What Now?

I survived!

Parents' Weekend, that is. Which shouldn't feel like as big a deal as it does. But I slept for 11 1/2 hours last night and am not planning on getting a lot done today. Or tomorrow, because here's the beauty part: We get the Monday off after Parents' Weekend as a holiday! And thank goodness, because I'm kind of a zombie.

Of course, we earn every minute of that day off. Last Thursday, I had to write formal progress reports for all new students and all students in academic difficulty; those get mailed home and arrive mid-week right before Parents' Weekend. Then, over the weekend and on Monday, I wrote informal academic updates for all of the other students and sent those to the students' advisors. Then I spent a couple of hours on Thursday collating all of the various reports and updates on each of my eight advisees and in some cases following up with teachers to get more details.

Then, on Friday, we have a long assembly first thing, and then every class met for half an hour, during which I did my best to (figuratively) sing, dance, and juggle, all while making a connection with each and every parents. In most of the smaller classrooms, parent and student bodies are just crammed in; there are folding chairs everywhere, and everyone just does the best they can. I'm lucky in that regard, because I have a large classroom that has low built-in bookcases running down the two long sides of the room, and these bookcases are topped with a counter that the students sit on while their parents get the seats; the students always love sitting on the counters (it's a special thing), and we all have breathing room. It's a slightly awkward audience moment, because I'm talking to the parents about "your daughters" while also making sure the students themselves are involved and getting a chance to show off for their parents. My personal goal is to have every parent beaming and eating out of my hand by the end of the half-hour, and I accomplished that in three of my four classes; the last class is always the flattest of my classes, and it's an afternoon class so the parents are tired by then, so I'm giving myself a break on this one.

Then, once classes are over, I met with five sets of advisees' parents in a row, and then came back in on Saturday morning to meet with the last three. In these meetings, I gave parents the various updates and progress reports and talked about how things are going with their kid -- the exact topics of our conversation depended on the kid in question. We talked college applications and SATs and social adeptness and diligence in homework and situations at home; the conversations ran the gamut. I always give the advisees themselves the option of attending those meetings, and a couple of the students did want to be in on the meeting, which was great in one instance and awkward in another (a senior who is just the loveliest person in the world but in front of her parents becomes sullen and a typical teenager; fortunately, she didn't join us until halfway through the meeting). 

Each of these meetings is about half an hour; this is the weekend when having a large advisee groups really adds significantly to my labor. (I have eight advisees; some teachers have only three or four, and one particularly awkward teacher doesn't have any. It is a compliment to have a large advisee group -- it means that the students like me and the administrators trust me -- but it's one of those compliments that translates into more work ... something FGS does a lot.)

Plus, Saturday is Homecoming, so there were games and festivities all day. This year the faculty ordered special t-shirts that say "FGS Faculty" on the front and have the school mascot on the back; they are actually very nice t-shirts, and I was happy to plunck down my $10 for it, and they allowed us to look school-spirit-y all the time on Saturday even if (as in my case) we were fighting a bad headache and getting increasingly wiped out. I will admit that I slipped away from school by mid-afternoon, during the JV games, and missed the varsity games altogether. We aren't required to go to all of the games, so I wasn't doing anything wrong in leaving, but I was certainly not showing the maximum level of commitment and school spirit.

But now, having slept almost around the clock, I begin to feel as though I have lived to tell the tale. There are only three weeks left in the trimester, and then we have exams right before Thanksgiving. I miraculously have nothing to grade this weekend except one small set of quizzes, but then on Tuesday begins a period in which I will have something to grade all the time until the term ends -- this is just inevitable, and there's nothing to be done about it, but it adds to the piquancy of these next two days before the deluge begins.

(And hey, despite everything else going on, I did manage to write before school on three days last week and wrote another 1200 words! Yay!)

On writing before school

So I'm now well and truly launched into the project of co-writing the FGS history. At the beginning of the school year, when I was doing archival research, I was going over to the library after classes and working for a couple of hours at a stretch, and it was totally wiping me out, such that I had some serious moments of doubt about whether my goal of having a draft of the first chapter done by mid-December was even possible. Not that it would be a disaster if I missed that entirely self-imposed deadline, but having committed to it, I want to make it happen.

But then I mostly wrapped up the archives work and had to settle down to writing, which continued to be difficult in September ... as did everything else, really. I was not feeling a lot of joie de vivre in September. And I faffed about, intending every day to actually start writing but never quite doing so.

