June 22, 2005
CSS week 5
all day yesterday i wore my teacher-hat (okay, it's invisible, metaphorical, etc.) & graded summaries & bibliographies & wrote margin- and end-comments & calculated grades & e-mailed invididual students & e-mailed the class & updated my roster (again) & planned out their weekend peer-review activity & wrote out patient instructions for using features on the site & typed "commas & periods go inside quotation marks" a good thousand more times & reviewed heaps of good paper topics & a few that look like they'd really like to crash in a firey tangle of half-formed intentionality, but there's only so much listening you can ask of them when they never, ever, even once in their entire lives, will hear you. maybe i should record an audio hello and post it somewhere, link it to the site so that at least i have a voice. maybe they'd like me better speaking in the one that they invent inside their heads. the picture's small, obscure, uninformative. i wonder if i look grandmotherly in their heads, or hippie-lesbian, or 24 and inexperienced? i don't suppose it matters much; they take me seriously or suffer the consequences.
::swings power around like a spiked ball on a heavy chain:: <-- ::is far more likely to hurt self this way than any long-distance course participants::
next lesson: how does peer review & commentary work between peers who've never met each other either & don't have gradebook clout to make their suggestions externally-validated as consequential? 15 out of 20 have posted the drafts due 10 hours ago. i've just sent a nagging note out to the delinquent 5 (2 of whom have been delinquent for enough assignments lately that i'm starting to wonder why i'm bothering to keep nagging, since currently i seem to be the only one in these particular exchanges bothering with much of anything at all). we'll see, we'll see.
in the meantime, juggling: i must convince myself that ths writing i'm supposed to be doing for the last of my graduate courses (eeek!) is both relevant & possible; skirting one possibility or another has drug this out for months already & it's starting to make me sick of myself, frankly.
Posted by ttobryan at June 22, 2005 07:49 AM