a few thoughts

* One of the magazines I get had the standard scaremongering article about how stress is, like, really really bad for your heart, you know?

And they proceeded to list a bunch of ways to "cope with stress." All of them sort of expected the person needing to cope had sufficient free time: "Cook and eat healthful 'whole' foods." "Make time to exercise every day! Maybe even exercise MORE, if you already are!" "Take up a new hobby, maybe jewelry making!" Or it assumes that you are coupled and with children: "Recruit your spouse to help out more around the house! Line up chores the kids can do!"

And it occurred to me: in these kinds of "stress bad" articles, there is never the hint of a suggestion that maybe, just maybe, the source of the stress should be addressed. Though I suppose that's a bigger deal than the standard woman's-magazine can attack.

I know where a lot of my stress (Well, the external kind; I also admit some of it is internal) comes from: (a) Having to deal with people that have difficult behaviors (sense of entitlement, rudeness, tendency to interrupt, etc.) that I am not terribly well-equipped constitutionally to deal with (I am not the kind of person who can yell "SHUT IT!" to someone who keeps talking over the person who is SUPPOSED to be talking). and (b) My perception that the economy, and therefore my job, my hobbies, and perhaps even my ability to easily acquire groceries in the future, is circling some drain. (They are closing a number of Wal-Marts. Granted, the ones closing nearest me are the dinky "Neighborhood Markets" they tried as an experiment and so it is more likely failed-experiment than 'we need to retrench'. But Macy's is also closing stores.)

I also was looking at some sockyarn yesterday. Some of the really fancy brands are now up over $30 for enough yarn for ONE pair of socks. I think this is where I turn to my stash for a good long time, though if and when I use it up, probably yarn will be up around $60 for one pair of socks....

again, it makes me slightly sad, as that was one source of comfort and fun, and I feel like I can't really afford it any more. (Then again, there's Webs and its closeouts; maybe that and KnitPicks, which has the virtue of being a bit of an "off-brand," are where I get my yarn from now on.)

* I have to make a decision fast. My birthday is on a Saturday this year, right? And I almost never get the chance to do something "fun" (for whatever I consider fun) on my birthday, like right on the day. BUT: it is also the day of a recruitment program I have helped with for at least 10 years now. And I've got e-mails from both the person running the program and my chair asking me to let them know right away if I can do it again this year.

And I don't know.

This is like one of those cartoon moments where the character has an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Only in my case I am not totally sure who would be which.

One is saying: "Oh, come on. You've said yourself, 'adult birthdays are a cheat.' You've done this thing for 10 years, everyone expects you'll do it again. It's kind of the only big rah-rah thing you do, anyway, and you might regret it when you come up for post-tenure review this fall and there's a hole in your record shaped like this particular piece of service. Anyway, you can ALWAYS find time to go do whatever in, I don't know, March or maybe April. It's not like you're going somewhere with a friend or anything."

The other one is saying: "Geez, you're the one who always volunteers to do stuff. And you really don't take that much time for fun stuff for yourself. You never get to really celebrate your birthday because you are literally always working. Go to Whitesboro that day and check out their quilt shop and that yarn-dyer's studio that's supposed to be there. Go out for lunch. Stop at the Brookshires' on the way back home. Take a day for yourself."

I don't know. I have to decide within an hour or two I think. The added issues are these: (a) the end of February is often an iffy weather time and I'd be frustrated if I refused to do this and then the weather was too bad to go have "fun" and (b) I often get a cold or some kind of respiratory thing right around my birthday and if I'm feeling too unwell to go out I will be unhappy.

So I don't know. I also get that 99% of adults don't do much of anything for their birthdays and they just go and do whatever work is expected of them.

* And no, I'm not going to play the "well, it IS my birthday and I had been thinking of doing something" card to my chair, because word will get out, and the only thing worse (IMHO) than having to work on your birthday at something that is technically optional is to have the other people there decide it's a good idea to single you out and pity-sing the birthday song. 

* There's a story kinda-sorta making the rounds in academia. A president (of a school I am not familiar with: Mount St. Mary's in Maryland) is alleged to have said that, essentially, "underperforming" students should be "culled." But the thing that got me was his giant assumption about faculty - allegedly, he said in an e-mail* to a prof:  “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”

(*And yeah. Unwise to put something in an e-mail that you don't want for public consumption. Also the whole "put a Glock to their heads" reference is incredibly ill-advised, IMHO.)

