Month: May 2011

The mountain of student papers is finally graded and all the grades are in. Thinking grades were due at 5:00 p.m. yesterday—not 11:00 a.m., as was the fact—I was late because one student had special dispensation to turn in assignments late. But finally all that ess aitch eye got done and officially stamped and filed.

A record number of students failed, two for plagiarizing but most simply because they stopped turning in papers. It’s interesting, the number of community college students who don’t drop when they can’t keep up with a course. On the surface, it would seem better to have a W on your transcript than a D or an F. Apparently, though, there’s a financial incentive: it appears that if they pretend to stay in a course, they get to keep scholarship or loan money that evidently would be forfeited if they dropped. This little bit of fraud is abetted by the District’s policy of allowing them to repeat courses several times and counting only the highest score in the GPA. Thus if you got an F in math and later managed a B, your grade-point average would reflect only the B.

From an instructorly point of view, one shouldn’t complain: it’s that many fewer papers to have to read.

From a taxpayer point of view, though, it seems wasteful. In the comp courses alone, 13% of the classmates failed for this reason.

Oh, well… As soon as grades were filed, it was on to indexing this year’s issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History. After plowing through that much student drivel, reading SMRH is actually refreshing! Yesterday I got through a well written piece on a recently discovered Vie of Isabelle of France, a thirteenth-century Franciscan réligieuse sainted because of the alleged miracles she could work. Medieval Europe was so strange that reading about it is like reading of the doings on another planet. It has a science-fictionlike character. To say life in Europe before the Renaissance was very, very different from our reality is to understate.

Meanwhile, I haven’t even begun the Arizona Book Publishing Association’s newsletter, which was due a week ago. And today I have to go to a meeting of our neighborhood group, for which I have agreed to work on a newsletter or write web content—don’t know which yet. And very soon now (like…today?) I need to start the course preps for the summer 101 and 102 classes. That’ll absorb another week of unpaid time. Ugh.

I’m about to slip the bonds of Evil Blackboard, creating new sites on WordPress.com for all three of my courses. The one for the 102s is already up and running—this semester’s bunch tested it for peer-reviewing drafts of their final endless paper, and it worked pretty well. For the purpose, it’s much easier than using Blackboard’s half-baked blog function, because in its clumsiness BB effectively “hides” responses to posts, forcing you to search twice in two different functions for every single student. In WP, all you have to do is run your eye down the page, or sign in as the admin and simply go to manage > comments to find their most recent work. That’s only one of several functions I think will be much simpler.

The other new strategy will be to establish Gmail accounts for each section and tell the students they have to use them to e-mail me and to submit their papers. This will organize all incoming student correspondence by section number, and it also will get it off my personal e-mail, which is swamped with trash forwarded from the college’s and the District’s wayyy tooo many departments.

Not only do these entities emit reams of irrelevant messages to everyone with a maricopa.edu address, employees are in the habit of hitting reply-all to every little self-congratulatory message, every announcement that someone’s spouse died, every invite to a retirement party, and on and on. The largest community college system in the country (vaster even than the Great Desert University, with over 70,000 students the largest pretend-university in the land), the Maricopa County Community College District has a lot of employees, all of them yakking to each other irrelevantly over the e-mail system. The result is that student correspondence (and other important matters) gets lost in the shuffle.

I’d like to unforward the college’s e-mail, once I get the students established in Gmail, and then give my real-world address to the division chair, the division secretary, and the few friends I’ve made over there. However, occasional important messages do come through, and having to visit the college’s system every day in search of those would still require me to sift through all that trash, while adding an extra layer of sign-in hassle.

Meanwhile, several efforts by the magazine-writing students are good enough to press into service as guest posts, and so in the next week or so, while I deal with the mass of urgent work that didn’t get done while I was grading papers, I’ll be running some of those here.

Welp, the sun is up and so I’d better get going. Later!

Images:

Bust of Aristotle. Copy of a bronze by Lysippus. Photo by Jastrow. Public domain.
Sainte Isabelle de France par Louis Desprez (1841), statue refaite d’après un original gothique. Porche de Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, Paris. Photo by Jastrow. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.