Looked down. Saw the Soils exam. Thought, "Huh, one must have got mixed in" Looked at the rest of the stack. All of them soils exams.
I had the wrong exam. Worse, I didn't have the RIGHT exam, not even in my office.
Moment of panic. I hate looking incompetent even if maybe I am. (My whole life is anxiety about not making mistakes. Many of my achievements have been fueled solely by my fear of looking stupid. Because not-looking-stupid is about all I've got some days)
How to recover? I went back to my office to LOOK, but also to grab my flashdrive if there were no copies of the right exam (I would have rage cancelled the class, but I am impossibly far behind the syllabus). I allowed myself a moment of embarrassing self-excoriation in front of the class, but then launched into finishing the next chapter.
So, I guess I give the exam Monday. One guy expressed relief; he had already had three exams this week, so maybe it's not all terrible.
But I still feel terrible. I hate it when the mask slips and my inner incompetent shows up.
Yes, I could handwave this away and say I've had entirely too much to do this week, but the truth is: this isn't any more than what a professor on some other campus has to do, and I could handle this level of stuff before. I can't quite forgive myself for (a) sending the wrong exam (which is what I did, as it turns out; I had a way to check and I did) in the first place and (b) not LOOKING on Thursday morning to be sure I had both sets of exams correct.
And of course this spirals me in to: "You're gonna get bad teaching evals this semester....which is gonna impact your next post-tenure review...and maybe you'll wind up losing your job!" (Yes, exactly like Twilight Sparkle being worried about being busted back to Magical Kindergarten.)
But it was such a BONEHEADED mistake! Why did I have to make it? Why can't my mistakes be things no one knows about but me, like putting my underwear on backwards or something?
Then again: nobody died.
I'm also trying to gauge in my mind (I know, dangerous thing to try) how well a joke about "I don't know who was praying so hard about 'I don't wanna have to take the exam Friday' but it worked" would go over as I hand out the exam on Monday (I announced it, obviously, to the class, but also posted a note on the class website: several people were out (field trip, sports trip - I have a couple of softball players in my class, someone with chronic illness having a doctor's appointment) so they'll know.)
But yeah. I hate making mistakes like that.
I did run to the walgreen's - both my calculators died, allegedly (if you can deal with tiny screws) you can replace them, and I'm going to try, because $7 or so worth of batteries is cheaper than $30 for a new calculator. I also bought myself a "fluster" - I had seen these there before and kind of wanted one. Little blindbag llama toys (well, not as cheap as most blindbags, but). Called "Who's your llama," a suppose a pun on Who's your mama or similar.
Except, I got the one I probably wanted least
"Trauma Llama," the injured llama. I SUPPOSE the little cone of shame makes up for it a bit, but why couldn't I get one of the girly ones with cute clothes?
(If I had time, maybe I'd MAKE some cute clothes instead of what he came with, but, I don't have time for anything these days)
Update on the calculators: got one of them working again with battery replacement, no problem. This is the one I know was "my" calculator - as in, I bought it, at an electronics store, it came in branded TI packaging. The other one was one I scavenged ("Let me take it, maybe I can get it working again") when a student was going to pitch it out after it died. Allegedly they were both TI-30XA models, but they looked different - different typefaces on the front, and when I opened them, the circuit board in "mine" was a lot sturdier and the different parts were marked with alphanumeric codes - absent on the other one. And the "scavenged" calculator would not work with replaced batteries (I tried a couple things, including the "static reset" mentioned in the comments on this page.) I wonder now if that one was a "bootleg" TI....I wonder if there are fake versions made. (At any rate: tossed it in the trash, it wasn't one I bought anyway). I guess 50% success rate is better than 0%....and now I also have a tiny (eyeglass sized) screwdriver for my office, which may come in handy again some time.
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