shouldn't it be worth fighting for?

I think I've figured out some of my distress with some of my students. It is that they get defeated very easily, like they've given up.

I hand back homeworks and instead of students paying attention to my discussion of what folks did wrong, they flip through their dayplanners or talk with their neighbors. And they toss the graded homework in the trash on their way out. And when I hand back the next one, on which they have made all the same mistakes, they say something like, "I just don't understand this" or "I just didn't work very hard on this" or something.

Dammit. Shouldn't your college education be worth more of a fight than that?

I remember when I was in college - in particular, chemistry - and I didn't understand something, I would find the TA or the prof on his office hours, and go in with a list, and say, "I don't understand thus-and-so as well as I'd like to. Could you explain it to me again?" And they would, and most of the time I'd understand it better. But my office hours, they are lonely. No one shows up to ask questions, even though I have people who get all bent out of shape over low grades or not understanding.

If you care about something, you have to fight for it. You have to be willing to put in a little effort. I get the feeling a lot of these folks either don't care, or have swallowed the victimology pill, where they believe if they don't get PRECISELY what they wanted without effort, it's because someone did them wrong along the way.

I have people who "play the victim" in my classes - they skip class, and then act all offended because, apparently, I did not show up on their doorstep to give them the announcements they missed. Or they do poorly and come at the end of the semester blaming me that they "didn't know" something, when they were absent on the day it was discussed.

And it makes me tired. I am just one person. I cannot do all the work for each of the 100+ of them. I cannot keep track of who was and was not paying attention at a given time. I am doing my best but they have to meet me at least halfway.

This is the millennial generation, folks. Ain't none of us Xers ever going to be able to retire, because there will be no one willing to take the reins from us. Or if there is, they will be calling us every 5 minutes to ask us "how do you turn the copier on again?"

I've said before I wasn't in favor of conscripted military or civil service, but I'm beginning to wonder - as 18 year olds continue to seem more helpless and "younger" with each semester, if there isn't going to come a point where we as a society have to do something to, figuratively speaking, force their testicles to descend before unleashing them on the world of the rest of the adults. Because as an adult older than these "kids," I am growing heartily tired of the whining, of the shutting-down, of the refusal to take responsibility for even rather small aspects of their education. As I said: I cannot do it all.

I have come within a hair's breadth of going all snarky and saying, "Oh, and do you want me to wipe your butt for you, too?" this semester. Twice, actually. That's not good.

Augh

The feel-better package I ordered for myself? That I was wondering when it would come?


turns out I never actually completed the order. Sigh. Ricki FAIL. (I did now but no idea if any of the items are now out of stock). I guess I got distracted. I hate that.

And I need "feel better" stuff right now, the combination of semester-suckage, news-suckage, and being around snarly snappy people is really getting me down.

I can't do it anymore.

I can't watch the news, or listen to commentary. It makes me despair too much. We are a nation divided. Neither side listens to the other any more, neither side is willing to admit that the other might have useful ideas. And it seems sometimes the side in power is interested mainly in hanging on as tightly as possible to that power and getting even more. Things are changing, fast, and not in a good way. People who want to slow down change, who want to say, "Wait, we need to think this over first" are vilified.

And so, I kind of give up. I leave it to those with more stomach for this than I have. Who have more time. Who do not work in a workplace where admitting their true political leanings will get them shunned. I know it's weak and irresponsible, but I just can't.

And so I'm giving up watching the news. Instead, I will watch the NCIS re-runs that USA so helpfully runs during that time. And the SpongeBob re-runs that Nickelodeon has on offer in the morning. Oh, I'll keep reading the blogs and scanning headlines on-line but I am just done with televised and radio news; it makes me too sick of my fellow humans. Both the sort of random everyday joe who sees nothing wrong with setting dogs on fire, and people in Congress who see nothing wrong with sucking more money out of people's pockets while shaming them for earning that much money in the first place.

I need one of those clocks, like they used to have in the Cold War - the five minutes to midnight sort of thing - only mine would be the "minutes to midnight" where "midnight" is me running off to live in a cabin on 100 acres of woodland, all posted NO TRESPASSING TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT THIS MEANS YOU.

Still sad, still thinking

About the Fort Hood killings.

I have known people who were (formerly) stationed there. I know how bases often become a pretty tight community for people who live there.

I think that's maybe the theme of the 20th-21st centuries: a group of people build a community that is working, that is doing good, and then someone comes in and tries to destroy it. (Actually, maybe this is the theme of civilized life; I seem to remember some instances, not quite the same, from the New Testament.)

I don't know why. If you pressed me, I'd kind of shrug and shake my head and go, "Evil?" Because I don't know. I'm the kind of person, who, if I get really angry with someone (and that is VERY rare, at that), my inclination is to go find that person, sit down with them, and try to explain why I am angry and see if I can fix things. Or, in the few instances where I felt my life was trashed and I had just failed at everything, my plans were to pick up, give away most of my stuff, buy a cheap car and drive as far as I could, find a new town, and get a job waiting tables or something for a while. Just disappear and try to make a new life. I never actually did it - on wiser reflection I figured out an alternate plan that didn't involve running away - but literally, that was my "nuclear option" - running off and resettling somewhere else and trying to make a new life.

