Cinnabar and Alabaster

i'm starting to learn who's who and what sort of things to expect, at least from some of them; i have some frequent contributors and semi-frequent AIM-pingers, some worriers who e-mail me long, twisted questions about what seem to me like simple things. i like when they do this: it's a chance for me to be more articulate, to address them individually, to be a person out here with ideas and questions too, not just the Source of Assignments and Grades, which is what i too-much feel like, especially in what i project as the minds of the ones who aren't talking, aren't consistently doing the work, are checked out even while their names still on the roster swear that they're signed in.

i've managed to annoy dustin 2 or 3 times already, but after i scolded him for sounding like a whiner in the first e-mail he sent me about it, i've gotten nothing but polite inquiries and comments from him, and we've engaged in a productive discourse about some of his questions and concerns; i figure if he comes out of this not entirely thrilled with me, but has learned to think twice about the tone he's sending when he sits down to send e-mails, especially in a professional capacity, which at the moment he's doing and i hope he remembers to keep, then this has already been valuable for him, and i'm a success. i screwed up yesterday, failing katie on an assignment i'd forgotten i'd agreed to extra time on because she'd been having trouble getting a copy of the textbook, and she was perfectly kind about reminding me of what i'd said, which of course i remembered as soon as she said it, and i changed the grade at once.

overall, i'm a little out of the rhythm of it--sometimes i'm a few days later in getting back to them about work than would really be most helpful to guide the next thing they're supposed to be doing--but i'm getting there. i'm learning, they're learning: i just hope some of what they're learning is about research. if teaching a research class is a classroom instead of a computer lab or library is hard (and i kvetched about that a lot last semester when i did this course in real life), teaching it online to a group of students whose resources i can't imagine--i have a few in town, a few in NYC, one in jersey, one in colorado, one in france, one in turkey, and a few whose locales they've never shared--is a little bit ridiculous. all i'm really doing is gathering online writing-resources for them, outlining assignments for them to test those suggestions on, and commenting, always feeling like i'm doing so belatedly, on the ways they haven't really done what i'm not sure they had any way of knowing they were supposed to do. but i'm giving them lots of graded chances to contribute ideas-only with no formal constraints, and the ones who are leaping in there will do pretty well even if they never do get their MLA citations in order.

the ones who aren't doing it, though... i don't know why they're not doing it; that's what bothers me. it could be that they're slackers, or that they just don't care. it could be that they have more important things to do with their summers, and are planning to re-do this for credit later; it could be that all they need is a graduation credit and they've already calculated out the minimum-contribution they need to put in & that's all they mean to do. but it could be that they don't know what they're supposed to do, and aren't doing it not out of laziness but because they're unaware. and if that's true, it's my fault for not finding a way to make it more clear... even though without them here to talk to, if they don't ping me via one medium or another to ask, i have no way of knowing what's clear and what isn't.

to that effect, i'm trying to put together an early midterm-grade for everybody to hand out early next week (since i'll be away all weekend and the last assignment i'm planning to reckon in is due tonight at 10, or 12, for dustin, since i wasn't awake enough to argue with his bad math when he asked for extra time). maybe seeing ugly letters will spur a few to action. maybe seeing nice ones will relax the others. i feel like it has to have been longer than 4 weeks already, like we've been doing this forever, like we're going to run out of time, and at the same time like we've barely started. a few of them have nothing to their credit on the list at all--but i've talked to all of them. intentions are gliding and soaring, flapping madly about, limping a little--they're all over the globe. we can only wait & see.