Bring on the baseball!

Bring on the baseball!

March 30, 2008, 9:16 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

I know the Red Sox already have started playing, but it’s really not baseball season until April. I want to sit in a nice sunny stadium, beer in hand, and look out over the bright green grass while warm wind ruffles my hair.  I am sick of snow, sick of wool, sick of wet feet, sick of boots, sick of shoes, sick of socks, sick of stuffy dry houses, sick of ice, sick of my winter coat (which needs dry cleaning but I can’t afford to be parted with it long enough to get it cleaned), just sick of the eight months of winter thing.  I am sick of losing my mittens and having to find them again.  I am sick of hat head. It’s supposed to snow again tomorrow.  I tell my kid (bless her heart, she’s feeling like crap again) that one of these snows in late March to mid-April will almost certainly be the last snow.  She reminds me that the first time she visited Albany, it snowed in the third week of May. Damn kids and their long memories. 

I spent the weekend grading, running her to dance practices of various sorts, and cleaning house in anticipation of my mom’s visit. I console myself with the idea that a) she loves me and isn’t too critical; b) her eyes aren’t as sharp as they used to be and our house can be dimly lit; and c) she’s 5′ 1″ and so anything higher than 4’10” or so, she won’t be able to see the top of. (I don’t dust as much as I might.) Anyhow, the whole family pitched in (at least until the Elite 8 was on, when we all quit at the same time) and everything is looking a lot better. We just have so much stuff to recycle — kid toys, clothing, kitchen goods. I don’t know how the stuff piles up, but it does.

Tomorrow, I am back to the classroom and will have to both do prep and grade incoming papers. From the drafts I’ve read, I’m feeling kind of excited about this batch, but I definitely want to work on getting them back earlier. I have to split the difference between the student’s desire for evaluation (what did I score?) and my desire to give them lots of feedback (here’s how you can work with what you have to get better). I can look at a paper pretty quickly and sort it into A, B, C category but that’s not really helpful developmentally to someone getting it back — the tough and time-consuming part is to figure out how to communicate strengths and weaknesses in a way that is substantive and useful without being overly negative.

If you’re here because you’re in my class and you found me through Facebook, this really is about as exciting as it gets…sorry. You’re welcome to hang, but I am just exactly as uninteresting as you suspected I might be.  

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