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So I was in my chair’s office today talking about what a pain scheduling my oral exam has been. (This oral exam is coming up in about two weeks. It’s the written exam that I’ve passed.) As I was getting ready to leave, she said, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
That I’m going to fail the program?
That I shouldn’t bother showing up for the oral?
That I only passed the written by the hair of my chinny chin chin?
No. Although I don’t think that I’m the only person in the world who obsesses over my perceived mediocrity. No, apparently she was in a bar that Saturday night in San Francisco and was talking to her friend and colleague who works at [redacted, but very cool university]. This friend was raving about a presentation he’d gone to that was really good
…and apparently it was mine. Not my panel’s; mine.
Now granted, I’m sure they were drinking copious amounts of whisky at this point. But I’m pretty happy about the fact that, even while hammered, someone remembered my presentation.
I passed my written exam. All that angst about revising it? Totally not worth it.
I feel the need to tell more about meeting Anne Waldman in the women’s bathroom. Because it’s not quite as neat as I might’ve let on in the first reference. And, okay, fine, because I also hope that Anne Waldman Googles herself and finds out the truth of what happened in the bathroom. ALL WAS NOT AS IT SEEMED.
So I enter the bathroom on a coffee-induced, bladder-relief mission, and on my way to the only empty stall, I see Anne Waldman washing her hands. I try, rather unsuccessfully, not to stare, but it’s Anne Waldman! I get to my stall and barely notice that the person before me didn’t flush. The toilet’s contents weren’t gross so I didn’t think too much of it; instead, I was mostly trying not to think about how Anne Waldman might be listening to me pee. (I have a bit of a phobia about public restrooms, one that I’ve [mercifully] kept mostly to myself lo these many years. You’re welcome.) I finished quickly and left, and the toilet (an automatic kind) flushed as I unlocked the stall door. Two more women were in line, and one went into my stall.
I began washing my hands NEXT TO ANNE WALDMAN, who was now applying makeup for her presentation that I was planning to attend. Planning to attend, that is, until the woman who’d taken my stall comes back out, looks directly at me, and says to the other woman in line, “That toilet is about to overflow.”
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
I had no idea what to say or do. “It wasn’t…. I didn’t…” I sputtered, but the damage was done: Anne Waldman glanced at me and it was clear that she thought I was nothing more or less than a woman who’d clogged a public toilet.
Oh Anne, if you ever Google yourself and end up here, please know that all I did was pee. I swear. And then I was too embarrassed to show my face at your presentation, and instead went to a different one where the first presenter was crucified and the other went point-by-point through his syllabus and I’ve regretted it ever since. BECAUSE YOU’RE ANNE WALDMAN AND YOU HAVE THIS EFFECT ON PEOPLE.
or, San Francisco Convention redux
After nearly missing my plane on Wednesday morning, I finally made it to San Francisco, found my flatmates, and got settled onto my Hide-A-Bed in our little apartment. I sat in on several panels, including:
- An excellent panel on parody and its usefulness in the composition classroom
- Another excellent panel on satire, including the teaching of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, in the composition classroom
- A horrible, horrible panel where two of the three presenters didn’t show up. One canceled (and didn’t send her paper — shameful!), and one canceled and sent her husband in her stead to (1) read her paper, and then (2) discuss his foray into contract teaching (this second part involved him going point by point through his, yeah, TWENTY PAGE SYLLABUS, and an audience member finally spoke up after fifteen minutes when the presenter had only reached page four and asked him to move along to the writing part; awkward!); and finally, the only original presenter, who got taken to task, probably because everyone was frustrated with Mr. Long-Winded Syllabus Reader, and probably because the final presenter was unable to articulate why we should teach digital essays. The redeeming point would be that the third guy had his students doing some pretty cool stuff that I hope to use someday. If I, like, get a job and stuff.
And of course, my own panel, which went really well. We had three other excellent presenters and our chair was the aforementioned Cynthia Selfe, which combined to produce a pretty good turnout for a Saturday afternoon presentation of around thirty people. I had a couple people come up to me afterward and ask for my e-mail address so they could get more assignments and suggestions on teaching multimodal composition. It was pretty cool. And Cindy Selfe gave me a hug and told me I’d done an excellent job. Cindy Selfe! hugged me!
(Okay, I promise I’m almost done name-dropping now. One more.)
I saw Anne Waldman in a hotel bathroom (Anne Waldman!). Yes, dear readers, I had the privilege of washing my hands next to Anne Waldman. My life is complete now.
Last night and today I get to hang out with some pretty cool people, and then tomorrow it’s home to see The Husband. Whom, I admit, I kind of miss.
- Dude, Cindy Selfe totally logged in on my laptop to check her Google Calendar. (For those of you not in the know, Cindy is to computer and writing scholarship what Judi Dench is to film and stage.) Eep!
- Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher came to my apartment to talk about computers and writing with people from my uni. CINDY AND GAIL! AT MY APARTMENT! (See previous metaphor; Gail and Cindy are like the power platonic couple of computers and writing.)
- The theme of this conference is “making waves” (our panel’s presentation is titled “Making .WAVs” and you can thank yours truly for that little play on words), and after two days of presentations, I swear if I hear one more effing thing about waves, someone’s going overboard.
- Tomorrow is my presentation. I’m either going to (1) die, (2) pass out, (3) burst into tears, or (4) a combination of all three. But it’ll all be over soon….
This may be the last post for awhile…or it may be the first of the most fantastic spree of procrastiblogging this world has ever seen. We shall see. My exam questions arrive in a couple hours, at which point I shall (a) freak out, and then (b) immediately go fetal. Who knows what’ll happen after that; if I disappear, I promise to send postcards from exotic but distant locales to let everyone know I’m still alive but for pete’s sake don’t come looking for me until the statute of limitations for my graduate program has elapsed.*
So, here are a few things that I feel compelled to note before I go into that dark, dark place:
Snowy
Yesterday I was pretty thankful we hadn’t taken off the studded tires on the Prius as I drove home IN AN EFFING BLIZZARD. Srsly. The road was so quiet in two inches of snow and it felt like I was driving through space with the white flakes whizzing past like stars. Had my hands not been clamped to the steering wheel, I would’ve taken a photo.
Phone
Um, my phone has stopped taking calls regularly. So I’m not ignoring calls as much as I’m just not getting them. This may or may not be a major problem next week when I’m in San Francisco.
Fuckwittage
I should probably make this clear: now is not the time to fuck with me. Jokes aren’t funny, I am not a good sport, and yeah, I’m going to be super selfish and bitchy** for the next seventy-five-ish hours. Ye be warned.
*this, of course, doesn’t really exist. But I imagine they’d be pretty pissed about me dropping out mid-final-semester.
**yeah, I know, so let me clarify: MORESO THAN USUAL
When it came time to sign up for presentations in my seminar this semester, I took care to choose one well after my portfolio, exam, and oral defense were finished. And then, in a fit of gallantry for my colleague who had everything due in a span of these two weeks, I offered to switch dates with her. So it is that I am presenting on a particularly impenetrable text tomorrow, and the only thing I can think to use as an example of democratizing technology is Cylons and BSG. That 4.0 gpa I was bragging about in my previous post…: Ah, Pride? Let me introduce you to my Fall.
In other but related news, today I broke into furious sobs after spilling some coffee grounds on the counter. At the time it seemed like such an apt metaphor for, like, life or control or messiness…something, y’know, all deep and shit.
For those of you considering graduate school, are you effing crazy? well, good luck.
This coming weekend is my M.A. exam. Which I am, of course, TOTALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO, just like a visit to the gynecologist or, I dunno, going back to high school or living with my parents again.
So how this works is I get my exam questions via e-mail on Friday morning, and I have three days to write a fifteen- to twenty-page paper, complete with sources and a theoretical basis* and, like, some original ideas on computers in the composition classroom. Part of me is like, Hey, no big deal, I always write my papers the weekend before they’re due, and I have (thus far) a 4.0 gpa in grad school. And the other part of me is like, Holy fucking shit this exam determines whether I pass or fail I AM GOING TO DIE.**
This is all to say that I need the husband out of my sight next weekend, lest he get in the way of, um, friendly fire. So if anyone out there wants the better half of this relationship, perhaps to play long and boring games that take an inordinate amount of time, by all means save him from me. Just let him come home from time to time to be sure I’m alive and well.
