One normalish thing

 I gave my first in-person exam since early March 2020 today.

I had burned out on online exams: yes, in some ways grading is simpler, and for "objective" questions (like matching), you can set it to automatically grade so you don't have to (you still have to grade the essays). But making the exam in the LMS is a giant pain, especially if you want to use questions that you hand wrote (I still have to compose things longhand and type them in). It's worse, somehow than typing in a word-processor, and there's sure a lot more to remember.

And also: an online exam seems easier to cheat. I would get horrible copypasta for my essay questions that seemed to be someone typing in a few keywords from the question and just ganking what they found, and in a lot of cases it was laughably inappropriate for the question. Oh, grading was easy: a zero and "this does not answer the question" in the comments box. But it was bad for my morale to think that students were so willing to cheat - and thought I would not catch it (that was the worst: "Do they think I'm THAT stupid?")

So I wrote a paper exam and made a big hairy deal about "exams are in person now; if you are ill or must isolate, e-mail me and we will set up a make-up time, or it can be your drop exam.

And I sent it to print shop - surprised I remembered all I had to do, down to what our printing account number was - and got it back. 

And I remembered to bring some knitting. In the before-times, I often worked on the stockinette portion of a sweater (in fact - the Pocketses vest, which I really need to block so I can make the pockets and the button bands and finish it up - was one I worked on back in 2019 and early 2020). I don't have a sweater like that going now - the current Incunabula is pretty complex and requires a lot of thought, and I need something where I don't need to be tied to a pattern or watching my hands the whole time. But I did have a version of the Antler Toque from Tin Can Knits on the needles, and had only completed 2 of the 8 cable repeats, so I figured I could get one or two more done. And I made a big deal last night of bagging up, and setting the bag on top of the shoes I was most likely to wear, because my memory is NOT GOOD right now and I will forget things and then remember them when it's too late.

But I remembered the knitting.

So I walked into the class - my last of the day, and glad I was giving an exam so I would not need to talk. (I am tired by Fridays these days). And I handed out the exam, and pulled out the knitting.

And I needed a moment. A lot of feelings. A mix of "things are maybe heading back to normal" and "it's been a century since I did this" and I had to stare into the middle distance for a moment. But then I picked up my cable needle and tucked the skein under my arm, like I did in the before-times, and started to roam around the class while people worked. And it was kind of a relief - eyes stayed on their own papers, I know no one was googling answers, and I had a stack of paper exams to go through (I got them graded this afternoon) and put comments on (even though I warned them "you won't like my handwriting" and yes, that's another benefit of the terrible LMS way of doing exams, at least they don't have to interpret my chicken scratch comments). 

But here's hoping to the return of more things from the past. Already I'm looking forward to getting to my mom's for Thanksgiving - I do not think things can be any worse than I returned in August, and apparently Amtrak is mandating vaccines or regular testing for their employees (and I can stay in my compartment) and maybe I can get out and circulate a bit more and maybe, just maybe, something like Bell Choir will return eventually so I get that human connection I need?