Too bad, so sad, but the party's over

Although I have a couple of blog posts floating around in my head about literature and its value to teaching, the rest of the world etc., they aren't worked out yet, so they'll have to wait.

Right now though, I'm staring at a huge pile of take-home exams that need to be marked. I've made my job a bit easier in creating a basic rubric that I'll fill in, and the fact that students usually never come back to get these the next term means that what comments I insert will be telescopic, but it sure is hard getting up the desire to mark these things. I may leave them till tomorrow.

I gave my students a three hour window in which they could hand in their papers, but they needed to hand them in as hard copies - I wasn't going to accept email submissions. They've known this deadline for six weeks now and I even told them they could make arrangements to hand it in early if they had exam conflicts, or if they just wanted to finish it early. A couple made arrangements to drop them off last week, but I still came home one short.

Why is it always the weakest students who do that?

Don't answer that. I know why.

I even stayed an extra half-hour to give them time to get to me because the weather and the roads have been so horrible. I had planned to get to school an hour before I said I would, and even with that cushion, it still took me an hour longer to get to work than I thought it would.

To get to work, I have to go through the river valley. The main route through was slick, slick, slick! this morning. I crawled down with everyone else in first gear, and even on the way back up, which of course is usually easier, I didn't get above second gear because it was really slick too. The snow management in this city has just not kept up to its growth, that's for sure. It was never great, but it's definitely gotten worse over the last few years.

I have to say though, some of the students who ran in at the end of the three hour window really need to use some common sense - two of them told me their cars wouldn't start this morning (no, really, your car wouldn't start in -30 weather?) So they had to plug them in. Umm... ??? We live in Canada, people! When it's this bloody cold, you gotta plug the car in! What I want to know is where they've been for the last several years? (And yes, they're upper level students - this isn't their first year here.)

Anyway, aside from some of this kind of silliness, I actually had some really nice conversations with some of them. One even said that she was worried at the beginning because the way I'd structured the course differed from what she'd been told by other students who have taken the course before. But she found it really helpful the way it was set up. So that was really nice to hear.

I think that might be one of the best compliments a person can get about a course - that the student came expecting one thing and got more than they bargained for. Everytime I've heard such a comment, the subtext has usually been that the student had expected to hate the course (the perils of teaching required gen ed courses) and found they ended up liking at least a part of it. I think the best comment I ever got on an eval was for a public speaking course and was something to the effect of "making a course most students dread enjoyable". Defying student expectation certainly isn't my goal when I design a course, but I think it's a bonus when it does happen.

Here's hoping the coming term will also defy students expectations of their course!