The assignments come in thick and fast on Mondays, as they do every Monday this semester. I’m teaching classes which have due dates at 11:59 each Monday. So I sit here and watch the number of submissions tick higher and higher, and try to figure out which things to assess first so the most important feedback gets back to the students in the most timely fashion.
I do this every week, and the answer isn’t always the same, but, also, it always is: start somewhere.
The thing that is the same is the thought that I shouldn’t teach a semester’s worth of classes which have things coming due all on the same day. I’ll spend three, maybe four days doing nothing but agonizing over points and pecking out constructive criticism and compliments.
None of this, none of it, is bad. But there sure is a lot of it!
We have two giant hydrangeas, both of which gave up quite some time ago, of course. But I’ve come to love the look of these faded old flowers. They speak to the season, or to just how a person feels in it, maybe. Still full, but brittle. Slumped to the elements, but still holding some character. And though their spring and summer beauty has faded, there is a new color and charm in there. And just a tinge of the original color, which I didn’t see until I looked carefully.
We’ll have to cut these back soon, which is a shame, in a way. If I brought them inside I could write essays about the corymbs for weeks, but I’m neither a poet nor an English literature professor, so it would be out of character.
Here’s a sunset photo from earlier this week that I didn’t use on the site. This is out on a road that feels lonely in all of the right ways.
I bet the wind whips through there. It probably is right now. It is really coming down out there. The first real rain we’ve had since the end of September. One good soaking won’t allow us to overcome an extreme drought, but you have to start somewhere.
