I was caught up on all my marking. That my chapter draft was complete (heck, that I even had time to edit it!). That the snow predicted for tonight would hold off or wimp out. That I had about eight extra hours of sleep or the prospect of same sometime soon. That the term was […]
While others enjoyed Thankgiving, it was a normal week’s end here at the Abode. I put aside my grading duties for the past four days to
take care of some medical issues in the family
play an evening of Everquest
shop for housewares (we have new dinner plates and wine glasses!)
spiffy up the abode
host some friends and their […]
I used to feel a bit like the invisible person in my university (this was helped by a string of long-time employees never recognizing me at all, even though I was the longest-serving woman in my program). I realized that I don’t feel that way anymore; I haven’t in several years. One of the reasons? […]
Thanks to my awesome graduate student, marking has progressed on multiple fronts. I finished another stack of project proposals for one class and the quizzes for another while graduate student marked one more set of tutorials. Now if I can get a pile of tutorials in the first class along with the bibliographic essays from […]
Grading Jail is really, really boring. Except for the interest generated by student work (which has been generally of good quality, whew!).
It’s just the repetitive nature of it all that’s got me down — open another file, write in comments, record mark, repeat. *sigh*
That and this damnable lingering cold. It goes without saying that I’m […]
Something hijacked my email signature yesterday in the University’s Groupwise system. It changed my signature text to a spam message and toggled the signature to always be on (which is why I noticed after sending out only three emails today because “WTF, why am I not being prompted to say Y/N to signature?” made me […]
I do not live in China. I live in Canada. Your own geolocation software knows that!
Please to stop with the serving me up search results and blogger headers in a Chinese script. It makes me nervous that you’re going to start censoring my results. Please to stop with the starting me at a map of […]
Well, obviously the only newsworthy part of uncovering a great European Neolithic settlement that revises our thinking about the start of metallurgy back about five hundred years, provides strong evidence for an active family life and valued role for children in the culture is that Prehistoric women had passion for fashion.
/headdesk
Sometimes it hurts to be […]
In the medieval history quizzes (you remember, for that class of nigh-unto 100 students?) I am marking, I have sequential “fill-in-the-blanks” that are properly answered with “The Fourth Crusade” and “The Fourth Lateran Council.”
1) In 1204 the leaders of __________________ made a “detour” and conquered Constantinople instead.
2) Innocent III presided over _______________ in 1215 […]
So I’m taking breaks from marking over the last two days and tackling Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?.
What a complete joy this is to read! It’s neither politicized screed nor overwrought posing. It’s approachable, affable, insightful and engaging. You get the feeling for what Bérubé’s like in the classroom — the type […]