4/25: What I Accomplished Today

1. Went to Literary Society. The lunch was nice, and several people from book group were there, so that was fun. My colleague who sometimes does the introductions introduced today's speaker, and her introduction was a concise analysis that captured some of the nuance and paradox of Oppenheimer in fewer than five minutes.

The speaker wasn't good, though. He seemed very personable, and based on comments he made, I suspect he is a good teacher. However, he summarized the book--the book we all had at our houses. The book most of us had at least made a start on. Hint for authors: if you're asked to speak at one of the Literary Society functions, don't summarize your book. Assume your audience has read it, and if we haven't, make us want to. Why in the world am I going to want to read a book when I've already heard the good parts? I thought this was a very irritating lack of audience awareness.

The other problem: he ran long. Most of the speakers take 30-40 minutes and then take questions for another five or 10 minutes. He was at 40 minutes and going strong, and I needed to go to work, but I hated to leave in the middle. Eventually, though, my bladder, impatience, and work ethic won out, and I left.

2. Graded two sets of papers, graded two classes of online work, prepped tonight's class, taught tonight's class.

On work days, I put that, and it seems almost like a throwaway. For this to make sense, however, you have to know that, particularly near the end of the semester, this is the most time-consuming thing I will do all day; today, this took a total of six hours.

You may have noticed (probably not, but maybe) that, on the weekend, this tagline was absent. Unless I am desperately, desperately behind, I do not bring work home. First of all, I'm entitled to a personal life. When I was in school, we had a cousin who was an English teacher, and it seemed like every time we asked if she wanted to go somewhere, she couldn't because she had a million papers to grade. I have a million papers to grade, too, but I keep double the office hours I have to so I can finish them at work. When I'm home, I get to relax and enjoy being home.

The other reason I try not to bring papers home is that my Co-Vivant wants to help. She has some regard for teachers and thinks everyone should try to help them--but the way she helps me is by offering to grade papers. "Is that the person's name? That's a stupid name. Just on the basis of that name, you can't give that student higher than a C." "This person is in college and has penmanship that poor? Flunk 'em." This is funny, sometimes, but it doesn't get the work done any faster.

We don't have any animals anymore (they were all old; the last three died within about a year of each other two years ago), but when we had animals, I tried not to bring papers home because one of the cats would eat paper. Once, she did nibble on a gradesheet until one of us noticed what she was doing and rescued it before it was demolished. Then I had to go to the English department secretary and show her the paper and say, "You're not going to believe this, but my cat ate my homework." She took my gradesheet and showed it to the department chair, and they both laughed very hard for a very long time. It was only mostly embarrassing.

3. Verified my book orders for the Fall semester.

4. Reading. I'm probably not going to read the entire Oppenheimer, but I've decided I'll at least skim through the rest of it, not because the co-author's talk was so inspiring, but because the Oppie's personality is interesting. I'll probably skip the part about his trial; I find kangaroo courts so frustrating and un-American and...nauseating that I really can't stomach the thought of going over the material yet again. I had a friend who would say I was burying my head in the sand by refusing to admit the reality of what happened; I would say that I'm well aware of what happened, having read several other books and articles and seen several documentaries about it. I would counter that I'm not burying my head in the sand; I'm not making myself sniff that particular pile of feces again. So I skimmed a little more of that; we've just dropped the Bombs.

5. The woman who normally backs up the placements had a family event today, so I did the placement backup.

6. We watched Nova tonight; it was about the promises and shortcomings of solar energy. We're both interested in putting up solar panels, but we're not in a position to do that yet.

7. Started the new Pogo badges; got about a fifth into two of them. The personal challenge, the badge that came up in the 2005 badge book, requires me to win games of billiards; I'm not good at winning Pogo billiards. That could be a long one.

8. Started working on my level 20 Paladin in World of Warcraft. Shifting from a higher-level to a lower-level character is tough the first day or so because you can't just breeze in and do the things you could the day before. It's also a little frustrating because I've leveled the dwarf and gnome to 25, and both draenei, so now I'm starting the human portion of my character list. My human paladin is just lame until I remember how to play her; she can't zip in like a warrior, and she has no ranged abilities except that she happens to be an engineer and usually has some explosives. Pulling (separating one or two evil critters, a manageable fight, from a larger group) is hard when you don't have any range (she doesn't have a bow, a crossbow, a gun, a throwing axe, or a wand with which she can deal damage at a distance).

Okay, enough WOW whining; tomorrow or the day after, I'll have a better feel of how to play a paladin again, and then it should be fine.

9. Today's BigFishGame is one of those dumb-ass Missing Object puzzles. I liked Travelogue 360: Paris because I thought the hint system was innovative, but other than that one, I think all of these games are just goofy. Not my cup of tea.

10. Trying to remember if I did anything useful around the house today. It seems like there was something I did when I got up this morning, but now I don't remember what it was.