Spring Break--Having a Plan

This week is my spring break. The kids are in school, Hubby is gone on vacation, and so I have lots of hours in the house to myself. It. Is. Wonderful. But, unfortunately, I cannot just luxuriate in the silence or lie on the floor, staring at the ceiling in relaxed bliss. I can't even curl up on the couch with a book. No, I have stuff to get done, including two (out of three) batches of essays*, several sets of quizzes, and a chapter draft for the dissertation. Plus, there is all manner of housekeeping, gardening, and bill paying to which I should attend.

In order to get said stuff done, I figured I should have a plan, especially for the grading which I really want to ignore but cannot. Here is the basic plan that I came up with last Thursday:

Grading:

• Sunday evening: grade all quizzes
• Monday during the day: grade paper revisions 
• Each day, M-F: grade five essays from batch one during the day, and grade two essays from batch two each evening after the kids go to bed
• Sunday at the end of break: the remainder

PhD:

• Do a lot each day

How has it been going, you ask? Well, it's Tuesday afternoon, and I have graded all of the quizzes but only two essays. Out of about 45 or 50. (Wow, typing those numbers just spooked me, big time.) And I wouldn't say I've done a lot for the PhD but rather a little, or maybe a medium amount.

What have I been doing instead of grading? Oh, I don't know--taking morning walks with the dog, cleaning out the pantry, tidying my environment, drinking tea, talking to the cat.

But unless I want to be totally screwed on Sunday, I better get busy with the grading. And if I want to have a decent chapter draft by Friday, I need to step up my game on that front, too.

I will happily accept any advice for how to milk this break for all its worth so that it seems both productive and vacation-like (rather than unproductive and not-so vacation-like).


*The third batch will just have to wait until next week.

Dear Colleagues

I know that very few of you want to talk about Student Learning Outcomes and Assessment (SLOA). I know that everyone has been doing the duck-and-cover routine for 10 years, hoping all of this nonsense will just go away. Even as people like me have been saying, "Let's just do this so we can do it our way," most of you have been nervous. "They'll hold it against us," you fear. "They just want quantitative data," you say.

Well, look. I'm not in love with this stuff either. But I just spent all of last year editing our 300 page accreditation self-study, which was hard and extremely time consuming and which I thought might cause my husband to divorce me. And now, despite those efforts, our accrediting organization has put us on warning. Yes, I agree. They are whack. But still, we are on warning, mostly because we don't have our SLOA ducks in a row.

So. This whole duck-and-cover thing has cost me time, time I could have used for much better things--more time, I think, that if we just got the job done right the first time. So I've been saying this to some of you lately, and you still don't want to hear it. So, for now, I retreat. I will do some research, keep some notes, and build my little file of ideas in case you come to me and say, "Um, Hey, GoodEnough. What were those things you said about assessment?" And I'll whip out a plan that we can put into action.

But until then, I retreat. I retreat because I don't want to pull your teeth anymore and, plus, I OD'd on committees last year and am over it. And also because, really, I don't care that much. I feel confident that we won't lose our accreditation because, ultimately, the administrators at our college have way more riding on this than I do. Plus, if someone, in their last minute rush to meet the standards, says, "You need to start giving this multiple choice scantron test to all of your students," I'd say, "Okay. Whatever." Because I've realized that I just don't care that much about whether everything goes down perfectly. I still won't teach to the test. I'll still teach the good stuff. My students will learn. And you won't fire me. And, at some point, we could probably fix the problem because bad plans can be reversed. And I will try not to say, "Told you so."

*I don't mean to suggest that "people" and "bloggers" are two, exclusive categories. I do believe that bloggers are people.