I have GOT to buy a new desktop!!!!!!!!!!!
The iMac has virtually ground to a stop, so antiquated is it and so clogged with whatever built-in obsolescence bugs cause old computers to slide toward entropy. I’ll bet I’ve sat here watching it choke and struggle as it trudges along for a good hour. And god how i hate having my time wasted this way!
One mistake, and you’ve got to do it all over again, and it takes ten minutes just to get the program you need to reload. I’ve been trying to build this semester’s course packet from a number of PDFs for the past goddamn HOUR—the job should have taken all of ten minutes at the outside.
I may just have to give up. Now I can’t get the damn computer to respond at all.
Spent the entire day yesterday, yea verily until 12:30 this morning, revamping the website and rewriting course materials, using the much zippier MacBook. Along the way, I learned that the newer versions of Apple’s “Preview” program will manipulate PDFs with as much or more panache than my decrepit version of Acrobat Professional. This is good: it means I don’t need to buy a new version anytime soon. Acrobat is an expensive piece of software for people who earn $2400 a semester.
However, the data I need—and there’s a lot of it—is on the old computer, which is the only one that will speak to the printer. And that terminal is too old to support any fancy new Mac operating systems.
Welp, the actual work of this semester’s 102 sections is hugely simplified. When it comes to serious grading, I’ve about halved the workload:
• Eliminated all but one draft
• Killed off all peer reviews
• Thereby quashed the need to have students interact online through blog comments or forums
• Found videos to substitute for lectures
• Assigned oral progress reports at three points during the semester
• Gave students deadlines for the library labs, after which they get no credit for attending
• Required one-on-one conferences at the end of the semester, for the 2,500-word research paper that’s such a monster for most of them
In fact, I’ll only have to grade three sets of papers and one draft. The rest of the stuff will entail my sitting back and watching them perform.
The result of assigning rafts of busywork is, as usual, that a student would have to be brain-dead or AWOL all semester to fail the course. If you scored 50% on each of the three actual papers but religiously performed all the busywork and extra credit, you’d end up with a final score of 69%. This means a student could get a D (60% to 69%) on any of the three real assignments, fail the other two, and still potentially pass the course with a C.
As a practical matter, students who fail the essays don’t do all the other assignments. But in theory it could happen.
I don’t know how to interpret that. On the one hand, it’s deeply demoralizing: to get our students to pass a dumb-bell course like freshman comp (which should be, shall we say, minimally challenging no matter what the instructor chose to do with it), we have to pack the thing with mickeymouse bullshit. But if we choose not to do that, at least half the students will fail or drop, and that seems counterproductive, too.
Truth to tell, I have tried to build some rigor into this semester’s course. They’re going to be terrified when they learn they have to write on topics of my choice on a subject of my choice: Prohibition & the Great Depression. Their paper topics are already assigned (I’ve dreamed up more than enough to cover all three papers for all 50 students), and they will hate it, hate it, hate it that they can’t recycle the sappy post-adolescent maunderings that got them As and Bs in their high-school social studies and English classes.
The semester will begin with the proposition that writing is a tool for learning: that we write research papers so we can learn things and communicate what we learn to others. And this semester we’re going to learn about a period in American history that has great relevance to our own times.
In addition to writing three researched and documented papers on some pretty bracing topics, they will also make three oral presentations (one of them 15 to 20 minutes long) describing what they have learned along the way. This, I hope, will force at least some of them to reflect on and synthesize some of the stuff they encounter as they wade their way through the shoals of early twentieth-century history.
Exterminating the drafts and peer review works to a secondary advantage: now exactly zero student interaction will happen on my external website. All that will appear there will be the course materials, weekly learning modules, and an interminable list of links. This should overcome any objection the District may have to off-network sites. There’s no way any interchange (licit or illicit) between student and faculty can occur; nothing that is graded appears there; and nothing that could even remotely offend FERPA can happen there.
God. It’s after noon. I’ve spent half the morning watching stupid little mandalas spin. WordPress.com kicked me off and now I can’t get back in. DamNATION!
And now that it’s finally let me back online after three tries, the damn thing has lost page content I entered and saved earlier this morning. Now I have to do that ALL OVER AGAIN!!!!!!! What ELSE has it deleted?
Time to feed the dog and then drive down to the Safeway and pick up a bottle of bourbon. This wagon isn’t goin’ where I wanna go!