Happy birthday, Angel

Today is Darling Daughter's birthday.

I might have made a bigger deal of it if my life hadn't careened around a strange bend several months ago such that I've spent this whole day in mid-December grading papers. (Okay, I've taken a couple of short breaks, but you get the drift.)

The south turn started at the beginning of the semester when a senior professor informed me that I would be coteaching a couple of courses with him. I taught both courses myself for about 8 years before they were yanked away from me last year; the argument was that an engineer would be able to solicit higher-quality projects from our students. That professor isn't the one teaching with me; turns out that wasn't such a good idea, either.

I've never been really happy with having the course yanked as it was, so I was less than enthusiastic when I was called back in on it; I was also not particularly cheered when I discovered that "coteaching" would me that I would do virtually all of the design of one course and coordinate four teaching assistants to grade them, with little assistance from the senior professor. Worse, I was given little control over the teaching of the second course but all of the responsibility for grading the formal, senior-level reports. And apparently I'm doing this without any formal credit from the university.

The glitch in all this is that the grading rubric for the course I'm grading for is clearly derived from the one I used when I taught the course, but the instruction didn't really prepare the students to measure up to its demands. Consequently, when the papers came in in mid-November, few of them earned passing grades, and most of them shocked and disappointed their authors, most of whom have been top students in their classes since kindergarten.

Sometimes the classes have been rewarding; a couple of my lectures in the class I have controlled went off very well, and one of the TAs has remarked a couple of times that she has seen significant improvement in the writing she has been grading over the course of the semester. When I asked last week for examples of good, average, and poor final reports, they TAs said they had plenty of good ones and several "average" ones, but "poor" ones were hard to come by. I'm okay with that.

And except for the long, long hours of grading in the other class, sometimes it has had its rewards. I was surprised several times by students whose first-round grades were poor but who stopped to thank me for the detailed comments I gave them. I was pleased by a couple of students who told me they had been in a laboratory I had graded a couple of years ago and had used techniques from that class as they wrote excellent formal reports as seniors. And I have been gobsmacked by a surprising number of students who first grades had been horrifying to them but whose revisions have merited As or low Bs.

I've never still been grading papers this close to the end of the semester (I have only hours, really, before I have to submit final grades), and I resent the hours I've had to steal from other opportunities that I consider more important to my life, but I have to admit I appreciate the students who clearly responded to my advice and did well.

A small group of them had permission from the professor to do one of the course assignments today, provided they got permission from me. I assured them that I would accept the late assignments (because he was willing to), provided they all sang happy birthday to my daughter. Their responses have been amusing: what's her name? where will she be? why do we have to do that? None of them matters except the last: because I said so!

I'm not sure if they did it (I doubt it), but I'm quite sure the daughter half a continent away didn't hear it. But I do hope she had a lovely day!