But then, on Monday, October 1, I woke up ridiculously early, 5 a.m., and was wide awake and feeling like life was clearly going to be better now that September was over. So I decided to get up and write before I went to school. And I pounded out about 300 words before showering and heading to school. 300 words is not a lot, of course ... but hey, it was the first 300 words of the project! And I had done it before 7:00 a.m.! I felt a warm glow for the rest of the school day.

The next morning, I slept until my alarm went off at 5:45**, so no exceptionally early start for me ... but then it occurred to me that there was really no reason I couldn't shower quickly and still sit down and write for maybe half an hour before leaving for school. And I did.

And then I did it again the next day. And the next. And pretty soon I had written before school every single morning for the entire week and had written about 1500 words. Hurrah!

Now, these words are mostly in bits and bobs, small paragraphs not clearly connected to the paragraphs next to them, and everything will have to go through some serious revision before I can call it truly a rough draft. But I always find it easier to tackle revision task than the getting-it-down-on-paper task.

I've now kept this routine up for three weeks, although I lost some steam this past week, partly because I had grading to do before school a couple of days but also because I'd run out of obvious small pieces to write. So yesterday afternoon I printed out all of my research notes and marked them all up, labeling them as to topic, and made a list of several small-ish topics that are of an appropriate size to tackle in one or two or three mornings. That list needs some further work this afternoon, maybe prioritizing the topics, and I also thought I'd do some copying and pasting of my research notes so that I have everything for one topic all in one place together, ready for my 6:00 a.m. brain to grasp it and start work quickly.

Motivation for all of this comes from the feeling of immense satisfaction I have the rest of the day when I have written before school, as well as from the accountability of Dame Eleanor's writing group, which has been fabulous.

If I can keep this up for the rest of the term, then I should definitely be able to have a bits-and-bobs draft completed by the end of November; then I can spend the first half of December hammering it out into a more cohesive draft. My plan is to give that draft to my co-author and a couple of other colleagues by the time that school breaks on December 20. In a way it's stupid to push and push and push myself to be done *before* winter break ... but damn it, I want to take an actual break and really relax, and that will be much more possible without the draft hanging over me. Besides, I think my colleagues will be more likely to read it over break than during school.

It's funny what having limited time does for my productivity. Knowing that the clock is ticking and that I absolutely *must* step away from the computer by 7:00 a.m. at the very latest or risk being late for school means that I don't mess around checking email or blogs or Facebook and that I get right down to work. Today, on the other hand, I've been dinking about for two hours and haven't accomplished a damn thing. Some of that was deliberate -- I needed some down time after a busy week and an early morning yesterday to go proctor PSATs -- but also it's because when time stretches before me, I waste most of it; when time is short, I tend to make good use of it. I think that's why this early-morning writing plan is working well so far, and I'm hoping that it becomes habit very quickly. It's not quite there -- I still think that it could all come crumbling down if I took one or two mornings off -- so clearly the task is not to let myself slip into hitting the snooze and thinking "well, I'll write tomorrow." But getting to add to the word count over to the left is a real inspiration to me; I'm hoping to make that blue bar move further and further to the right in coming weeks!

** I am not one to spring out of bed, so I credit being able to get up and write at 6:00 a.m., moments after waking up, to the fabulous alarm clock that we bought last year: the Philips wake-up light clock, which creates an artificial dawn such that I usually wake up well before the mellow chiming begins. The clock isn't much good in the summer, obviously, but once it's getting darker in the mornings, it's a miracle worker. More money than I've ever spent on an alarm clock before, but so worth it.

The iPad grading report

It's been an exhausting couple of weeks, but I have survived. Maybe not thrived, but survived, and that's perhaps all that one can expect during Exploding Head Month. Not that my Octobers explode for the same reasons that Ms. Mentor mentions; now it has to do with Open House for prospective students (last Sunday) and college letters of rec (done as of Monday) and mid-term grade reports (done as of Thursday) and Parents' Weekend & Homecoming (next weekend) and proctoring SATs and PSATs (tomorrow and two weeks ago). Anyway, it's been hectic around these parts, and several times I've thought "Oh, I must blog that" and then run out of steam well before I could open up Typepad.

One of the many things that happened in the last couple of weeks is that I successfully graded my first set of papers on the iPad ... and I'm happy to report that it was a success, and that I will defnitely be repeating the experiment! Oh, and the Apple Bluetooth keyboard and the Origami Workstation worked beautifully -- definitely a good choice.

