Grading in the Sunporch

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I was just thinking that academic types don’t mention grading often enough, especially in late April. A measly 50% of tweets and status updates from my network of peers mention grading–astonishingly low!

Right now I’m in the sunporch, grading. I would post about this to my Twitter account, but for this I need more than 140 characters. It’s a longer trip all the way around these ideas I’m having.

Here are a few of the grades FERPA will allow me to share:

  • B- to my deteriorated spelling skills. Here I thought “sun porch” was one word.
  • Make that a C+ because I had to look up “measly.”
  • F to the cooling fan on my five-year-old Vaio laptop because it sounds like a motorboat engine. All the time. The Family Finances Committee says my new home computer is on the list of “Things To Buy When In 2018 We Get These Student Loans Paid Off.” Fie!, fiscal conservatives!
  • C- to the rest of the laptop for getting me this far. I mean it: thanks!
  • C to the unsightly water-stained hole in the ceiling above my head. The exterior was repaired; the interior left like a monument to water damage, intact.
  • A to family, except, why is nobody home right now to nudge me through these fits of procrastination?
  • C- to Yoki, the dog so conflicted as to whine when inside because he wants out and to whine outside because he wants in. Any more whining and both of us will be crying. The C- also goes for that smell.
  • B+ to the bug carcasses in the shaded corner on the indoor/outdoor carpeting.
  • A to temperatures adequate to warrant grading in the sun porch on a Sunday afternoon.

Comfort Inventory 6

Reading Time: 2 minutes

In typical C.I. fashion, a list:

  • Is. asked to play this song over and over and over today.  And at
    lunch she kept saying, "Tee-ka-lee."
  • Grades. Check.
  • To cap the semester, a meeting tomorrow and a mock in-person interview
    on Friday. Mock: I am to sport a turtleneck and then all of my questioners
    heckle me about the answers when it’s over. Kidding aside, I’m grateful for
    the simulations.
  • In the spring I will be teaching an online section of WRT205 associated
    with University College.  I have some decisions to make.  Today
    I’ve been thinking about a focus on attitude: worldview, manner (a
    split of Burkean agency), and so on.  I saw something about Carol
    Dweck’s Mindset, but it also could tie in with a whole range of stuff:
    cool studies, believing/doubting, standpoint theory, perspective. 
    Due to my insufferable pre-course-configuring nomadism, tomorrow I will be thinking something else, no doubt. The semester begins
    January 12, which means I have until 11:30 p.m. on January 11th to make up
    my mind.
  • WRT195ers finished last week with Pecha Kucha presentations–re-makes of
    their six week sustained research projects.  The switch from the
    textually intensive "paper" to the visually intensive and improvised
    presentational-performance: a hit, and something I’d definitely like to do
    again. 
  • One of the presentations included the uncanny (and unintended)
    substitution of "digital naives" for "digital natives" (on a slide). I know
    Weinberger has mentioned "digital naives" before, but it was sort of a
    surprise fit here in that the point was made in the context of the adeptness
    of "digital natives."
  • My bags are packed and ready for MLA later this month.
  • No, no they’re not.  That’s a joke (a real side-splitter, I’m sure,
    for anyone both type A and on the market).  But I do have the itinerary
    for a trip embedded in another trip: first to Detroit by car, then to SF by
    plane, then back to Detroit by plane, and "home" to Syracuse by car.
  • Is. has been busy at the whiteboard sketching humanoids.

Sketch