The Shivers

Fall semester: day sixty-five

I've been unnaturally cold for the past two days. I can't really explain why. Most of the day on West campus yesterday -- especially when I went outside to smoke -- I was trembling with chills, chattering teeth, shivering, etc.


I tend to get cold a lot more easily when I'm ill or sleep-deprived, but I slept ten hours last night, and the illness I suffered at the beginning of the week was, apparently, nothing more than a 24-hour bug of some kind (or, again, mild food poisoning). After Tuesday morning, I felt fine and was no longer dizzy. So, I'd slept. I'd eaten yesterday -- energy bars, coffee, and tea. I wasn't ill. There was no reason for me to feel unnaturally cold. Yet there I was, shaking and shivering. I am, of course, getting burnt out and worn down; I always do at the end of the semester. I am quite glad that it's the weekend (at least for me) so that I don't have to set my alarm and can wake up whenever I feel like it. It always feels as if I have something else to do, and usually that's the case -- there's no true peace for me anymore at this time of the semester. Assignments are coming in one after another, and there's always a mountain of papers to grade, assign, collect and grade again, etc.

My 210 class isn't exactly happy with me. They've had six assignments thus far, and the first five were pretty easy. The latest one, the Resume/Cover Letter (which I mentioned here before) I graded today, and many of them did quite poorly on it. Consequently, they'll now have to use their one allowed rewrite on it if they want to do well on it...at the same time they're also producing their mammoth, 12-to-18-page (average) final assignment of the semester, their Proposal/Grant Request. In a normal semester that wasn't an 8-week course, they'd have the better part of a month to do this. In a course that's 8 weeks long, when I'm out of town for Thanksgiving week and then when we return it's the last week of class, that simply isn't possible. And they're not too happy about that.

"I don't like it either," I told them last night, "but I have to follow the lesson plans the way the department has them set up in order to fit all the assignments in. Keep in mind that I have to grade twenty 12-to-18-page reports as well; you're not the only ones working here."

This is true; I don't necessarily care if they take sympathy on me or not, but I do feel it for them. It's really shitty the way the class runs because of this schedule -- it's fine for the smaller assignments, but for the really long and intricate ones it doesn't change, and it's not like I can extend deadlines or change around timeframes when the schedule is set by the university. Can I tweak lesson plans? Yes. I've had to do that a lot when it comes to this class. Can I outright delete assignments or magically add another few weeks to the course calendar? No, no I cannot.

"Look at it this way," I said. "If you were taking the sixteen-week version of the class, this Proposal/Grant Request assignment would be two different assignments -- as it is originally set up in the workbook -- and each of them would be 10-15 pages minimum. So, you're getting off a little lighter than other 210 students would."

This is also true. It may not make them feel better, but it's true. The workload for 210 is heavier than many of the grad school courses I took -- heavier than 700-and-800-level courses. That's not a joke. I'm doing the best I can with it and I'm trying to help them every step of the way on it to make it as easy as possible for them. I think most of them recognize that, but I also know that they don't necessarily like it, which I can't really help. It's the luck of the draw, good or bad, and it's the "luck" of the fall semester's scheduling. Taking a second-8-weeks class is brutal.

I've tried to schedule things as gingerly as possible, but again, there's not a whole lot of time to do it. As a result, I introduced that massive assignment three nights ago, and I collect drafts of it -- from everyone -- on Tuesday. They can choose whether or not they want me to keep the draft and grade it as their final copy, or if they'll keep it themselves and turn it in two days later on next Thursday after they've made more finalized corrections and additions. The object here is to give them a rewrite on it without them actually doing a rewrite, and for them to have the best copy possible to turn in whenever they do give me a copy to grade. The bonus for turning it in early is that I won't take off for any errors they find and fix and/or any other corrections they make in peer-review during Tuesday's class, and they'll get my helpful pointers on how to shorten it and condense it down to ten minutes at most for their Oral Presentations...which they immediately start doing as soon as we get back from Thanksgiving. If they wait to turn it in next Thursday, they're on their own for edits and the like, and they won't get my feedback on their finished assignments until I give their graded copies back. Copies which they can't rewrite anyway, because they'll be doing Oral Presentations on them and then the class will end.

So, yeah. It's a shitty situation all around, but I'm trying to give them as many concessions as possible, and help them out as much as possible. I don't want to see any of my students fail the course. Most of them are doing pretty well, with the exceptions of the awful Resumes/Cover Letters that they'll more than likely rewrite and fix up over the weekend. Most of them just had a lot of careless mistakes -- spelling errors, missing dates, missing job experience, strange organization, or they were just left unfinished. 700 out of 1000 points have now been given out in the class -- the Proposal/Grant Request is 150, their Oral Presentation 100, and their attendance/participation is 50. The grading scale is pretty simple. It also doesn't leave any room for error. I've given out a total of 25 bonus points over the semester for people who dressed up for Halloween and who went to the Writing Center as well, so it's not like I'm not trying to be nice and helpful.

In contrast, my 011 and 101 classes are clicking along pretty smoothly. I collect another set of papers in my 011 class on Monday, and then we cover as much MLA stuff as possible and do workshopping in my 101 class this coming week.

I love teaching all three classes; really, I do. I love teaching in general, which you may already know, but I didn't know if I'd like the 011 and 210 since I'd never taught them before. I do. They're all enjoyable classes, and I just want to see everyone succeed. That's totally all I'm looking for in my classes. If my students show up and do the work, I give them every chance possible for them to be successful, and most of them rise to the occasion.

