Exam week Monday

My hip still hurts.

My bursitis flared back up LAST weekend after driving the 6 1/2 hours. I had just got it back mostly gone, then came the 90-minute Title VII presentation. Sitting on hard plastic chairs (why do I have fat all over my body EXCEPT on my butt? I could do with a slightly smaller chest in return for a little padding there....) that are molded in such a way that if your hips are wider than the average 8 year old boy's, you're going to wind up uncomfortable.

And I did. In retrospect: I should have sat in the back, where I could have stood up every 15 minutes or so without it seeming disruptive, instead of in the middle of the room (I picked the spot because it was nearest to two exits: sometimes I get a bit paranoid when all the faculty are massed somewhere, thinking, "If some disgruntled-former-whatever wanted to do harm to the lot of us, this would be the time....")

Also, I will note: there were a couple places where I wanted to stand up and say "Ninety percent of the women and perhaps thirty percent of the men in this room have experienced what is being discussed, please move on." I hope no one had PTSD brought up by some of the stuff.

And yes. We found out that we did it because, indeed,  some now-retired people in positions of power did what they ought not, and so the rest of us get punished. (Kind of like: you get coal in your stocking because your brother was disobedient all year, but he still gets candy).  I know life isn't fair, but it just seems like this is unnecessarily unfair.

And they warned us that more is coming. Great. Next time I'll sit in the back and stand up and if anyone says anything, I will point out I have a chronic condition that makes sitting in crappy chairs for longer than 20 minutes a bad idea. Surely I'm not the only one with back/hip/knee problems who finds being forced to sit for 90 minutes burdensome?

***

And I came in this morning to all the e-mails. One person who needed something of me, never showed during the scheduled times, showed up while I was in the meeting and is now unhappy.

Another person wants extra credit.

Other people want permission to hand stuff in late.

This kind of thing is the thing that wears on me most about teaching: all the asks. All the assumptions that I'm perfectly happy to write make-up exams on short notice, that I will allow re-dos, that I offer extra credit to make up for the many assignments skipped.

(That last isn't so hard for me: I just reiterate the syllabus policy of "No extra credit." I have several reasons for this:

1. "In fairness to all students": offering extra credit AFTER the class is over means not everyone gets a shot at it, and that's not fair or ethical. In fact, once I told a student that that kind of thing went against my code of ethics (that is: I do not offer points to people that not everyone can earn) and their response was "Don't worry; I won't tell anyone" and I was like LET ME EXPLAIN TO YOU AGAIN WHAT 'ETHICS' MEANS BECAUSE YOU HAVE CLEARLY FAILED TO GROK IT.

2. It makes more work for me, at a time when I'm busy and tired and just want to be done and think about relaxing and also think about scramming out of here for a little while. I think there is a disconnect that people don't believe or understand that faculty experience exam week stress too. (On Ivory Tower Fiber Freaks, someone reported how trained "therapy dogs" were brought in for a session where students could go and pet them - as an exam-week destressing thing - and when a couple faculty showed up, the people running it were like NOT YOU and that just seems so....needless.) And yes, I get it: we're more mature so we are supposed to have better coping strategies. And we get paid to do this. And it's not our future careers on the line (except it kind of can be: too many students earn Fs and you're getting talked to after your post-tenure review). But the assumption that we are either inhuman  or superhuman....it's false.

and a lot of us would just like the chance to pet friendly doggos during exam week.

3. I have copious opportunities to earn points during the regular semester. In fact, in two of my classes, I do a "drop homework" or "drop lab" where people who complete ALL the work get the "drop points" as bonus points: so it doesn't penalize people with that one week they're out sick, but it rewards the people in a v. tiny way who made it to every lab. And I find in about 80% of the cases someone comes to me requesting extra credit, it is that they have not done all the assigned work for the class, and again I ask: why should I make extra work for myself, then?

But yeah. It kind of sucks having to e-mail people back a "no" because there are a small number of people who will e-mail back "but why" or "my other profs do this" (Oh, and if your other profs jumped off a bridge, would you expect me to?) and.....as someone firmly in Guess Culture (where I don't ask for stuff unless it seems eminently reasonable AND I am fairly certain I will hear a "yes" and the other person won't feel put out) dealing with Ask Culture people - who ask for the moon, and when you go "Wharrrgarrrblll what makes you think I can do that?" they go "Well, it never hurts to ask" (And I think, always: but maybe sometimes it should)

***
I also had someone accuse me of taking class materials down off the course webpage. Of course I did not do that. I leave the stuff up there until the page "expires," usually some time a year from now when the people who administer the CMS purge old pages.

But, I figured: IT did an update this weekend (which briefly messed up my ability to get campus webmail from home; trying to get in led Malwarebytes to warn me of "malicious scripts" in the page, and I didn't want to risk it in case someone had altered something to hurt us). I figured it was possible the update could have broke something.

So I went and checked.

Of course everything was still there and in exactly the place where it's been all semester long, and I e-mailed the student reminding them of the location of the stuff, just in case it's been so long since they looked at it they forgot but....

Yeah, a lot of this is my personality coming out here. I was super-independent as a student. If there had been CMS webpages when I was a student, and I couldn't find something on it, I'd have clicked every button and link I could find on the page before e-mailing the professor about it. I find a certain number of our students will try ONE thing and then give up and ask for help. Same thing with getting articles online: I once had someone get v. belligerent with me (and my co-teacher, fortunately this was a co-taught class) because he just handed in an abstract and we said, "No, you need to read and write about the ENTIRE paper" and his response was "I can't FIND it" and darn it but we had a copy of that paper in less than three seconds. 

And yes, I know, I've always been "too" independent (see: One Reason Why I am Not Married) but it's frustrating to have to field requests vaguely accusing me of doing stuff I didn't do just because the person in question apparently couldn't be bothered to look a little harder.

(It's possible, I suppose, the IT update messed up the CMS for a while, and they tried accessing it then, and I did reference the IT update....but seeing as the stuff is where it's always been....)

But yeah. When I get those students, who will spend ten seconds looking for something and then give up and demand help (or worse: not do anything until the last minute and THEN demand help), I wonder how they're going to fare in the working world. I know I once had a TA I non-recommended for further employment because I literally had to hang over him and tell him every five minutes what to do - most of the TAs I've had, I could give a list of what needed to be done to, and they'd go do it and only MAYBE come find me if someone had moved something and it wasn't where I told them it would be. But this person would complete one part of one task and then be like, "Okay what do I do now" and it got so frustrating.....one of the reasons I don't generally push to have a TA in my upper level classes is I often find it's easier to do the work myself than it is to supervise someone in doing it.

So anyway. I am really really really hoping that my dad is a bit better over break, and that no one else gets hurt, because it would be nice to give up a little responsibility for a little while, and maybe have someone to fuss over me a little. (That doesn't happen enough, I think. I get fussed over a LITTLE bit at church, and that's nice, but....I feel like I would like to be fussed over a little more).

Because on top of all the work-stuff like usual, and the additional requests for help and other stuff, I also have laundry and marketing and cooking and dishes and cleaning house and all the other life-tasks that a person needs to do to remain hygienic and healthy.....and it's just me, I have no one to help me. And so it gets to feel like too much when someone is asking me "hey can you print all this stuff out for me and wait around until I get there and then give it to me?" or whatever the unreasonable-seeming-to-me request of the day is.