22 more pounds of kitteh

Davy (Hook) has started coming indoors at night. He's mostly been a good boy, as long as the other cats leave him alone (and as long as he and Ernesto aren't in the house at the same time). Here, he weighs down one corner of the bed, daring the other kittehs to get near him. Amber was thinking about starting some trouble, but she decided otherwise and made herself comfortable elsewhere.

I am done with grading. DONE, I say! What a frustrating semester. There are a few upset students; mostly, they're the ones who refuse to take responsibility for their own learning. There's only so much draft feedback I can give; ultimately, we all have to write our own papers.

I reminded a few of that while commenting on their final exams: "How often did you talk with me in my office? Once? Twice? I'll look back at my schedule and see. How often did you visit the Writing Center? I don't recall getting any notifications from them saying you'd been in for a consultation. How well did you take notes? Read the text? How many drafts did you write, and how far ahead of time? How many days of class did you miss?"

I had three or four Fs, and a huge number of Ds. A few students squeaked by with Cs, while a handful ended up with Bs. There were no As at all. At. ALL. A few students earned As on an assignment or two, but no one ended up with an A for the course. Indeed, a strict rubric is a thing of beauty. A paper must be fairly decent to earn even a C at Somewhat Larger University. (Anyone interested in seeing the rubric, please contact me off-blog, and I'll email you the link.)

Although this semester was rough, I learned a lot about teaching, and about myself—about which I'll post later. For now, I'm glad to have the support of a department that takes its mission seriously. With any luck, I'll have a full-time, non-teaching job by the end of Spring Semester.

How did my own classes (the ones I was taking) turn out? I don't yet know. In the graphics class, I'm not sure I did so well; my final project was way below what I'm capable of producing. I'm the only one to blame for that. If I earn lower than a B, I have to take the course again...but that may not be a bad thing overall. It would certainly hurt my GPA, but my Adobe CS5 skills and designer's eye would certainly benefit. Still, I'm sort of afraid to check my online "report card."

The professional writing project probably turned out all right, but we shall see. When I finally submitted it, I was so tired of fooling with it, and of the vagaries of stupid MS Word. Who would have known that Word doesn't Spell Check or Grammar Check documents containing image files? Or, rather, that Word checks only the tiny sections of wording where your images appear, and then informs you, "Sections marked 'Do not check for spelling & grammar' not checked?" despite the fact that you marked NO section of the document as such?

Oh, and who would have known that once you eliminate said graphics (and even the built-in cover sheet) from the document, Word still ignores the fact that you told/set it to check every section of the document? And that a header and footer-based page number are not compatible with a linked Table of Contents once you include a cover page and letter of transmittal—that yes, you'll have to go in and hand-draw text boxes for those page number and hand-correct those page number listed in the Contents?

And ALL because you thought some graphics might be a nice addition to your report. ARGH!