I had the students email me their papers in .pdf and required that the files be labeled in a certain way, so that caused a little snafu for a few students who had some difficulty following directions. I was a hard-ass about this, though, figuring that it was a good lesson for them to learn to follow the damn directions. And having students take these two steps made it much easier for me to get everything nice and organized on my iPad so that I could dive right in.

I had wondered in my last post what the advantages to Notability were over just grading by hand. Yes, one keeps a copy of the paper, and I do see the advantages to that, but otherwise? And I was still feeling this way after the first seven papers.

... and then the next morning I (re-)discovered the text box, which is the obvious advantage to Notability/iPad grading that I had managed to completely forget during those first seven papers. I'd been writing my margin comments with a stylus, and then typing the final comment, but I'd completely missed that one can actually type comments in the margins or between lines. Duh! And suddenly it became very clear to me why this is a great way to grade papers. I'm sold!

And then, when I was about halfway through the stack of papers, D. figured out how to do text expansion, by which I can create a replicable comment and give it a nickname and then just pop it into any paper. So, for example, I wrote a long comment about what an essay title should ideally include, and then I just zapped it into every paper that needed it. Very nice!

I used Tanya's suggestion of sorting papers in Notability into A, B, and C folders, and that worked well enough, although honestly next time I might create folders for the full range of grades -- A, A-, B+, etc. -- just because that would replicate my usual piles-of-paper approach.

After I had finished grading them all, I exported them to Dropbox (the work of mere seconds), and then I emailed each student back her paper. That process did take a few minutes, but I wrote up a cover email message (which, among other things, invited them to come in and talk with me about their graded papers but said that they had to read Ahmed Afzaal's "Grading and Its Discontents" before they did so) and pasted it into each of the emails, so I got a little bit of a production line going.

From the students' perspective, once they figured out how to save things into .pdf and remembered to title the file correctly, the rest of the process was great. They seemed to appreciate getting the papers back via email, and they certainly appreciated getting the papers back on Sunday afternoon rather than in class on Monday. This timing let them react to the graded paper in the privacy of their own home rather than in class, when they would have to go to another class right after that. And this was particularly important for this first major essay, since many of them got grades much lower than they would have liked (not unexpectedly for their first major AP paper, but a shock to the system nonetheless). And the students who have come in to talk about their papers have all printed out their papers with my comments, even though I didn't ask them to do so.

So I'm a happy camper, and we're going to do the same thing for their second major essay assignment (which I handed out the next day, because there's no rest for the weary).

Of course, I emailed those papers back on Sunday, and then I haven't opened my iPad since then. I think I'm just not a big tech person, and it's been a busy enough week that I just don't have time or inclination to play around with any more apps. So I'm clearly under-using my iPad, but I figure if the grading thing works out well, then I've made good enough use of it not to feel guilty.

Oh, and plus -- one student who came in to talk with me this week said that all of the students were super impressed at how quickly I got graded work back, that they'd been amazed to get their papers back on Sunday when they'd just turned them in on Tuesday, and that in general they all appreciated the kind of feedback I was giving. It is always nice to have one's labors noticed, even if she really was just speaking for herself and not her 29 fellow students!

So, hurrah!

Three more grading-on-the-iPad thoughts

1) I had a dream last night that I was grading in Notability on my iPad, and I got really mad at a student because her essay wasn't taking the Oak Ridge Boys seriously enough, was in fact making fun of them. ?!?! That weirdness aside (and on waking up I had to think for a moment if I even knew any Oak Ridge Boys songs; of course, I now have "Elvira" stuck on a loop in my brain), the noteworthy thing is that, in my dream, I blamed Notability for the student's flippant attitude. Now obviously I wouldn't do that exactly, but I am now reminding myself to carefully separate any technological frustrations I will undoubtedly face this week from the actual content of the students' work. Not a bad reminder.

2) My biggest concern about grading students' work on the iPad is, honestly, not the commenting but the grades themselves, because when I grade by hand, I then stack the papers in piles by grade (the A pile, the B- pile, etc.), which I find helpful for norming, for making sure that I'm keeping my grading norms consistent. I have been known to shift a paper from one pile to another, especially at the beginning of a stack of papers when I'm getting warmed up. So how am I going to do that now, without actual papers to put in stacks? 

