Three weeks till the language exam in German. I'm a bit nervous about it, since my German isn't as strong as my Spanish, though I managed to muddle through that one okay last year.

And four weeks until the end of the semester and all my work has to be done as well as student papers marked. The good news is that I have only one of those big 25-30 page papers to write (though I have to read pretty much all the primary and secondary material yet) and a presentation week after next. The other course, the one where I'm doing all the reading, I only have to submit a summary to finish it up. I will likely write a conference paper out of the course as well, but to get the credit, I just have to do summaries, which I've been doing all along anyway, so I should be set pretty good for that.

I still have lots of student work to do though - I have two sets of drafts to comment on yet as well as two final papers for each of the eighteen in the class. Ugh! I'm trying something new this time. I'm having them submit the drafts by email (or Blackboard) and by tracking changes in word and adding comment boxes, I'm going to give them back my comments electronically as well. My hope is that this method will be slightly more effecient than printing everything out and handwriting is, since my typing is faster than my writing (at least legibly!). We'll see how it goes. You may be amused to read the story my students are writing about. I like it alot. Its by Jorge Luis Borges and is called the Library of Babel. I was surprised at how many of my students had absolutely no idea what the Babel of the title referred to.