Eight more days to go.
Four class meetings for each composition section. A week and a half of instruction left, with two assignments remaining for the online magazine writing section and the final essay for the 101s; after that two final exam meetings for the f2f courses, to be occupied by the extra-credit Phaque Phinal, a device created to persuade a few students to show up for the required, redundant, time-wasting final exam meeting, to which adjuncts must show up on pain of not being paid.
Up at 4:00 a.m., grading papers. It’s after 8:30 p.m.; just finished entering grades for the most recent in-class time-filler.
Soon as offices opened on the campus, it was on the phone to the counseling department, where I had to explain the situation with Ms. Annoyance not once, not twice, but three times as the story escalated upward through increasingly responsible levels of supervision. Finally ended up with someone who apparently was as elevated as they get in that office — another adjunct.
{sigh}
She recognized Ms. A’s name but could not recall the context in which she’d heard it. Plowing through her department’s records and looking up our stressed student’s records by her ID number shed no light on that question. However, she did discover that Ms. A is enrolled in a course taught by one of the counselors, one of those “Welcome-to-College-Now-Grow-Up” things that have become all the rage in higher education.
She said she’d explain the situation to said colleague; the teacher-student relationship should at least open that door in a convenient way. The words “an adult student with four kids of her own said she’s afraid of her” and “might harm herself” helped a great deal in this endeavor.
So. At least I’ve alerted some authority somewhere about whatever risk, if any, exists.
Entertainingly enough, when I remarked that this has been a particularly difficult semester in the behavioral department, she said things have been crazy all across the campus. She said they had never had so many behavioral issues in one semester, in the entire history of their department. “We’ve heard some stories that you wouldn’t believe,” said she.
Ohhh-kayyy. I guess I should feel happy that the 101s have only come close to fisticuffs.
Ms. A did not appear today. One of the veterans riveted classmates’ attention by discussing his struggle with PTSD and describing how he felt, to paraphrase mightily, like an outsider. Our future police officer revealed that he didn’t even know what assignment was due next, to say nothing of having even vaguely thought about a topic for it.
It’s hard to think of a subject for an assignment you don’t know exists, eh?
I can’t stand it.
I also teach composition and can grade 25 10-page essays in just a few hours. Check out my Grading Made Fast and Easy kindle book. You can find it on Amazon by putting the title in the search bar. It’s also on Lulu if you prefer a PDF copy. Or just go to my webpage and scroll down then click on the book cover on the right. I’m telling you, if you’re taking longer than 15 minutes grading a single 10-page college essay, that’s way too long. For 2-3 page essays, about 2-3 minutes each. Check it out.
@ virtualprofessor1: Yes, the most incompetent and cynical colleague I had at the Great Desert University advocated this method. IMHO, it’s inexcusable to spend three minutes pretending to assess a student’s paper.
While it’s inexcusable, too, for schools to exploit adjunct faculty in the way they do today, it’s even more immoral to pass that exploitation along to students who are paying to be in your course and deserve to have some guidance in their attempts to learn. And though it’s true that many students blow off assignments, they are quite right to do so when they encounter faculty who do this kind of thing, reducing the course from cruel joke to blatant ripoff.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.