Of Broken Glasses and Student Conferences
As I write these very words, I can’t see them. Well, that’s not completely accurate. I can see them, but they are formless mass on the page. I’m trusting in my typing skills (and the red underlines for typos and misspellings) to make sure that the words I’m typing are correct. How did we get here? Well, keep reading, dear reader, keep reading.
Broken Glasses
To be fair, the pair that I’ve had are old. They predate my teaching years and go back to my time working at the library. At this point, that is some 7 years ago. however, I’m pretty sure they were in the middle of their life cycle even then, so they are probably 10+ years old now. Luckily, I have contacts but they are not the ones you wear during the night. Until I get up and put them in, all I can see are blurry shapes unless I get I get super close on the object. My usual routine is contacts by day and evening until I go to bed or the contacts become uncomfortable and then I take them off and put on my glasses. However, without my glasses, the early morning is pretty much a wash for doing anything as I can’t see well enough to do it well.
Student Conferences
So, this week I’m conferencing with students about their very first papers for the semester. While I love this part of the process in that I’m giving hem specific help to make their papers/writing better, I’m finding the logistics of doing this “remotely” and via Zoom to be a nightmare.
Scheduling is the very first thing that has me down. II set it up so that my students just had to email me a time and I would put them down for the time. They were also supposed to give alternate times, but many different. However, we were able to work around that, but the requests have come in all hours an times via two different email systems (D2L and the school’s email) making it hard to have to keep up with. Add to the fact that apparently the school’s email system had some sort of outage and some students’ emails didn’t reach me has turned this into a mini-nightmare.
Then I had major issues with Zoom and it creating a different room for students, so that only half who signed up were able to attend on time. Very messy and very chaotic. And I still have 2 more days of this to do–next paper will probably have 2 days and that’s it.
Well, you’re caught up on what’s been happening this week so far. Nothing but the usual heartache and problems. Thanks for reading and have a nice dayy.
Sidney
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Currently Working On (8/2020):
“Project Wall” (Science Fiction Story)
Drafting: 2nd Draft
Unhallowed (Weird Western Story)
Revising: 2nd Draft (Working Draft)
KnightWatch Graphic Novel (Fantasy Graphic Novel)
Drafting: 1st Draft (Issue 1)