Anyway. I deal with my fair share of "struggling" students. I've had a few, down through the years, where I've sighed and thought, "They'd really be better off doing something else other than college." I've even had one or two I counseled to either change majors or "maybe you could go and work for a while, kind of find yourself, and then think about coming back" (when they asked me about whether dropping out carried a "big stigma" - no, it really doesn't)

There's underperforming and there's underperforming. There's the kid who earns Cs and Ds his first semester because college is a big shock or he's working full time and trying to go to school and hasn't figured it out yet. But then there's the kid who earns Cs and Ds because drinking beer and shooting hoops is more important to him than studying is. The first guy, hopefully he will make a course correction. The second guy, eh, meh, I don't really care that much - if someone is unwilling to go "Wow, I need to buckle down" I'm not going to drag them into study hall.

(I will say, I wish we could be more selective. But given our mission, we can't be. So we do the best with the hand we're dealt, and a lot of the time that means doing remediation on people who didn't get the greatest high school education)

But no to "cuddly bunnies." I'm actually kind of insulted by that assumption. My students are not My Little Ponies that I ooh and awww over. They are adults (or maybe almost-adults: I get a few "concurrent" high school students). I get that they sometimes have competing demands on their time. I get that some students may be less-than-ideally prepared. I get that for many people, learning is not as fascinating to them as it is to me, and college is mainly a path to a better career.  I get that some people may be in college to put off becoming a "real" adult for four more years. Or to party. Or to try to find a life-partner. Or whatever.

I don't coddle. I do help people improve. If someone comes to me wanting tutoring or wanting me to explain something I will do it. If someone wants to come in with a draft of a paper early and have me tell them how to improve it, I am happy to do that. But if someone is unwilling to work, I'm not going to "give" them a grade they don't deserve and didn't earn, and I admit  I have looked at my share of students and sadly thought, "Just what ARE you doing here, anyway?"

There's a difference between helping someone pull themselves up by their bootstraps (genuine tutoring, stuff like counseling on paper-writing) and carrying someone (e.g.: our departmental tutor complained some of the students who came in to her didn't so much want help with the topic on their homework, they wanted her to DO the homework for them. She refused, of course).

And yes. I have my share of students I am fond of and that I really want to see succeed. There are plenty I have cheered for when I found out they earned a place in PA school or got a good agency job - but in those cases it was because their work had merit and they were also decent people.

I also admit, my first reaction to seeing the "cuddly bunny" article was to snort to myself and think, "Must be a private school." Part of our mission here is to assist people who are first-generation students, or non-traditional students, or who have life-stuff going on that gives them troubles.

And I admit, at times there are times I rail at the level and degree of help (or information) we are requested to provide: for example, we send out monthly reports on "at risk" students (we can do it for everyone, and I often do in my intro class) with their current grade and number of absences, and if we perceive a problem (e.g., they fall asleep in class), we can note that too. And I admit I think of the antediluvian days when I was a college student and how I was expected to keep track of my own grade and attendance wasn't even taken in most lecture sections because hey, if you missed, you'd just do that much more poorly on the exam. But then again, some might argue I came from a different background: both my parents were college educated (shoot, they both had Ph.Ds and were professors themselves), I had enough scratch that I didn't have to work an overnight shift to cover my living expenses, I didn't have a kid I was raising on my own, etc., etc.

I dunno. I think there's a balance between going overboard (I have had a few students who implied they wanted me to e-mail them personally to remind them of exams) and tying a brick to the "bunny" and throwing him in the river.

I definitely think people who don't want to do the work, who expect As for just showing up and warming a seat should not receive any extra unsolicited help, and in fact, should probably be counseled to maybe put a few years in at a job and THEN think about if they want college. But the kid from the single-parent home who is the first in his family to go to school, who is struggling because he went to a rural school with a poor science program but who really WANTS to learn the stuff and asks to come in for extra help: I will help him. And I will cheer at graduation if he succeeds and earns a degree.

but don't tell me I'm coddling a bunny. I'm not.

(Also, this is allegedly a Christian school? Hm. WWJD with a struggling student?)