s'posed to

...be writing a final. Yep, that time again. I told my students "next week we have a final. I think."

How's that for being on top of shit? In my defense, there are at least some reasons for my disorientation to time this semester. The university recently changed the academic calendar to allow for intersession sessions, pre and post semester week long "courses", and something like four overlapping interwoven summer sessions. In short, they screwed with the regular academic calendar to allow for as many ways as possible to squeeze a buck out of folks desperate to get that BA/BS stamp of approval in order to enter into the world of 30K+ employment.

I am still coming to grips with the fact that we now have a week off at Thanksgiving, a "spring" break that occurs barely past midwinter, and a Spring semester that effectively ends in April.

The semester changes, this year's "springing forward" too early, recent lab tragedies, and my age induced perception of accelerated temporal passage have conspired to leave me wondering WHERE THE FUCK DID THIS SEMESTER GO, and necessarily doubting the emails in my inbox which say this week is the last week of my teaching gig for the semester. The students I teach are mostly first years and they are as amazed as I am that we have a final next week.

I think that most of them are unaware of the other half of the basis for our shared disbelief that a final is coming so soon. What I am aware of from having designed the lesson plans is that our contact time for the entire semester is twelve 50 minute class periods - only eight and a half of which have real content. Add into (or rather, subtract from) that total the loss from the tendency for late arrivals and early departures each week and you get eight and a half 45 minute content sessions for the semester.

It is so hard for me to come to grips with the fact that I'm supposed to write, give, and grade a final exam on content from 6 and 1/2 hours of sporadic, disconnected lectures. Further, even though I have finally accepted this really is the last week after days of indulging an OCD like obesssion with checking the course calendar repeatedly, I find it hard to muster up the nuggets to write and give an exam under these conditions as I believe testing them on anything from such a set up is, at best, mere grade generation.

Thus far, I have a word document with a nice header saying "Final Exam", "Your Name", and "Section".

Did I mention a student from last semster just emailed me to meet about her grade? Nothing like waiting 4 months to complain about not getting the grade you want (rather than the one you deserve). I'm fighting the urge to write back with extreme cador. Until I can figure that out, I am not writing back. I have given myself a deadline of Monday for a reply. I'm hoping that in the meantime, I can get some advice from university officials and faculty on how to handle this appropriately if not well.

I suspect that I'd have less trepidation about handling this if there was any real mentoring for teaching in my department or university. I almost chuckle as I write that. Mentoring for teaching is a farce here. Grads are allowed to teach because it is part of our education as grad students, so goes the reasoning of universities across the US these days. We are not, I repeat, NOT cheap labor for the degree factory. All departments where grads are supported in large part through teaching assignments have departmental based, run, and overseen teaching support. For example, my department has a class on "teaching" where an old and revered british professor tells us how to speak without saying "um" and "like", to move around a room, how to use visual aids effectively, and how to deliver a perfectly non-participatory memorized lecture from start to finish. All of which are important but none of which necessarily counts as "teaching" in my book. There is also a departmental teaching assistant meeting at the start of each semester where our department head comes in dressed in "regalia" usually to the tune of a song which may have been rousing circa the mid 1980s and lauds us for how much teaching we do, and for the assloads of research and undergraduate enrollment dollars our department brings our university (which translate into new buildings full of underutilized resources and 300+ classrooms taught by increasingly undercompensated, non-permanent instructors).

In all of this mentoring, there's nothing about how to deal with the problem student or the student problem. Last semester, there were something like 3 suicides on my campus with many more attempts. It was alarming. In the midst of this, I had a student who was having a meltdown. Needless to say, she wasn't on the top of her game at the end of the semester. I gave what points I could, even violating my exam make up policy for her. My sense at semester end was that although she acknowledged having had a very rough go of it, she was shocked to see her grades reflecting this. And now she's back at possibly the worst time of the semester. My advisor is part time which leaves me as the senior grad in our lab - a resource for the junior grads on topics including funding, housing, health insurance open enrollment, doctoral exam preparation, and how many incompletes you can get without being asked to take a walk. I'm grading the sprawling last assignment for my 44 students and arranging and accepting makeup work for my current round of "students with problems". I haven't touched my dissertation in weeks, have only managed to do less than the minimum amount of work on my other funding assignments, and the end of my semester is looming as well.

I am as uncertain of the appropriate mindset for writing this exam as I am of the way to deal with a four month old problem-student problem without violating university policy and my own teaching and grading practices or escalating this into a hearing-level crisis.