- I am doing some rather grim grading tonight. The quizzes don't take long to grade, but it's kind of a bloodbath. But! If I grade four quizzes for each quick take I write, I'll be done at the end of this post. Off we go.
- So this morning I had a meeting scheduled with my chair, who had fielded some complaints about this bloodbath quiz (and about my general tendency to write hard tests). It's completely legit that my students were unhappy about this quiz, and my chair is a very reasonable person, but I was tense anyway. And then I saw the body.
- A body! A woman's body, face down in the hostas in my neighbor's yard. I thought at first that the lady who owns the house had collapsed gardening. I went right over and realized I was mistaken: this was a young blond woman. I shook her by the shoulder. "Are you all right?" I asked her. I shook her by the shoulder again. No response. I put my hand on her back so I could feel her ribcage for a long moment.
Nothing. - At last she took a long breath. "Are you all right?" I asked her again, shaking her shoulder. Slowly she began to respond, groaning and shifting. Finally she lifted up her face, revealing an abundance of smudged black eyeliner, and exhaled a long boozy breath into my face. Then she settled back into the hostas, face down.
- "You can't lie down in the yard," I said to the back of her head. "Do you need help? If you can't get up, I'm going to have to call and get some help for you." It took some coaxing, but she picked herself up again. I brushed a scurrying spider from her arm. "Do you need help?" I asked again. "No," she mumbled, "Vince is sending a hot dog for me." I said, "What?" "Vince is sending a hot dog for me," she said again. I must have looked perplexed. "Is that bad?" she asked. "Should I not have said that?" I was having trouble understanding her, but I wondered for a minute if Vince, the always pleasant student who lives next door, might be running some kind of -- I don't know -- prostitution ring? "Is there a place where you can go and rest and be safe?" I asked her. "Do you need a ride somewhere?" She said no.
- After a little more back and forth, she got to her feet and walked down the driveway, slowly but not unsteadily. I turned around to get Stella buckled into her carseat (she asked, "Why she was sleeping on the ground?") and when I had finished, the woman was gone. I suspect that she crashed on Vince's porch swing, but it's an enclosed porch and so I'm not certain. I hope she's all right. Say a prayer for her, please.
- My meeting went pretty well, proving once again that dread is a colossal waste of time. I have to say, the landscape in higher ed has changed enormously since I was an undergrad and a master's student. The idea of a student complaining to the chair of the department about a difficult quiz would have seemed laughable then -- but not these days. I can't complain too much about my students, though, because they really are a good bunch. One day last week Pete said, "Mom, are students annoying?" This suggests to me that I've been doing more grumbling about them than they deserve. "No," I told him, "not usually." Which is true.
More quick takes at Jen's.
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