3) Finally, it occurred to me last night that what I was most pleased with in Notability is that it can replicate what I do by hand -- the arrows, the underlining, the notes in the margin, followed by the longer note at the end -- and after I blogged about that last night, I wondered if there was anything it could do *better* than what I do by hand or if it's just a computer version of what I already do. And if it's the latter, then what advantage is there to grading by iPad over grading by hand? Will students perhaps read the notes more thoughtfully because it's on the computer in a .pdf and therefore somehow cooler than when I just hand them the paper back? One colleague told me that she thinks the advantage is that she now always has papers with her to grade, so she can grade anywhere, anytime ... but I actually think that sounds pretty unhealthy! I don't *want* to be working all the time, so that possibility doesn't really sell me on the technology. I'm going into this with an open but skeptical mind; I'm excited to see how the grading works this week, but I also want to evaluate afterward whether there's anything to recommend this approach other than bells and whistles.

another iPad query: covers & keyboards

Okay, I have my actual iPad now, as of a week or so ago. Yay!

(In fact, this is my first ever blog post written on the iPad!)

I've been playing around with it a little but tend to get overwhelmed quickly. But I'm feeling compelled to keep playing around with it since FGS bought it for me. So I've committed to grading my first big set of AP Comp essays (coming in on Tuesday) on the iPad, and to that end I have been cracking down (as I define these things in my techno-phobic way) to figure out some basics.

So here's the grading plan: the students email me their essays in .pdf; I download them into Notability; I comment on them in Notability; I email the marked up .pdf back to the student. This morning (while proctoring SATs) I took the Notability tutorial, and I actually like it quite a lot, at least so far. My approach to commenting on papers seems to involve a lot of arrows and circling words, and I'm pleased that I'll be able to keep that with grading in this program. What I was playing around with today on a sample paper was writing comments in the margins with the pen function with my finger, and then typing up a comment at the end. I'm actually feeling pretty good about this little experiment to come this week.

Here's the question: Do I need a separate keyboard to make this grading work? Typing on the on-screen keyboard is not, of course, a fabulous thing, although I was making it work (and it might lead me to write shorter comments, which would not be at all a bad thing!).

All of the humanities folks at FGS who have gotten iPads have gotten covers that include a keyboard, which makes it very easy to open the case, flip up the iPad, and treat the whole thing like it's a mini-laptop. So today I went to the Apple Store and to Best Buy and bought pretty much every cover and keyboard that might work, and I brought them all home to play around with them (planning on returning almost everything in a couple of days, of course, so as to ease the strain on my credit card! and I made that plan with the full cooperation of the store employees, making sure there was no restocking fee or anything like that).

And here's what I'm thinking so far: I don't think I want a keyboard/case combo! I'm already finding that adding just the iPad to my schoolbag adds an appreciable weight, and with the keyboard in addition, it's really quite a bit heavier! Indeed, iPad with the Zagg Folio keyboard/cover (which is the one most often chosen by my humanities colleagues) is actually heavier than D.'s laptop. I am really not into that weight. One of the reasons that I have repeatedly opted out of getting a school laptop to replace my school desktop is that I don't want to schlep around more weight everywhere! Plus, having a keyboard built-in to the case actually seems to reduce the iPad-ness of the iPad; it really does become more like a miniature laptop, and it doesn't work as well when one wants to use the iPad without the keyboard. (My science/technology colleagues tend not to get keyboards but do tend to get styluses, which is something that only a few of the humanities folks have bothered to get. 

So here's my thought of the moment (which is what D. told me to do a week ago, but sometimes one needs to try out the options for oneself): Get a separate keyboard (I'm thinking of the Apple wireless keyboard, which is one of the many things I bought today), but mostly use the iPad without a keyboard. I also got an Origami Workstation, which is a case for the keyboard that also functions as a stand for the iPad to prop it up at a good angle when one is using the keyboard. And I mostly will leave that keyboard/Origami workstation at home, but when I've got a stack of papers that I'm grading in Notability (which of course isn't all the time), I'll carry around the keyboard only then ... and of course that extra weight during those times is perhaps about the extra weight I would have been carrying around with the big stacks of papers anyway. And the Apple keyboard is larger and more comfortable for typing than any of the ones that come as part of a carrying case.