I can't understand wanting to kill other people. But I suppose that's why 99.9% of us don't.

Look, I don't know why this happened, if there was something (other than simple evil) that made the guy do it. It's probably irresponsible to even speculate at this point.

My main inclination at this point is to say "there's evil in the world, and sometimes people get tempted to it." May we all be able to recognize evil when it comes to us, and resist its temptation.

My heart goes out to the families who lost loved ones. And to the injured. And to all the folks whose sense of community has been destroyed, whose trust has been shattered. I hope they can heal.

I wish we never had to hear these kinds of stories. It made me think of Virginia Tech all over again.

Priorities and "having it all"

I've noticed something recently. It's really come to a head this semester, when I have several students with chronically ill family members, or with major health issues being diagnosed, or with other problems. A lot of the stuff is stuff that I would have dropped out for a semester to attend to (a lot of the stuff, while "big," is "short-lived" - a parent having major abdominal surgery but who will be OK in 2 or 3 months, trying to help a sibling go through the bankruptcy process). But these students don't; they randomly disappear for weeks at a time to attend to what is going on in their lives, and then come back and (a) expect they should be able to catch up and (b) expect that I will be overjoyed to re-teach what they missed and also write make up exams and set up the labs they missed just for them to complete.

I wonder if this generation of college students has been told the bad old feminist idea about "having it all," and have swallowed it wholesale.

Look, I don't care what anyone says: you can't "have it all." If you try, one of three things will happen:

1. You will do EVERYTHING in a half-assed, badly-done sort of way. (One way I can tell I've taken too much on? When the quality of my work starts to suffer).

2. You will do well on one or two things, but seriously short other things. If that's your spouse or your kids, that's a MAJOR problem. If it's schoolwork when you're going to school, you may well wind up flunking out.

3. You will burn out and either get sick or become very angry and bitter and be unpleasant to be around.

I think some of my students have opted for option 2, with the idea that the prof can pick up the slack for them. And then that forces the prof into the unenviable position of doing what they are already handling, plus doing more that they really don't want to do. And which may be an extra-heavy burden on them: I cannot drop everything to write a make up test for someone who shows up wanting to take it NOW. I have told people: I need a minimum of three days' lead time, but no one ever pays attention to that. Either they tell me that they are coming in, I write the exam, and then they never show, or they don't tell me but show up and get all angry that I didn't sit down RIGHT AFTER CLASS when they said, "Oh, I might need to take a make up on that exam" and write one for them.

I've also had more people this semester who missed labs acting as if I should scurry back into the room and set up all the equipment and materials again so they can do the lab on their own schedules. No matter that some require several people working together to do, or have perishable material that I would have to go back out and buy (probably on my own dime) for them.

I suppose it is all part of the larger trend of the "Millennial" attitudes - a colleague and I are giving a paper on the challenges of the "new workplace" and the "new generation" for college teachers and a lot of the references we've looked at have noted the same problems we complain about with students: a sense that the universe revolves around them, the belief that their work is wonderful even when it's not, and an over-blown sense of what they can find as work and what they will do with their lives.

And I think there's also a strong thread of "I'm the only student in the room" - I have had to actually explain to some of my make-up test demanders that, "I am grading exams for one of my other classes right now. I like to hand exams back to students the next class period and this is the only time I have to get them done. I cannot stop and write a make-up exam for you now but I will have one for you in three days' time." Or they don't understand that I have to go some afternoons to do volunteer work I signed up to do, and I can't just shaft the coordinator at the food bank (or whatever) to stay and do their make-up exam for them.

It is as if some of them believe they should be my first priority, even when they are expecting something above and beyond normal class process, and, for that matter, above and beyond the "here is how we will deal with problems" protocol from the syllabus.

And while I know I am perfectly justified in my, "No, I cannot do the make up exam now" or "No, I do not do make up labs," it makes me very tired to have to say that (sometimes on a weekly basis) and then deal with the inevitable pleading, complaining, or "but can't you bend the rules just once, just for meeeeeee?"

And what got me thinking about this was this morning. I was getting dressed to come in, figured I better wear slacks because I can wear my trackshoes with them, rather than having to wear dress shoes that might hurt my feet in the approximately four miles I am going to walk and the approximately four hours I am going to be on my feet today. My church is serving lunch at the "ecumenical" Christian center on church (we have a Baptist center, a Church of Christ center, and an "ecumenical" center.) So after my class this morning I am going to walk over there (it's a little over a mile from where I sit now, but parking on campus is so horrific that I'm not even going to TRY) and serve food. I don't mind doing it, the students who come in are nice and are grateful for a free, home-cooked lunch - and most of them are regular attenders of the center's worship times - but it's just the time involved, especially now. Especially because I had someone go all sad-faced on me yesterday when I said I couldn't have them do a make up exam at that time, as I was going to be over helping serve lunch.

