Last summer weekend

Well, not the last weekend of meteorological summer, but the last weekend of "work summer" for me.

I'm in, working. I want to complete a little research and I also need to prep for teaching Monday. Because I have an 8 am class, a 9 am class and an 11 am class. I have time (at 10) to prep for the 11 am, but that 9 am class - which is biostatistics - well, there's going to be no prep time right before it, and I will be having to mentally shift gears from the intro bio class I teach at 8 am.

Also, I have to really be on my A game in biostats because I have a student in it I've had before. A student with some issues. Not as great issues as the student of a year ago in May, thank goodness, but someone with a tendency to do this:

Student: "I don't understand."
Me: "Okay, what's giving you trouble? What do you want help with?"
Student: "Everything. I don't understand. I hate this class."

You have to realize, that attitude is utterly unhelpful to the professor. I get that students do it, I get that students get overwhelmed at times. But to say you don't understand anything....that's not exactly narrowing down the field so I know what topic to attack first.

Fortunately, most of the students in my class are like this:

Student: "I'm really confused on how to calculate an average using a frequency table."
Me: "Okay, let me do another example of one for you. And remember, you have to use the sum of the item frequencies as your number of observations. That's one place that people commonly make mistakes." (I find, after teaching this class - merciful heavens, it'll be fifteen times this fall - I find there are certain places where people commonly mess up, and I try to point those out to the class, so hopefully at least some people will learn from others' mistakes)

And then, after an example or two:

Student: "Oh. I get it now. Thank you."

So, yeah. I'm gonna have to pack my patience. (Also, this is someone with the habit of bringing a class to a screeching halt if they don't understand something, even if everyone else does. They will stop and call out the professor for being confusing. And that annoys me but it's not cool to show that you're annoyed in that situation.)

***

I had thought of just ditching today. (Is it "ditching" if the only person telling you "You need to be at work" is you?) I need to do some grocery shopping, I have to bake a pan of jam bars for tomorrow*, and I just want to get out and have a little relaxation time before classes start up.

So I'm compromising: coming in this morning, and then going later today. That probably means I won't have time to do the baked beans like I planned, but I realized I had bought a package of ground bison that has Monday as its sell-by date, so I'm going to make meatballs instead.

(*The organist we used to have - she had been the organist for many, many, many years - I guess since before I was born, even - passed away. She had retired a couple years ago and her health had steadily been going downhill. Even though she was technically a member of one of the Baptist churches here, her family requested we host the memorial service and reception. So I got asked to make jam bars. Which is fine - they are pretty easy to put together. But I just have to remember to do them. (I was going to do them last night - they will keep - but I forgot, and anyway, I didn't have the right kind of ground up nuts).)

I also want to go to the newly expanded Green Market (natural foods store). I thought the new location was open some weeks ago, but they weren't yet. Apparently they are now.


***

I finished "Dancers in Mourning" (the most recent Campion I read) a few days back. It was one of the more melancholy Campion novels....for one thing, Campion finds himself falling in love with one of the women in the group he is helping, and for various reasons, he could NOT act on that feeling. (And again: I like dear old Albert even better. One of the reasons he won't act is that "Philandering is no pleasure if you have not the temperament," a quotation Campion attributes to Don Marquis. (I have no idea if the real-world Marquis ever said that or not)). Also, the body count here is higher than in some Campion novels, and the ending...well, you get the feeling that everything that happened was just kind of a waste (Any murder is kind of a waste, but in some of the other novels, there seemed to be more motivation, rather than sheer unpleasantness, for the murderer). And the order of Campion's world is somewhat disrupted - he has to stay with different people, he loans Lugg out after the butler gives notice. And I think, even though he doesn't complain about it, Campion is as much a lover of his proper home and an orderly life with things on time as Hercule Poirot or even Nero Wolfe is. (I wonder if there is something about the mindset that allows someone to "detect" that also tends to crave order?)

I think deep down one of the reasons I like these characters is that I also like order. I have my schedule, I like to follow my schedule. I like to have things planned out. I like things a certain way. ** I like to know I have the "bases covered," even in little things like knowing there's an extra jar of peanut butter in the cupboard in case I happen to use up the one that's currently open.

(**It may not be such a bad thing I never married. I'm sure my desire to have "things a certain way" and the fact that sometimes those "ways" are a little different and a little rigid would drive some chaps batty)

 So I've been casting about for "what to read next" (Yes, I'm still working on "The Horse, the Wheel...." but I like to take occasional breaks from that).  I started a Robert Ferrar Capon book ("Health, Money, and Love, And why we don't enjoy them") It's about grace. (Capon is an Episcopal priest). I'm not into it far enough to see if I'm going to garner any new insights or not.

I also tried starting a YA fiction book I bought a couple years back, called "The Looking-Glass Wars," which is a wild re-imagining of the Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass story (in this novel, Alice is actually a Princess of Wonderland, who gets transported to Victorian England to save her life when the queendom (Wonderland is female-ruled, and therefore is a queendom rather than a kingdom) is attacked by the queen's evil sister. On the one hand, it's interesting to see what the author has done with the characters (the analog of the Mad Hatter is actually a very highly skilled paramilitary fighter tasked with protecting the queen), but I got to the point where the body count, where bad things happening to characters, just got so high I put it aside. Too many really ugly assassinations done solely out of a thirst for "getting back at them." (It's funny. I try lots of YA fiction, especially the fantasy-fiction, thinking I will enjoy it - but in a lot of cases there's just so much violence. And really, I turned off the tv news and picked up a book to get AWAY from that.) I wonder if my frustration with these - and with a lot of modern novels that are nominally for grown-ups, is related to what Kelly, over at Byzantium's Shores, termed "our culture's current fascination with stories of Awful People At Work And Play." As Madeline L'Engle once famously said: I don't like stories with antiheroes.

So I might have to start some other novel, perhaps another Brit-Lit novel, or, I have what is supposed to be a "good" translation (in the sense of flowing better and not expurgating some of the parts earlier translators expurgated) of "The Three Musketeers." Yes, I'm sure that one has a high body count....but I don't mind it nearly so much when it doesn't seem, I don't know, gratuitous.