Now, doing things this way is more expensive, because I'm buying the Apple keyboard, the Origami Workstation, and an iPad Smart Case (which is a total splurge, because the iPad actually came with one when I got it, but it's black and I keep losing it because it tends to blend with stuff, and besides it looks like all of the school iPads that we have for student use, and the bright green one is just so pretty!). So, yeah, that's more money than paying $99 for a case with a keyboard. But I want an option that retains more of the iPad-ness; I already have a laptop and don't need another. 

So, a question: Those of you who have iPads, what have you done re: covers and keyboards, and are you happy with the options you have chosen?

Also -- because apparently this "free" iPad is going to cost me even more money before this adventure is through -- I think I need to get a new bag, one that is conveniently shaped/sized to carry the iPad. Now, I actually need a new school bag, since mine is beginning to shred, and I also could use a new purse (or rather the small messenger bag that I use as a purse), since the clasp broke on mine this summer. So I was already thinking that I wanted to re-imagine my entire purse/bookbag situation anyway, and now perhaps that time has arrived. I like Tom Bihn bags, and they have a nice-looking bag called the Ristretto (which sounds a lot like "risotto," so it might be that I would always be hungry if I carried that bag). 

Another question: Thoughts on this particular bag? Or others? What's your bookbag of choice?

(That external keyboard / workstation combo is how I wrote this blog post, which worked well ... except that for some reason it wouldn't publish, so I had to copy and paste it into an email and send it to myself on my computer, where I'm now publishing it. So that's a disappointing iPad moment, but this failure isn't about the cover or keyboard, so I shan't dwell on it right now.)

That queasy feeling

Almost exactly two months ago, I had a lovely chat with the head of school about career possibilities in administration.

This morning, I remembered why I really might not want to pursue those options, or at least why I should definitely think carefully before wading into those waters.

We had a department meeting this morning with our high school chief administrator and second-in-command to talk about various options for senior electives -- no big deal, and it went fine. But as part of that conversation, we started talking about interdisciplinary course offerings, and suddenly there was a lot more tension in the room as people started complaining about how such curriculum innovations are talked about as a good idea but then not supported by the administration with resources.

And I was definitely part of the tension as well and was frustrated not only by the administration, for the above reasons, but also by everyone present in the room, for talking about interdisciplinarity as though it could only consist of team-teaching interdepartmentally, and also by one colleague in particular who has (by virtue of a new role she's playing) starting chiming in all the time about how technology is going to really change everything, but in this case without saying anything more specific, as though iPads or whatever were going to make us all magically interdisciplinary.

So basically I was just in a grumpy mood, which has mostly been true all day, and so really this morning's meeting was just one more opportunity for me to feel grumpy, although I tried to hide it.

But also afterward I felt that sickness in the pit of my stomach and that shortness of breath that I always feel after a contentious meeting, particularly one in which I have spoken up strongly. In this case, I was worried that I had offended the chief administrator -- which made me unhappy not because of his position but because he's someone I like and respect -- and that I had spoken too much and not circumspectly enough. I checked in with other departmental colleagues afterward, none of whom seemed to think that the meeting had been any big deal, but I kept fretting and fretting. And afterward, when I had a spare hour during which I could have been grading or getting ahead in some respect, instead I sat down and hammered out a carefully worded email to everyone who had been at the meeting, following up to make an important point (important to me, anyway) that I felt strongly had been misrepresented in the meeting. And I've fretted about that email as well. Altogether I've spent a lot of mental energy on this meeting and its aftermath, and I've felt queasy the whole dang day about it.

... and at some point today I remembered that I used to feel that sickness in the pit of my stomach pretty much all the time, especially when I was running a (very small, budget-less) program at St. Martyr's. There's something about open conflict and about certain leadership roles that makes me feel queasy and nervous, and while I've continued to feel that all day long, the experience has reminded me how very thankful I am that I'm not normally in these situations anymore.

And I think I'd like to stay out of those situations insofar as possible! Which, I think, means not taking up some of the administrative positions that the head of school so helpfully outlined for me in August. Even though I think about the real possibility of getting bored and restless if I remain in the classroom exclusively, it's also worth remembering the real likelihood that working in administrative roles outside of the classroom will more frequently have me dealing with that sick-to-my-stomach nervousness. Food for thought.

I'm teaching Jane Eyre right now and was struck by Jane's metaphor for that same sick feeling once the adrenaline of speaking up dies down:

"A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused and menaced Mrs. Reed [or spoke up too forcefully in a contentious meeting]: the same ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meetly my subsequent condition, when half-an-hour's silence and reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct" (Ch. 4)

Indeed.