Interesting, Part II

Spring semester: day twenty-eight

The weather forecast for the weekend is not looking good. It was updated while I slept (shortly) last night; a weaker system with sleet/ice is coming through tonight, apparently, and then the temperatures will plummet again (as in, below zero) as this storm predicted -- now for Saturday night and Sunday -- drops "measurable, plowable" snow on us. How much? Nobody will say yet. I haven't seen a single accumulation prediction model yet, though I would assume they'll tell us by tomorrow or Saturday, obviously.

Again, it doesn't affect me much at all unless they don't clear off the roads by Tuesday morning, but it's fascinating to see the development of storm systems and to follow them from beginning to end. Daisy calls me a weather nerd, and (generally speaking) she's right in that regard. Also, following the weather is about the only somewhat exciting thing to do here in Kansas. It's not like Newton has a jumpin', swingin' nightlife when the town is populated primarily by senior citizens and we have one of the largest small-town police forces I've seen anywhere. We don't even have a Kmart.

Since I don't have anywhere to go and have very little of consequence to do this weekend, my plans are to stop at Walmart on the way home from teaching this morning (to get the groceries I need for the next week or two), then to put the car in the garage, eat something, and go back to bed. I told Daisy last night that this was my plan of action for the day, and I'll probably end up sticking pretty closely to it. This morning's 102 class will be simple, though it won't necessarily be short -- it's their workshop day, and we have four copies to go through. It will probably take most of our class time because of that. Of course, I always tend to look forward to the end of class on Thursdays, because once that class ends, my weekend begins.

I'm wearing most of the same clothing I wore to teach last night, with the exceptions that I've changed shoes and pants (the pants I'd been wearing, one of Dad's pairs of pants, need to be washed). I'm wearing the same shirt and hooded sweatshirt simply because of laziness, because I didn't see anyone last night who will see me this morning, and well, because it's so cold that I don't want to freeze for three minutes if I were to take them off to change into something else. I have nobody to impress on Thursday mornings; I see my students and the West campus administrator, and that's it.

I did have to brush all of the snow off the back of my car last night before leaving to teach, though everywhere else that the sun touched yesterday melted everything off. My car, when it's parked in my driveway, is almost perpetually in the shade (at least in the winter, anyway). The bonus of this is that it never gets to be super-hot inside it in the summer when it's parked there, but the drawback is that when it snows, if I leave it outside, I always have to clear all the snow off of it (at least the back half of it, anyway).

As mentioned above, it is again very cold this morning; the temperature on my weather app says it's 18 outside and feels like 6. I believe it; it's pretty cold in the house right now, despite the fact that I've cranked the furnace up a lot higher than usual to make it warmer in here. I will, of course, turn it back down when I leave. I didn't get my electric bill yesterday, but I do know it's coming; it can't be that far off. And with the cold snaps we've been having I doubt that it'll be much lower than last month's bill. On the plus side, with the larger than expected paycheck I'll get tomorrow, I'll be able to pay it without waiting several weeks to get enough money in my bank account. I told Daisy last night that it will also be nice to go to Walmart today and actually be able to get some of the stuff I need without fretting and trying to budget and re-budget everything before I get up to the cash register, or looking at my list and saying to myself nope, can't afford that today, so it'll have to wait.

Last night's 210 class was a blast. I've mentioned before that I love teaching English 210 because it's a really straightforward, easy class to teach -- the drawback of it, of course, is that the class can be really, really boring if it's full of uptight and/or stiff students with no sense of fun or humor. The class I have this semester is wonderful; there are eight of them, all of them are vocal, do the work and have fun with it, understand the lessons I'm teaching, and if they have questions, they ask them. They don't give me shit, they don't make excuses as to why their work can't be turned in on time, and they are all generally fun students to teach. Because of that, and because of the unique way the class is structured as a once-a-week night class, I can play it loose with the assignments and the scheduling, and I can have fun. I could do that last semester in my 210 class as well, but that class had twenty students and it was an eight-week course, so the assignments came one after another, one after another, all the way through those eight weeks while some of them struggled to keep up.

Last night was one of the best classes of my teaching career. They're working on their Public Service Announcement assignment, and I told them to be creative and to have fun with it as long as they fulfill the requirements of the assignment itself. To those ends, I have students writing PSAs about orc attacks, zombie survival advice, and "beavers: grizzly bears of the lake." Not kidding, folks. I like this; I appreciate creativity, of course, and as long as they're hitting the beats and are fulfilling those assignment requirements, I do encourage them to have fun with it. The rest of the assignments in the class are rather boring for the most part, even though I do everything I can to keep the class fun and high-energy. The textbooks are even more boring, to be honest with you, and they don't tend to help much with the assignments at hand -- a lot of the stuff in them is "no shit," common-sense advice on business writing. Some of the assignments in the class (well, at least one of them) aren't even in the 210 books; the lesson plan I have and use, and have modified slightly over the past year, has a resume and cover letter assignment on it -- that's not in the workbook or list of assignments for the class, but it has been incorporated into the lesson plans of basically everyone who's taught 210 over the course of the past few years, without any of us really knowing who originated said assignment. I use it personally to take the place of reading/homework assignments and quizzes, because it gives them a useful skill as well as keeps me from having to type up and make copies of quizzes and homework assignments for them, let alone grade said assignments and quizzes.

The PSA assignments come in next week (last night we went through drafts and did mock presentations), and I told my students to keep an eye on the weather over the weekend, since at this point who knows when/if/how much snow we'll get with this storm. The university, over the past few years, has become a lot more serious and pre-emptively cautious when it comes to closing down for bad weather, so if we get a ton of snow on Sunday it wouldn't surprise me if they were to shut down on Monday. Again, it won't and/or shouldn't affect me or my classes I'm teaching, but still. Given the road conditions a full four or five days after the last storm, I'm watching everything with a careful eye.

So, that's my day. Teaching this morning, going to Walmart, coming home, eating something, and then probably going to bed shortly thereafter. I haven't eaten anything since early yesterday afternoon -- I wasn't hungry when I got home last night, so I talked to Daisy for a bit, answered a few student emails, and went directly to bed. This means that by the time I return to the house in about, oh, four hours or so, I will more than likely be famished. I'm already sort of hungry, but after only getting about four hours of quality rest last night, if I eat something before I go to teach it will just make me want to immediately go back to bed -- and, obviously, that's a bad thing.