02
Oct 24
Oct 24
Productive, but not nearly enough
The grading continues. And it will continue later tonight. It will also continue tomorrow.
If it goes any longer than that I will begin to evaluate my grading. My self-assessment might not be a positive one in that eventuality.
But I should give myself some grace. I started this round of grading with some 70-plus items to grade. About 34 of them require real feedback. The assignment includes an element where they have to ask a question of something they’re reading, and some of the questions are pretty easy to answer based terms or something else the class has addressed. Some I’m fielding are of that pleasantly squishy almost-formed social science question that an undergrad can ask, the sort that actually opens the door to something quite important. I try not to revert to the grad school ways of getting to an almost-answer. Some of the questions are purely philosophical and then I think, this should be asked in a proper classroom, on a day when the halls are quiet and the sky is gloomy and you can make the snap decision that, no, this question is much more interesting than what I’d planned to talk about today, so we’re doing 40 minutes on the politics of art in a society of mass culture.
While not padding my feedback, I am averaging … a lot of words per response. Probably too much, but you know how it is when you get on a role explaining early 20th century media philosophy, or seminal sociologists or artificial intelligence. The words just flow, and soon you’re wondering, Will this particular student appreciate a newspaper column’s worth of thoughts on their assignment? Then you have to trim it. Getting back down to that 200- or 300-word range is the time intensive part.
The students were reading a paper that crossed Erving Goffman and Walter Benjamin, and by the end of it all, I find myself hoping I don’t come off a bit like the random guy in Good Will Hunting.
I’ve now read, and re-read this piece that I might actually understand it. And then not. And then truly grasp it.
So I went to campus. One part of my job is teaching. Another part is grading. Still a third part of my job is to receive training in this or that. I’ve had three rounds of ethics training in a calendar year. I’ve watched webinars of the privacy of this and the security of that. I have two more in the queue, because someone decided there wasn’t enough to be done. And today I had an in-person session, QPR training.
That’s Question, Persuade and Refer to you. And it was 90 minutes of talking about interacting with someone in a mental health crisis. There was also role playing. We had three minutes of role playing, which is not enough time to work your way through the scenario that was presented. I turned to the guy sitting next to me and invited him to pair up. He was in psychology.
Great, I said, a ringer!
“Experimental psychology,” he said. “If I never saw anyone at work I’d be happy.”
Or something like that, I was too busy trying to figure out how I would navigate through very specific hypothetical to take notes. In the end, we felt we’d done our part to help the troubled young man in the imagined scenario. And then we talked some more as a group, because this was 90 minutes.
It wasn’t that bad, but you could see where it might be a charged or otherwise difficult sort of conversation. At the end, the woman running the thing did something fun. She made everyone in the room say something they were looking forward to doing in the next 24 hours. A palate cleanser.
The thing of it was that everyone there had these interesting plans. Except for the guy who had to teach that night and all day tomorrow, so he was looking forward to sleeping tonight. When it came to me, I lamented that everyone else had these interesting plans. I was going to grade. Maybe ride my bike. Definitely pet the cats.
The woman who went after me was looking forward to hanging out with her chicken.
I went back to the office and did some grading, did some reading, and worked on the desk. It was a productive afternoon.
We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, the feature which finds me riding my bike around the county, hunting for historical markers. This is the 50th installment, and the 82nd marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series.
Sadly, I’m not sure why this merited inclusion. No one really spells out the history for us. And what even is the historic part of a local courthouse, anyway? The signs give nothing away.
Just 702 feet away is the truly historic Old Salem County Courthouse (1735), ” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>which we saw previously. That is the nation’s second-oldest courthouse in continuous use.
And a block away is this building. A court which is still in its first century of existence, sitting in a dour building which looks like it is hoping will be its last century.
Municipal Court, what are you gonna do?
Next time, we’ll see a sturdy 19th century brick home. It, like all the previous installments, will be better than this one. If you have missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.
01
Oct 24
Oct 24
Welcome to Catober!
Welcome to Catober, where we daily highlight the kitties, because once a week isn’t enough. They also get their own posts in October, because they slipped that into their contract when we weren’t looking. So, I’ll take turns highlighting each cat. Tomorrow we’ll have some amazing Phoebe cuteness. You can see the full collection of lovely cat poses right here.
I’m mid-thigh in grading things. Fortunately not hip deep, and only that deep because I stayed up far too late — even for me — grading stuff. And so today I graded stuff. Tonight, I will grade other things.
At this rate I’ll be grading things all day and night tomorrow. I believe I have it paced out so I can finish grading on Thursday. Just in time for this weekend’s stuff to start rolling in for grading next week …
Whoever set this schedule up deserves a talking to. Me, it was me. I deserve a talking to.
Here’s a video I shot on yesterday’s bike ride. There are a lot of fields turning a beautiful, bright yellow just now. I might have caught these just a few minutes too late in the evening for the color to really pop. Still lovely in their own way.
Since it is the beginning of the month, we should check in on the mileage. September was a good month, my best September ever, and it turned into the fourth most miles in any one month, be they ever so humble. And we can see the progression through the first nine months of the year on this neat little chart.
The blue line is this year, the red one is last year, and the steady green one is a simple what if projection of doing 10 miles per day. I’ve been trailing behind that, sadly, since mid July. Now I’m making progress and I’ll be back over the green line before you read this.
And there are some humble, yet cool-to-me milestones coming up on the bike. You’ll be underwhelmed.
I’ll be whelmed.
That’ll be the extent of it.
Let’s get back to the Re-Listening project for a brief update. This is the one where I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. At some point, I figured I could write about it to pad out the site with a bit of content — share some videos and the like, but these aren’t reviews, because no one cares. So let’s get to it, so I can get caught up. (I’m only behind by three albums, I think.)
We’ll return to 2006 or so, when I picked up a copy of Live’s 1999 record, “The Distance to Here.” It was the band’s fifth studio album, it went platinum in a month, debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 chart, topped the charts in three other countries, and settled into the top 10 in a half dozen more. They promoted three singles from the record, all which became at least moderately successful on the Alternative Airplay chart. But it never really worked for me. This is the last Live album I bought, and by the time Ed Kowalczyk left the band a decade later, I had no idea.
But I have two things here. This works a whole lot better now, for me, than it did back then. It could be a small doses record at the very least. And one or two of these tunes could be sticky — which is sometimes good and sometimes “get out of my head.”
The other thought was centered around this show at a concert. I saw the band at a festival when they were touring on this record. They closed their set with this song, and they were working out the instrumentation so that, one-by-one, the band slipped away off the darkened stage. Then there was only Kowalczyk, and the whole sweaty crowd was singing along and he stopped strumming his guitar, they kept singing, and he waved and walked off. It was better than this version, which came about some years later, but similar.
Kowalczyk rejoined the band after a few years away. And then he fired the band. They were all, as I recall, southeastern Pennsylvania high school classmates who got their break soon after, and became a 10-years-later overnight success. And now, they’re taking turns suing each other or some such. Kowalczyk is touring with the name, but all new band mates. They just came off the road from a midwestern swing last week.
In the next installation of the Re-Listening project, we’ll try out a pretty decent tribute album I’d entirely forgotten about — which is entirely the point.
And now, back to grading. And next for you, more Catober!