I said to myself this morning, "I will be very glad when I am done with doing stuff for other people for a while, and can attend to my own stuff." Not a very nice thought, perhaps, but in this past week, I've done lots of mop-up after student absences, and I served a stint at the local food bank handing out boxes of food, and I helped with some on-campus stuff, and today I am helping to serve lunch.

Oh, and yesterday afternoon, I arrived home to a message: since a member of my church's mother (who was affiliated with another church) passed away, they were taking food to the member and his family. Could I possibly pick up something and bring it? They were going to bring the food by around 5....

As the message was sent at 9:15 (when I was in my first class of the day) and I didn't get it until 4:30 when I finally arrived home, I called the person who sent it and told her that there was no way I'd have time to do it. She was understanding, but still: I really need to do a better job of educating people, I guess, that I can't generally do stuff with less than a 24 hour turnaround time.

So I just kind of get worn out. And it doesn't help when a lot of the students are overly optimistic about what they can get done, or how well they can cope with life issues. And I understand, in some cases it may be Financial Aid that's forcing them to do what they do - dropping out and restarting is a lot harder and you do run the risk of losing the aid, and sometimes it's actually "better" from a Financial Aid standpoint to take the F than it is to drop and go below "full time student" level. But that's not my fault. I didn't make the broken system. But it does frustrate me when students come to me expecting I can give them 10 hours of uninterrupted time, where they seem to forget that I have over 100 students in all my classes put together, and if they ALL demanded that much time...well, the universe would collapse upon itself.

I wish none of my students had to go through the crap they're going through. Partly out of simple humanitarian feelings - it must really suck to have to work to help your disabled adult kid get the assistance he needs to go through life - but also because it would free their minds up to concentrate on school. And I would have to hear far fewer sad stories of why I should bend the rules, "just this once, just for me."

I love a good "stupid criminal" story

Check it: these guys used permanent marker to "disguise" themselves before committing robbery. PERMANENT marker.


AH hahahahahahahahaahhaha!

a heartening development

I had LOTS of trick or treaters this year. LOTS. More than previous years. I gave out almost all the candy I bought.

This makes me happy. I see trick or treating as one of the simple pleasures of childhood. (I realize some may disagree with me for religious reasons, and that's fine for you. I grew up in a fairly observant family and there never seemed to be "evil" or satanic overtones to Halloween to me - and of course the next day is All Saint's Day. We kind of saw it in two ways: first, as a fun day to go out and do what you don't normally do (go out at night, eat more candy than normally permitted) and second, as a day to laugh at what scares you).

I'm glad it's not been swept away completely by the increased "convenience" or imagined greater "safety" of taking the kids to the mall instead, or doing a parking lot "trunk or treat." Oh, maybe some of the kids I saw did that too, but they also got out to do the old-school way of trick or treating, like I did as a kid.

I always try to buy the "good" candy; on a tip from a parent I know, this year I went for Skittles and 3 Musketeers bars and little Twix bars, those all seemed to be big hits. Most of the kids thanked me and a few really got excited when they saw what they were getting.

I like seeing all the trick or treaters. The tiny little kids in their tiny little costumes (cutest one this year - a babe in arms dressed as a bumblebee), the slightly older kids trying to pick the coolest or goriest costume (there were quite a few grim reapers this year, and there was one kid dressed as a Zombie Michael Jackson. Maybe a bit inappropriate, I don't know, but it was a pretty good costume (it was homemade)).

It makes me happy that this tradition survives. I hope it continues to, despite all the "bad news" about sex offenders and danger lurking in the candy and the recession and all that other crap - when you're a kid, you don't remember what's going on in the news (I don't remember much of Carter other than that he had a big toothy grin and used to be a peanut farmer, and I don't really remember the Carter Recession or the oil crisis (other than waiting in long lines to buy gas with my dad and him cussing a bit about it) but you do remember stuff like trick or treating.

And I think parents do, too. I know I get a lot of pleasure, even as a non-parent, from handing out the candy - it must be a lot of fun to take your kid out and see them get excited and have them all dressed up.

Sigh

Something came up that reminded me of my cousin who committed suicide. It's been five years now but it still hurts when I'm reminded of it.

I realize people in that frame of mind aren't really thinking, but really, it is the ultimate selfish act.

I'm just kind of melancholy right now. It's rained all week long, I'm trying to grade some absolutely terrible papers (I think I'm going to have to go back and re-teach stuff they should have already known) and all I have to look forward to tomorrow is coming in and doing the research work I didn't have time to do today.

I will admit to going over to "Superbuzzy" (a site that sells Japanese print fabric and cute little toys from a company called Re-Ment) and buying myself a couple of treats. (I got paid today. And, oh crap, that reminds me: don't go grocery shopping today. Or tomorrow, for that matter.)