Whether you are ready for it or not, your work schedules always march on. For me, that means grades and feedback. Always grades and helpful feedback. In one class, the students are tasked with conducting an audit of a social media platform of their choice. Last night, a draft version of that audit was due. And so I am reading those, trying to offer some constructive criticism, and then catch errors, and then finding creative ways to point them out, but not obviously. (Catch your own errors. I’m grading you, not editing you.)

Next week the final audit is due, so this is timely. Not every professor in the world is timely with their feedback, but I make the effort. (For those eventual weeks when there’s too much going on, I can apologize and remind you that usually this is a 24- or 48-hour turnaround, but I have this other work of my own, you see…)

For that group, it is all coming to a conclusion next week. Their audit draft will be in their hands by Thursday. The final audit and their final exam are due by this time next week. Altogether, that’s 45 percent of the class.

Meanwhile, other students are plugging in another along with quizzes and discussions and slide decks and outlines …

So I’ll stay busy this week and next.

And also start mentally preparing classes for the spring term.

I should just stay in the yard.

What if I did my best thinking out there, but I’ve just not given it a chance? What is thinking, anyway? What is thought? Does it arrive fully formed? Or do you tease it out under the moonlight, while doing random quotidian chores and you aren’t even focused on the thing? And isn’t that just another version of something arriving, fully formed?

Oh, and here come the Canada geese. You will know them by their honking. There is a wildlife refugee over in the direction from whence they are flying. We’re just under the regular seasonal flight path here, so this flyover happens a lot this time of year. I wish I knew, for purposes of alternatively romanticizing their habits and scientifically considering dietary options, precisely where they are going. There’s a creek just a mile from here, as the geese fly, and maybe the dining there is good. Or maybe they are heading all the way out to the river, or some other slough.

I didn’t notice it until I opened the photo here, but if you look at the bottom right corner, there’s a branch of that distant oak in the background that perfectly traces the outline of the giant shrub in the foreground. That’s the sort of thing that would be too cute if you painted it, not worth the effort if you tried to compose the photo that way, but perfectly charming when it is an accident.

It’s like the branch of the tree is telling those geese, Thataway!

OK, back to grading.