The morning began with a per-alarm realization that I had failed to include the bibliography in my Volcano logy presentation documents. I let the alarm jar me into action and managed to get it added, copied to backup, e-mailed to the student in my group responsible for compilation, and then began my morning routine.
The drive in to town was uneventful until I passed the county road that leads to our favorite farm produce stand. Thompson's strawberries are available. The rest of the day becomes shaded by background planning on how to bring some home for dessert tonight. I need to get cash, a container to transport them from the stand, as well as get some mushrooms for tonight’s ersatz Stroganoff over Matzoh strands.
I'm running out of ideas for Pesach meals. The bested meals of the season have been one meal of braised short ribs and two dinner soups. We've eaten the obligatory fried matzoh twice. I have no real idea how many boxes we've polished off this year. ed
The strawberries couldn't have made their appearance at a better time. Today's “group presentations” can only be described as beginning at the clusterfuck level and getting rapidly worse.
The first group, assigned 15 minutes, took 25 minutes to read their papers, poorly for the most part, while pointing out sentences in PowerPoint slides – the modern filmstrip. The instructor said nothing to them.
The second group, mine, began in the same manner with members 1 & 2 reading and paraphrasing. Member 3, the kid who is always 20-30 minutes late, had the 3rd slot. He made no attempt at reading his work, just pointed at a slide and muttered various non-connected phrases about nothing germane to his topic for 11 minutes. The instructor said nothing.
The 4thack slot was mine. I opted for brevity, made no pretense of reading anything, made my points and sat down looking un-practiced but ethically enabled. Slot 5 reverted back to standard form and took 6 minutes. The instructor said nothing.
Group three was missing one person of their five. They took 20 minutes after the formal class period ended.
The projects must now be laced together and submitted in some semblance of a coherent paper. The student in my group responsible for that task feels my paper is far too long. I told him to remove what ever he felt he needed to. I have no grade dependent upon this project. What I submitted was adequate, accurate, and met the letter of the assignment as well as the spirit.
No, I do not work and play well with others. They should all be sent to bed with no dinner and no cell phones, computers, ipod, ipads, or any other electronics.
It is only a paper that receives no grade, generates no real value beyond reminding me that academic life was not one I felt any calling to join. While I love history and some other disciplines, I love them far more for the love of learning, the hunger for knowledge which my mother instilled in me from my earliest years, than from any desire to teach and do required research and publishing at a university level. As for k-12 education jobs, I'd sooner go back into the army with no hope of leaving the service.
Gloria and I shall dine in semi-kosher manner and feed each other fresh, delicious,stawberries tonight. Life is very, very good.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment