New School Duds

One of the rituals about returning to school is getting new school clothes. Starting with the fact that I've only had to look professional a few days a week for a couple of years now and then add to that my small amount of weight loss and then put my new dream job in the mix and you have a totally valid reason for doing lots of Internet shopping for clothes and shoes. I do have a few Burks I can wear on casual days that aren't too Burkie-looking, but that's pretty rare. Otherwise, it's back to the pantyhose, skirts, and heels. But, these days as a fat and 40 year old, I can't wear heels like I could when I was a skinny 20 year old. Luckily, I discovered some of the "kitten heel" designs from Me Too (amazingly comfy). And I also discovered Zappos!

Truthfully, I have seen them on the net before, but never thought to buy anything from them until I saw that they carried Me Too shoes. I've been looking for some navy low heels, and the only place I could find them was Zappos! So, I took a chance. I literally ordered them last night about 10pm. Today when I got home from school, they were magically at my door. Wow! Plus, shipping was zippo, nada, zilch! They even have a 365 day return policy as long as you don't wear the shoes out and you return them in the same packaging. Holy Cow!

[Pictured are Me Too "Agitha" in navy patent leather.]

Bad, Bad Shoes

Starting in the fall, I will be back in the classroom. All summer I've been teaching, but it's all been on the web, so my normal teacher attire has been casual to say the least. Though my official return to teaching started last spring and I did have to actually enter a classroom in person, I managed to get by, but the shoes were starting to become an issue.

My "teacher shoes" (as in not my beloved Birkenstocks) are on their way out. When I was teaching full-time about 5 years ago, I invested in an assortment (black, white, navy, brown, etc), and they are now ready for retirement. But, I so dread shopping for shoes!

I know. Who doesn't enjoy a new pair of shoes? My fear of shoe shopping dates back to Catholic school when we were limited in what we could wear, and with a size AA foot, that didn't leave me many options. If I could have worn tennis shoes or sandals (which either tie or buckle), I could have managed, but of course, both were no-no's.

One year my mother ended up buying the the ugliest shoes on the face of the planet. I wore them to school one day, and my friends asked me why I was wearing "retard shoes." They reminded me of the shoes you used to see poor kids who had suffered from polio wearing along with their leg braces. So, I never wore them again and spent months getting written up for wearing tennis shoes (which were denim and suede - hey, it was the 70s). I tried to convince Sr. Rosetta that they were actual shoes, but she wouldn't buy it.

Fall semester starts in about two months, so I have to get my courage up and venture out soon. Ugh!

Virginia Woolf, You Are Not

Though it may seem to some people like my various part-time jobs are unrelated, they really aren't. For example, I'm a part-time English instructor and I'm also a part-time blog recruiter/trainer of sorts. In many ways, my tasks at these jobs are very similar. I have to help people write. This often requires that I tell them how not to write.

Very nicely, of course, I have to point out grammar problems or organizational issues in their writing and try to explain the correct way they should be writing the essay or blog entry or what-have-you.

Sometimes my student/trainee takes my "help" the wrong way, which is understandable. No one likes to be told he/she is doing something wrong. But, sometimes they try to support their wacky writing by telling me things like, "It's my style" or "I was trying to be funny."

I'm never really sure what to say to something like this. If writing comma splice after comma splice is style, then I'm at a loss. To me, when a nobody (in terms of writing career) writes like this, it means you simply don't know when and where to place a period. Learn the rules first. Then when you become a wildly famous writer and say that Dr. P in your ENC101 composition class taught you everything you know, you can write in whatever style you wish.

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Smart Snacking, I Hope

Two of my three classes are over with, and I just have to give a final (and grade the final, calculate, and upload of course), and then I'm done with class number three. This third class is my only traditional "in the classroom" class because my other two were web-based. Because of that and the fact that for the most part this has been a wonderful group of students - all women - nine total - and all but one really worked hard for me this semester - I wanted to treat them while they take their final, sort of ease the tension a little because I know they'll be totally freaked.

So today while shopping I had to figure out what I could get them that would not impact my diet. Obviously, these snacks are really for them, but I don't want to bring something that will tempt me, even if I only nibble.

As I strolled down the snack isle, past the Oreos, the Yo-Yos, the yummy wedding cookie with the white powdered sugar...well, you get the picture...I had to find what I'm calling "smart snacking." One wonderful find was a box of individually wrapped bags of gold fish crackers, nine a bunch. Ah, nine students, nine little bags, this was good!

But, I needed cookies too. I remembered that one student didn't like chocolate (I know, weird, yes), so I found a box of tea cookies; something like ten cookies only have 140 calories. Excellent!

Finally, for the chocolate lovers, I opted for a zip lock bag of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies. Again, calorie count wasn't killer, but even better, they zipped up so if there are any left I can easily hand them to a student to bring home to one of her children.

I've really enjoyed this class. Most of the students were in my class last semester and have just been a wonderful way for me to return to teaching after stopping for about a year so I could write my dissertation. They are all so eager to learn and serious about school, so different than most of my web students who turned in just about every assignment late and had more excuses than you could imagine.

I remember one class when I was explaining how to find good sources for a research paper they were working on, and I mentioned the difference between something like People magazine and a peer reviewed journal. I told them that they were scholars now, so they had to be very particular about what they used to support their analysis. One woman's eyes just popped open when I said that. The look on her face was "Me, a scholar?" And, then she sort of sat up straight in her chair and looked right back at me, so proud of herself, as well she should be.

Polishing My Crystal Ball

It's just about the end of the semester for all three classes I'm teaching. Two are web classes I teach through a junior college and the third is in a traditional classroom setting at a small branch campus of a private university. However, while in many respects the students are totally different (even though all of the classes are English related subjects), they share one thing: about this time of the semester I start getting asked to look into my crystal ball and tell each student his/her grade.

Usually the requests starts with something like, "I need to get an A in this class" followed by "Can you tell me my grade?"

Of course, this is before all their work as been submitted let alone graded. (I'm still working on my other magic trick of grading work that hasn't actually been sent to me yet.)

I imagine they envision me constantly typing in numbers into my spread sheets so I have an up to the minute number for their grades. But, the ugly truth is that I usually wait to do all the icky math stuff because not all students make it through the end of the semester. My web classes, especially, have a very high drop out rate. Heck, it's not usual for me to never, ever hear from a number of them. For whatever reason, they've signed up but never actually log onto the class. Again, I have no magic trick up my sleeve to help them.

So, what do I tell these students "who really need an A" at this point in the semester with only a week or so to go? I refer them to the syllabus which clearly lists all the percentages for each assignment. Then I suggest that they do a wonderful job on the final exam to help bring their grade up if necessary.

I know this sounds very cruel and cold to them, especially via email. But, obviously, I have to protect myself. I cannot predict any one's performance and I am far from a math wizard who can calculate grades in my head without the help of good old Excel.

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Threw the Internet

Ahh...sometimes you just have to laugh when it comes to teaching; otherwise, you'd (meaning me) go crazy.

Yesterday, I had to work all day at my crappy library job. When I got home, I had a mailbox full of papers to grade for one of the on-line classes I'm teaching. I tried to get through the essays that were drafts or outlines first because I was just too tired to do any real grading. When I opened up one email from a student who has been late on every single assignment this semester (his email was marked urgent!), I read something to the affect of, "Dr. P. Please read my attached outline and draft as soon as possible so that I'm not late with the final essay."

Ah, okay, so if I don't read this right now, then this poor guy is going to be late, and it is going to be all my fault!

I stopped, took a sip of my wine, and realized it was 8:30 (I was at work from 9-6) and time for me to stop working.

So, this morning I feel more pity for this student and decide to look at his paper right away. A quick glance at the outline shows that his thesis sentence is a fragment. I close the document. Why even look? He's already gone to the draft.

I open up the draft and start to read: comma splice...mark it....missing comma after intro clause...mark it... and then I get to a sentence (again, I'm paraphrasing here), "Threw the internet I have learned a lot, even more than when I watch television or go to school."

Hey, he did spell "a lot" correctly!

I Yam What I Yam

About a week or so after my interview, I started getting major cold feet about saying "yes," if I'm offered the job. Even with the low pay, which I could deal with, it is the driving. It would be intense. The longer I have to think about it, the more I have to wonder if it would really be worth it. So, I emailed an ex-instructor of mine and asked her flat out, "If I took this job, would it remove the stain of adjuncting from my CV? Or is that a lost cause?"

Her answers were pretty much what I expect: "No" and "No." Of course, she put it much more eloquently than that. She basically said that I am what I am. I have a wide range of experience, some academic and some not, and the right employer would acknowledge that and the wrong employer wouldn't.

Other than the fact that adjuncts are treated like second-class citizens, these questions also came from an experience I had once when a college administrator told me that my 10+ years of teach a min. of 2 college classes a semester didn't count as real teaching experience. Now, if I had a couple of full-time years as, say, a high school teacher, that would count. But what I was doing? Nope. I tried to reason with him that what he said just didn't make sense to me. How could all of those classes I've taught not count? How could someone who has never taught a college class at all be considered more experienced than I was?

"That's just the way it is," he told me.

So, I bought into his retarded reasoning. Now, after thinking about it and getting her encouraging email response, I realize I am lucky I never really worked for that administrator. It would not have been the right job for me because he immediately had the attitude that I didn't measure up because I came from Adjunct Land.

Before receiving her response, I had just about convinced myself that I was not going to take the job if offered. I love the school and the people that work there, and I'm sure the teaching experience wouldn't hurt my CV, but I think I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing and see what happens.

Blogging 101 Class

All of my comp. classes will end around early May, and I will be leaving the library in June, so I was under the impression for awhile that I might have a slow summer, and slow also means less money when you are a contract worker. Coincidentally, I was contacted a little while ago by someone from the local jr. college's lifelong learning institute, one of those places where mature adults take classes for fun. They aren't for college credit, but they are a notch above adult ed.

So, this idea popped into my head: why not teach a class on blogging? While I hesitate to call myself an expert, I have been doing it professionally for a couple of years now (and that's not counting my About.com site). I contacted the program director, and not only did she love the idea, it happens that she has had members request a class on this. Wham, bam, thank you Mame, I'm scheduled to teach two basic blogging classes this summer, one in May and one in June (no classes will be offered in July/Aug.)

One of the things I like about teaching is that it is an excuse to learn. As a teacher, you need to be prepared, and that means research. So, I've started doing a lot of reading about blogging (more than usual) and I also started a new blog over at Word Press just for the class called Blog Class Info. I'm going to use it to store my handouts and stuff for the class, and this way I have a place to store the materials. I was thinking of having my students set up a blog there, but now that I've done it (I'm still messing with it, so it's kind of under construction at this point), I think blogger is a little more user-friendly. I can't even begin to explain how much I hate WPs help documentation.

Soooo....while doing my research I've made a few changes to this blog as well. I figured out how to create categories, or as blogger calls them, labels. I also have my archives set up a little differently, and you'll see my new sexy avatar has been added.

Got Diss!

Finally, after months of waiting, I got the bound copy of my dissertation in the mail today. I sent this in for binding even before I graduated, around mid-November, and according to the paperwork I filled out it was going to take six to eight weeks. Yeah, uh, it's, like, mid-March folks!

I almost decided not to bind it because, arrogant fat chick that I am, I plan to have someone really publish this some day, a big highfalutin publishing house like MIT of course. But I had so many family members that wanted a copy, and now-a-days you send the final in as an electronic file. Most people want a hard copy to read, so I plunked down the cash to have 8 copies made for people like my parents and sisters. Hopefully, after reading it, they don't think I'm any more crazy than they already think I am. Even my husband says he will now read it since I gave him a copy too.

Funny how it looks so small now that is is bound. It is hard to believe it took me a year to write those 207 pages!