Happy New Year!

Only two (emailing) disgruntled students from the fall, and neither one so disgruntled as to constitute a problem. Students don't really "get" how grades are weighed: see current thread on Chronicles of Higher Ed fora about math incompetence.

I think the most interesting thing I learned this semester was about ecological economics: the proposition that a resource value (say, a forest) is not automatically equal to its cash value, because once turned into cash, the transaction is not reversible. Hence the conceptual failure of neoclassical economics. Woot!

Otherwise, my classes were reasonably attentive and motivated. I really enjoyed the practice of teaching, which is something new for me. It felt much more relaxed and collegial this term.

I am not getting my hopes up. Spring semester is always a tougher slog - as the popular wisdom goes.

Curmudgeon Girl says: happiness is no late grading

What is making me happy right now is that for next semester, I'm gonna put a drop-dead deadline in my syllabi that 1-2 weeks after the assignment is due, I won't accept late assignments anymore. Period.

There is a little wave right now of LATE LATE work propelled by whiney, pleading students who feel that their life stories are so very exceptional that they should be exempt from the rule that EVERYTHING (no exceptions) was due last Friday. Oh, my car. Oh, my disk (back) problem. Oh, oh, oh.

And I would bend, in the holiday spirit - but how fair is that to students who actually took the deadline seriously and are adult enough to conclude that they fucked up, move on?

You can just imagine the QUALITY of this late work, right? Yeah, overall, it sucks bigtime. Take the 50% reduction for late work that thankfully my syllabi already incorporate, and you wonder why these students even bothered. But then again, math is seriously not their strong point, so it's no surprise that they are overoptimistic about what this work will do for their final grade. Why let algebra intrude on their "feeling" about what grade they've earned?

Bottom line: classes ended yesterday. If they haven't talked to me about their "issues" by now, they are out of luck.

winding down

This semester, like past semesters, is poised to end with a fade rather than a bang. Two of my classes ended Friday; one ends tomorrow - so this weekend was a lot less focused on class prep than usual. Then, I administer exams and grade them on alternate days for the next week, but there will be plenty of down-time to make cookies with Mom (one of our fun holiday traditions) and decorate the tree and the house a little, and do the little bit of shopping we need to. The adults in my family don't exchange gifts anymore, and even buying for the kids has turned into a gift-card thing, which is pathetic, but less pathetic than being the aunt and uncle who give the weird/useless/laughable gifts.

After Xmas, we are going to buckle down and work like dogs, I on my book, and B on his paper.

Huh. I wonder if we really will?

Christmas usually puts me in a mood. We have scaled back immensely from the whirlwind we used to undertake, which is good. It was to stressful and tiring. But now there is more time to contemplate, and so I can see that all the "joy of the season" is mostly manufactured by the advertising agencies to get us to buy more: so depressing to be manipulated this way. There is no critical examination of the proposition that everyone "should" be get-get-getting - and so beyond the depressing weight of what to get for all the people who already have what they want is the guilt of not donating ENOUGH so that all the people who can't get what they want can maybe get just a little something. Toys for Tots, Globe Santa, etc.

To say nothing of the curmudgeonly post I could write about how everyone is so damn grumpy at this time of year. Especially drivers on the commute - what's up with that??

end of semester roundup

In the first half of November (and late October too, probably) I was having trouble keeping up with the day job with all the other stuff - research work, grant app, service-related paperwork, etc. - that was competing.

And in the latter half of November, up til and including now, I have been swamped with grading. Thus, rule #1 for spring 2010: ASSIGN FEWER ASSIGNMENTS. I think I do a pretty good job designing assignments (although I've learned from some mistakes made this term, mostly along the lines of my assuming that students know how to do college-level research: WRONG!!!) but I don't necessarily enjoy reading the results. And I really HATE having to assess them with a grade.

Another good thing about spring: the classes will be smaller. Grading 37 of anything is a tough slog. Let's hope that my WRG course enrolls enough students to run though!

More on Shadow Cities

I had hoped that Neuwirth's Shadow Cities (see previous post) might be worth assigning to a class - or at least a chapter of it. But it's too anecdotal and not analytically rigorous enough for college reading. More, the focus is on the author and how he reacts to things and sees things - not nearly enough about slum residents and what THEY are doing. In short, although his experiment to live in four global city slums is interesting, it doesn't add up to enough to be useful in any of my courses - including the one I'm working on for next fall, Global Cities.*

*I need a more intriguing title than that. Feel free to suggest one in the comments.

Global cities

Just finished reading Shadow Cities: A billion squatters, a new urban world. Robert Neuwirth. Focus on Rio, Nairobi, Mumbai and Istanbul.

More about this later.

11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month

Unlike most people of my age, I am unusually invested in the history and emotion of World War I, and especially in the impact of the losses. This preoccupation stems from a study trip called "The History and Geography of World War I" in 2001. It was life-changing in many respects, not least because of the amazing poetry and literature and memoir I read as background for my seminar paper.

This sonnet by Charles Hamilton Sorley is one of my favorite (although emotional) poems of all time:

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.

Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.

Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,
"Yet many a better one has died before."
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Thanks to world-war-pictures.com for posting this so that I could grab it.