Entry tags:
you know that the finals grading is going well when...
...you get five exams turned to the correct set of pages in before you see a student who has written a desperate apology for his lack of studying and explained he stayed up to 4am the night before and then spent the intervening day working on a homework assignment that he was supposed to have completed before he left class the previous week. I hate notes like this because while I have a lot of compassion for students who are, for whatever reason, struggling... at this point in the semester, there is literally nothing I can do to help this student, I know my instructor has tried to figure out how to meet his needs all semester, and at the end of the day passing him out of sheer awkwardness and pity isn't actually doing him (or anyone else) any favors. I would rather set my students up for success, thank you, and I know for a fact my instructor feels the same way. Bless her.
Incidentally, yesterday's talk went pretty great, inasmuch as anything could given that technical difficulties meant that I didn't have the correct HDMI-to-VGA converter for the screen: I had forgotten that the room this seminar is in contains neither a built-in PC (as I am used to using in lecture rooms) nor any kind of video hookup that anyone has on a laptop these days: it only has a single, sad, VGA port. I could have sworn my boss, who runs the seminar series, had purchased a VGA-to-HDMI converter to sit in the room, but nope--so one of my labmates, bless him, volunteered to run to the front desk of the next building to go borrow a converter from them.
I own a converter now that will live in my bag so this never happens again, thank you.
After I stared, dead-eyed, at the audience for ten minutes after the talk had been supposed to start--I'd figured this problem out ten minutes prior but not been able to find a converter in that time--my labmate got back with a converter in hand, and we spent another ten minutes finding out that my laptop was incompatible with the slide display for some (probably Linux-related) reason.
Eventually I offered sheepishly to sign up for an early talk in the spring semester or possibly to convey my talk through the medium of interpretive dance, to which my boss pointed out "These aren't mutually exclusive..." I wound up giving a quick chalk talk instead, which went surprisingly well. Got a compliment on grace under pressure from another faculty member, even, which I am going to take with a warm sense of mortified gratefulness.
Anyway, I'm doing better housewise--got a storage unit in the front yard, getting nice burly men to move my shit into it, more on that later--and I've survived last week no worse for wear, so I can more or less breathe again for a bit. Finals are due this week, though, so I'll be spending much of my weekend grading. Fortunately I have time.
Oof. I'm getting a cup of tea.
Incidentally, yesterday's talk went pretty great, inasmuch as anything could given that technical difficulties meant that I didn't have the correct HDMI-to-VGA converter for the screen: I had forgotten that the room this seminar is in contains neither a built-in PC (as I am used to using in lecture rooms) nor any kind of video hookup that anyone has on a laptop these days: it only has a single, sad, VGA port. I could have sworn my boss, who runs the seminar series, had purchased a VGA-to-HDMI converter to sit in the room, but nope--so one of my labmates, bless him, volunteered to run to the front desk of the next building to go borrow a converter from them.
I own a converter now that will live in my bag so this never happens again, thank you.
After I stared, dead-eyed, at the audience for ten minutes after the talk had been supposed to start--I'd figured this problem out ten minutes prior but not been able to find a converter in that time--my labmate got back with a converter in hand, and we spent another ten minutes finding out that my laptop was incompatible with the slide display for some (probably Linux-related) reason.
Eventually I offered sheepishly to sign up for an early talk in the spring semester or possibly to convey my talk through the medium of interpretive dance, to which my boss pointed out "These aren't mutually exclusive..." I wound up giving a quick chalk talk instead, which went surprisingly well. Got a compliment on grace under pressure from another faculty member, even, which I am going to take with a warm sense of mortified gratefulness.
Anyway, I'm doing better housewise--got a storage unit in the front yard, getting nice burly men to move my shit into it, more on that later--and I've survived last week no worse for wear, so I can more or less breathe again for a bit. Finals are due this week, though, so I'll be spending much of my weekend grading. Fortunately I have time.
Oof. I'm getting a cup of tea.