Speedily

1. I have resolved to end goofing-off computer time by 10:00, which means I am cutting it fine tonight. While Stella fell asleep I was reading Joshilyn Jackson's recent short story (Kindle single sale today!), and I stayed in her bed and finished it after she dozed off. I am looking forward to Someone Else's Love Story.
2. I have never exchanged an email with Joshilyn Jackson and I have only left her a couple of comments in the nine years I've been reading her blog. But it is one of my Very Favorite blogs, one of the top two Blogs Most Likely To Make Me Snort Coffee Up My Nose.
3. How's that for an exalted category?
4. This is a busy busy week, and I am a little behind.
5. I gave an exam today. I didn't know that exams would make me nervous as a professor, just like they did when I was a student. It takes me a loooong time to write good multiple-choice questions. I like for them to tell a story, and to cover the material in a fair way, so that the amount of time I spent on something in class reflects the weight it gets on the exam, and for the questions to be hard enough to separate the students who get it from the students who have sort of memorized the catchphrases. 
6. I think some of my students would prefer it if I wrote questions that rewarded the memorizing of catchphrases.
7. I was talking to my grad school advisor, for whom I TA'd twice, about the avalanche of grading that has repeatedly threatened to pin me to the slope and leave me there twitching bluely. I said, "I think my students think I'm kind of a hardass about writing." She said equably, "Well, you are kind of a hardass about writing."
8. Listen to me grumbling again. So here's the good news: some of my students are GETTING it. They are making real progress, and I can see it happen. In the last batch of papers I graded, one of them made me want to get up and dance around the living room because it was, like, EVIDENCE OF LEARNING in blinky blue lights.
9. I love Evidence of Learning.
10. Three days from now I will be done with my nervous-making presentation. This means, however, that I have to get it finished in less than three days. No time like the present, baby.