than they were when they entered. It’s not that I am indifferent to students’ desire and/or need for good grades, but learning to write is not like filling in a blank or coloring in a circle on an exam where there is only one right answer to each question and so the formula for getting an A is clear. Rather, learning to write is a lot like growing up. No matter how much advice and guidance we get, the fact is that we all grow up in our own way, at our own pace, and some of us never manage it at all.