Wednesday, September 10, 2014

20140910.0654

I spent much of yesterday reviewing what students had submitted to me on Monday. It went as well as it ever does; the assignment was for a one-page memo, I read quickly, and not all students submitted the work as they were directed to do. Even so, it took a large chunk of the day, the more so because it was interspersed with taking care of Ms. 8 and doing a few necessary things around the house. I was not able to attend to my own work in earnest because of it; by the time the grading was done, domestic chores called, and then other things demanded my attention.

I could have ignored them, of course. I have neglected meals more than once through simple forgetting. (One would think my belly would be smaller if I forget at times to eat.) I have failed to recognize the need for time and attention on the part of those whom I profess to love. And I could well repeat the occurrences; I doubtlessly will, in fact. But I did not yesterday, even if it had the effect of leaving me having not done things that I ought to do--not for the immediate demands of my job, but for the demands of my discipline and the potential to gain for myself a continuing line position.

It is a common complaint, surely, and one that can be dismissed easily as whining. And perhaps I ought to leave off it as such. The effort I expend on it can be better directed, as could the time...yet I do feel compelled to explain. Even if it is only to help things make sense in my own mind, I feel the need to explain, to try to arrive at some semblance of sense of how things work. Maybe, through building up the body of text that I do in this webspace, I can do something to look back over what of my thoughts and life I have recorded and identify some patterns that can help to illuminate me. And maybe, just maybe, I can do so at a time when doing so will be of some help to me.

It is a thing to consider. Even if I do spend much of the time I spend in writing the words in this webspace whining, there may be a pattern to the whining that indicates, among others, when I whine about what I whine about or what the focus of what I whine about is. The former would allow me to gain some sense of upcoming troubles (even if past performance is not a certain indicator of future performance), while the latter could help me to identify what (admittedly first-world and therefore not terribly problematic in the greater sense) problems there are for me to address. There are things that happen which escape immediate attention, after all, being too large to be seen in proximity but revealed in taking in the larger view.

Now, if I can get my students to realize that...

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