Tuesday evening things

 This is going to be a hellish week. It's already been stressful:

- minister handing in his resignation, effective apparently Jan. 1

- as a result, a meeting tomorrow evening to work through what we need to do. I hope this doesn't mean closing down but it might. I think if that's the case I'll try the Presbyterian church here first to see if I fit in, and if that doesn't work, the Methodists, and then the Episcopalians, and if none of those work, well, I don't know. Most of the other churches seem more fundamentalist than what I could be comfortable at.

I really hope it doesn't come to it

- huge pile of grading today, one paper has a distinct whiff of AI generation, and when I checked the resources I couldn't find evidence of the existence of two of them. But there's no way to PROVE it, not like the old "copy and paste from a website" thing, so I just relied on the fact that the student did not fulfill the guidelines of the assignment, and didn't actually DO the research project (it was just a review paper) and as a result, it earned a 50%. 

I got an aggrieved e-mail later in the day asking how I could possibly have graded it so low but I pointed out the failings in it and reminded them I had a guideline for the project up, and they skipped about half the things on the sheet. 

I don't know if it'll go farther than that; a colleague DID accuse a student of using Chat GPT (with some fairly good evidence) last year and they grieved the grade and reported her to administration and it was a nightmare. 

I HATE ChatGPT and other AIs when they're used for things like this, we have minimal defenses against it and in fact some faculty have capitulated and told students it's okay to use it.

But it's NOT writing! It's letting a computer regurgitate stuff, and the regurgitate is unpleasant to read and contains very little information relative to the wordiness. 

I hope there are some safeguards soon or this kind of word salad may just be my last few years of teaching (until I retire early in disgust)

- Spent some time this afternoon moving some of my soils lab stuff but there's so much more to be done, and I have to ask Physical plant to remove some old broken sliding doors off the too-tall cabinets in the room where I'll have to teach the lab when the rest of the building is inaccessible and I feel like we aren't being given enough help in this. Some of my colleagues have dragooned the TAs into doing it but I didn't have a TA this fall (don't need it for ecology) and so I'm doing it all by myself, fitting it in around when I'm doing my other things.

 it was 5:30 when I got home today

- Thursday a meeting to start planning to hire a replacement for the retiring microbiologist, and Thursday night is AAUW (and I have to find time to do the little bit of sewing on the mitts, and also make the meatballs I bought all the stuff for this weekend before everything blew up)

- Friday a Zoom with a job candidate for the other open position. 

So I'm going to be really exhausted the end of this week. And I was already kind of peopled out after Thanksgiving. And of course the resignation was a surprised to me so I'm still kind of reeling from that and apprehensive about the future. 

 

At least:

- I changed the sheets on my bed

- The new printer I ordered (the one I had had broken back in 2021 and while I don't print a lot, and had printed even personal things over at school (fewer than 10 pages a month), I decided IF I wind up filling in as a sort of interim, I may have to print the sermons I write, and I may need to do them on short notice if I decide to change something. So I spent some time setting it up but it went easily enough; no more fussing with having to type in the passkey for my router, the computer somehow sends that information to the printer automatically. 

This also means if I want a knitting pattern I don't have to read it off a screen; I really prefer reading them off a paper and then having the paper to carry with me. 

 - Also, I brought a little gift for Darwin (the new little departmental cat) back with me. I had bought a mixed bag of cat toys (we give Christmas gifts to my brother's pets) and I saved out one of those foil crinkle balls for him, figuring it was lightweight (he is still very small) and unlikely to break if someone treads on it. And because it has orange on it, like him

I think he appreciated it.

 

I do have to order my mom's Christmas presents (some salmon from SeaBear and I MIGHT find something somewhere else, like from King Arthur. And I have to find a place with good but not too expensive "Italian dinner boxes" (or similar) to send as a gift to my brother and sister-in-law. I suppose since I'm buying one gift for both I can go up to $100 as I usually spend about $50 a person. 

I wish I had more free time; the time leading up to Christmas is the best time and it feels like this year I'm too busy to enjoy it.