Today, the MFA students who graduate in December took their comps, including a few close friends. I feel for them, I really do; I know how stressful that is. It's not fun. It's not enjoyable. I did not like it. And I especially didn't like waiting for three weeks (or however long it was) before I found out my results. My own comps weren't as bad as I expected them to be, but they were by no means easy or pleasurable to get through. But, again, keep in mind that there have only been two or three students over the course of the past ten years or more who have failed their comps, and ten or more students take them every semester. Parker's comps, the MA comps, are a week from today -- the MAs do it on a different date than the MFAs -- and they're the reason he and I aren't going to the KU/WVU football game tomorrow as we'd originally planned earlier this fall. It can't be helped, really; I don't blame him. Parker, for as incredibly, ludicrously intelligent as he is, still gets stressed and obsessive about studying for comps just like the rest of us did/do. Again, I've been there -- I wasn't going to tell him to snap out of it or anything like that, because I know what it's like. I've let him remain laser-focused and have tried not to bother him much over the course of the past week or so, as he holes up and prepares -- only coming out of his office to teach and go home, still dressed to the nines but now more often unshaven than not. I totally feel for him, as well as for the MFAs who took theirs today.

I haven't heard anything else about my loans and forbearance; I got what appears to be an automated email response from the loan servicer because I sent off that email, but that's about it. As it is now Friday night (and thus, past the "two business days" they mentioned it would take to get back to me, I'm guessing that their automated response was my response, which really pisses me off, as I asked specific questions that I wanted a human to answer. I suppose I'm going to wait until I exit my grace period on Sunday and see what happens then (they'll tell me more info after that, almost guaranteed) and weigh my options on what to do. If nothing else, I can redo the forbearance paperwork and fax it in, again, on Monday or Wednesday. The English department does have a working fax machine that gets used pretty often, apparently, and the administrators told me it would be fine for me to use it. Upon telling my mother my dilemma (and her reading my last post here), she assured me that it'll get sorted out one way or another -- her way of telling me not to stress out about it. I just have to wait, but waiting (of course) isn't helping my stress levels; especially not when I have to wait yet another week before I get my next paycheck, when I'll have more bills coming in over the course of the next few days, and when I had to do my grocery shopping last night on the way home just so that I had enough food in the house that was different to eat over the next week or so.

In reality, this weekend is much like any other -- I have lesson planning and chores to do, as always, and football, kitty-time, and Daisy-time will be involved. I do, however, feel somewhat more detached from reality than I've been in a long time. My brain is basically fried. I'm forgetting the simplest things, like things I have to grade or what books to take with me to class. I've caught myself driving to campus while asking, aloud, what day it is, and if I'm sure I'm driving to the right campus at the right time to teach. In my sleep, my dreams are wildly erratic and crazy; things that are charged with tension and oddities, yet things I can never remember more than two or three minutes after waking up. The dreams seem stronger when I take the sleeping pills (if I do) on Monday and Wednesday nights. Underneath the surface of everything, I'm a mess who's barely holding everything together, but trying desperately to do so. I find myself thinking fatalistic thoughts, such as "all it would take would be one little thing to go wrong -- a blown part on my car, a paycheck that got screwed up, a bill lost in the mail -- to make everything crash down around me and end my life as I know it." The sad part is that's true. I've been living so long on mediocre luck, guts, and gumption that if something were to go wrong, I don't know if I could deal with it. I can never think completely straight, or think completely rationally, when I have a million things going on -- and between now and December 13 it's all only going to get worse as we rush headlong into the end of the semester and finals week. I have but eight teaching days left spread over my three classes, really -- next week and the last week of classes. Eight days to collect five different sets of papers, grade them, give a final, grade it, and then sit in for and grade Oral Presentations. It's insane. No wonder I'm beginning to go gray at my temples (no, that's not a joke; it's there).

There are twenty students in that 210 class, as mentioned before. They're all giving those Oral Presentations during the last week of classes. The class is scheduled to run from 7:20 to 10, which means that if it were to run the full time on the first night of that week, we could fit in sixteen of the twenty presentations if they were a full ten minutes each. Some may be a few minutes shorter, some may be a few minutes longer. This means, conceivably, we could get through all of them on the night of the 3rd, and wouldn't have to come back in the night of the 5th (since the class would be over), even if those who absolutely needed to go home left at 10 and the rest of us stayed late to finish them up, it would be so much better than to drag everyone back in there for an extra night two days later -- requiring me to stay on campus on that day for eight hours after I give my 101 students' final exam but before being in class for twenty or thirty minutes tops for the last three or four of them. Get what I'm saying here? I'd really, really like to be able to go home after my 101 students' exam is finished at 11:05 AM instead of sticking around until 9PM because four or five students need to present their reports to the class...a class which, for the rest of them who have already presented, is already over -- they'd basically be coming in against their wills just so that they're not counted absent.

I worked it into the assignment that we'll indeed come in on the 5th to finish up if we have to, that it's not optional if we need to do it, but I'm going to check and see how late the building will remain open after my class is scheduled to end at 10, and how long, exactly, these presentations will run. If I'm lucky, we may get to start class early and hit the ground running -- I don't think there are any classes in there before mine, and if there are, they're done well before 6:40 or so (I've been in there around that time setting up things). I'll check with the front office to see what the schedule is like in there during that week. I've also made it very clear in the assignment that if they skip class on the presentation day, that's on them -- they may not (and probably won't) get another shot and/or time to do it during class hours, and to get the points would have to come to my office hours either on main campus on Wednesday that week, or after I give my 101 final on West campus (it ends, again, at 11:05 AM) to give me their presentation in person.

Basically, I'm trying to make it as easy as possible for all of them to get done that first night if I can. It's so much easier for everyone involved, even if it means that class starts a little early and/or ends a little late. I know how students think -- nobody's going to want to come in on that second night of class if they can possibly avoid it, especially as it's the last day of the semester.

So, that's really what's going on in my life right now. I will, of course, update you with anything else as it comes in.