*I think I just threw up a little in my mouth
**Actually I have to do an oral exam too, but this written part matters a bit more
A recent New York Times article by Max Roosevelt discusses how professors and students see assigning grades. To put it briefly, students think they deserve higher grades than they sometimes earn. But is the problem with the students, as the article suggests, or the K-12 system of hyper-testing, or is it with instructors’ expectations?
First, note the words used in the first few paragraphs of the article: students “expect,” “deserve,” and feel a sense of “entitlement.” In a consumer-driven education system, these are very common feelings, and at this point it can be difficult to convince students otherwise. I do make it a point each semester to get students thinking about whether college is a “right” or a “privilege,” but I haven’t yet ventured far into the discussion about “consumers” versus “learners.” A worthwhile discussion, but not one that I feel ready to take on just yet.
Second, notice one of the interviewed professors’ way of grading: students’ default grades are C (where C = average). They have to extend themselves and exercise their ideas to raise it. This, I think, is not typical of all college classes and is the area where the article doesn’t dig deeply enough. For starters, different classes grade very differently. In math classes, if you get the correct answers, you get an A. In freshmen-level writing classes, if you demonstrate the skills of writing (critical thinking, rhetorical awareness, proper source usage, revising, etc.) then you get an A. This, I think, more than the sense of entitlement or the hyper-testing K-12 education, is the problem that sets up those expectations: different classes and different professors have different ways of assessing grades.
I don’t think that’s bad, but I do think it’s missing from the NYT article, and perhaps from students’ consciousness. Different fields of study prize different abilities. Duh. That’s why it’s college and not trade school: students are meant to experience a wide range of ideas and learn lots of skills. So I would argue that the problem isn’t with students’ expectations; it’s with instructors’ and professors’ communication skills: rather than just outlining grade distribution in the syllabus, they need to explain why they grade the way they do, and what it is about their grading system that will benefit students in the end. The article almost touches on this in the last part where Prof. Bower says, “Unless teachers are very intentional with our goals, we play into the system in place.” But alas, no further discussion.
I should add that this isn’t a final opinion on the subject; it’s more of an initial reaction. I’m finding that I have few set opinions these days…thanks a lot, grad school.
10:30 to 10:50 Fetal position, again
10:51 More revision.
11:40 Paper has magically grown two pages
12:25 The Husband is home; I am suddenly aware of how much I must stink and need to shower
12:26 Still working on paper
1:20 Still working on paper, but in desperate need of deodorant and/or shower
2 p.m. Put finishing touches on brand-new conclusion and e-mail quick question to adviser
2:06 Headed to the shower
Paper still needs a solid proofread, but I think it’ll do. I’m pretty sure I’ve cleared up the major questions my adviser has. Also the middle cushion on this couch is now shaped like my ass. BECAUSE I HAVEN’T MOVED FOR SEVEN HOURS (aside from two brief forays into fetality and a few trips to purge my body of its caffeine overload)
And did I mention the sky, it is so blue today? So very beautifully blue.
4 a.m. Begin waking in twenty-minute increments until
6:20 a.m. The Husband gets up
6:22 Wow I really have to go the bathroom and I don’t want to walk all the way downstairs but I don’t want to go while The Husband is in the shower
6:32 So uncomfortable…
6:36 I wish I couldn’t hear the shower water through the wall…water, waterfalls, whitewater…
6:37 That is the longest shower EVER
6:38 Oh thank god he’s out
6:39 MUST HE SHAVE RIGHT NOW?
7 a.m. Okay, have my coffee, have laptop, even have paper open on said laptop
7:10 Read through paper, comments
7:11 Give up in despair
7:11 – 8:15 Fetal position
8:16 Facebook
8:22 New York Times. Finally caught up on Twitter article
8:45 Grudgingly begin working on paper
9:15 On a roll
10:00 Okay, I’m doing it: I’m putting a Calvin & Hobbes comic in the paper (in addition to the xkcd comic already in it [this one, though today's is pretty applicable as well])
10:20 Have run out of steam (and coffee and sugar)
10:21 Blog
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