mimsy and outgrabe

Sack O' Papers That's right. One class down. Freshman Composition grades are FINISHED -- oh, with the exception of one student WHO BETTER GET HIS VERY LATE PAPER UPLOADED TO THE COURSE SITE PRONTO OR IT'S NOT GONNA BE GOOD NEWS FOR HIS GRADE. Also, I DID enter my developmental course's grades on Thursday, so technically that's TWO classes down. Also, I managed to wrap Christmas presents last night and this morning, so I'm more ahead of the game than I've ever been before! (Not to jinx myself -- but I'm hoping I'm this productive tomorrow, and that I can actually go to sleep on Christmas Eve, instead of wrapping presents into the wee hours like I've done every other Christmas since we began having kidlets.)

The semester is finally over. I've collected all of the last assignments, and now I must grade them. This is what my weekend will look like: Portfolios, Final Papers, Accepted Late Work I suppose it's not so bad. I mean, at least I can't accept anything else at this point. I'VE LEFT THE OFFICE. I'M NOT GOING BACK UNTIL AFTER THE NEW YEAR.  I'm so tired! But yesterday was actually kind of fun, in that I was able to say goodbye to a couple of students who I'm particularly fond of, and wish them well. One had the spectacular news that he's being scouted by Villanova FOR AN ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP (Who knew they scouted for academics? I didn't. But knowing it now makes me feel better about the world, somehow.) And I received a lovely thank you card from a student for whom I wrote a letter of recommendation back in November, and a couple of students said in a non-ass-kissy way that they enjoyed their class. Another student hand-wrote a ...

I feel as though I have run out of steam, although this really isn't a convenient point to have run out of steam, considering I have a full week of final grading ahead of me. Thankfully, though, there are no more classes to teach. I will have to meet with my students in my comp and developmental writing classes for a final time on Wednesday, but my literature classes on Tuesday/Thursday are simply dropping final assignments off in my mailbox and office this week, up until a 3 p.m. deadline on Thursday. And that feels kind of strange, because I enjoyed those classes a lot and it would be nice to see them again and wish them luck in the next semester -- but none of us really want the commitment of meeting as a group again when we have so many other things to do. This has been such a strange semester. Last night I evaluated developmental writing portfolios and I'll begin those again in a short moment. This morning I felt the need to weigh down the blogosphere with more end-o...

Last night I took the train into the city to attend the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize Winners reading at McNally Books in Soho. It was quite the adventure for a preggo mother of two.  First, it was a night off from the prepare dinner/eat dinner/bedtime three-ring circus, and second, I was able to rediscover the joy of maneuvering my larger girth through tight city interiors, such as the basement of McNally's Books, where I knocked copies of the Cheryl Strayed Wild memoir right onto the ground in a very boorish manner.  I should come equipped with one of those beeping sensors, like the ones that commercial trucks have when they back up, only it should sound its alarm whenever I begin moving, period -- backwards, sideways, frontwards, whatever. Watch out, world! Preggo's on the move! I need some kind of warning system not only because I have a rounder, wider body overall, but because my sense of balance and spatial intelligence has been compromised over the past few wee...

And here's an interview with Juliana Spahr about the teaching of creative writing. In case I actually have time to reconsider how I approach teaching my CW classes between now and January. Two student conferences today; portfolios in my developmental writing class are being turned in around noon (which always means a high-stress, panic-ridden last class -- but IT'S THE LAST CLASS!); and a last workshop for my composition students before they turn in final papers on Friday.  OH MY GOD WE'RE ALMOST DONE. I could cry.  I probably will cry, with relief. But it'll happen sometime when my tear ducts work again -- sleep deprivation sure dries those suckers out.

I can't stay here because I have to get away from internet blog reading and do some serious organizing for today's set of student conferences, but I wanted to put this link to my friend L.'s blog entry up here so that I could easily revisit it . . . her paragraph at the end about dementia and collapsing boundaries is something I want to meditate on more, particularly as I write my verse play, and think about ways of structuring it, and what "collapsing boundaries" and the "loss of the ability to impose culturally acceptable narratives" can and should mean to my characters.

Oh, hello again. You almost forgot I lived here, right? Me too. In fact, I'm so turned around these days I barely know where I am . . . but life is not so bad. After all, I managed to survive last week, which featured 28 half-hour conferences with students from my creative writing and composition classes. (There would have been more conferences, but a good number of them missed their appointments and rescheduled for this week. Which bodes well for this week!) The weekend did feature a particularly frightening episode, however, in which our 6 month-old lab jumped out of my husband's moving pick up truck (for the record, he was in the cab, in the middle seat -- because our 9 year old lab was hogging up the window -- and his flight through the window was sudden and unexpected and physically difficult and still unexplained . . .  I mean, he comes running back into the house if he so much as sees his own shadow outside, so I don't know why he'd try to chase an animal w...

I really should expect by now that with Good News comes News I'm Not Quite as Excited About. I received my first rejection from the contest circuit for the full-length ms of Fabulous Beast , and I'm not going to pretend I'm overjoyed about it. It put a depressing final note on yesterday, which was filled with conferences and grading and a really deep kind of exhaustion, as I didn't sleep very much the night before. My eyes were red and swollen and I'm actually thankful to the three or so students that stood me up, because it bought me more time during the day to grade and get myself organized for the week.  I was leaving the office, still really tired but feeling a little satisfied, knowing that I'd managed to get a good number of things done, and then I received the email form rejection. I don't mind the email rejection -- a true child of the information age, I definitely prefer the speed with which I can find out that a journal or book doesn't wa...