20150308.0951

Daylight Savings Day has come again, as it continues to do for some damned fool reason. It has been a vexation to me in years past, occasioning a failure to do as I said I would and a lampoon of the epideictic coupled to a screed against the practice. I have once again fallen victim to it, as the timing of this entry should suggest--and not only am I late in writing now, but I also slept in until what the clock told me this morning was nine. It is unusual for me, and it is not entirely to the good, for I have much to do today. There is a freelance order to complete (working on them occupied much of my time yesterday), and I have assignments to grade for my students. The latter is more imperative at this point, as it has been most of a week since they were submitted, and another assignment is due to come in tomorrow; I do not want to have that much grading hanging over my head, not least because it does distract me from the other things I need to do.

Among those other things is a refiguration of my teaching philosophy, since I am getting the kind of interviews that ask for such documents and it has been a bit more than a year since I last amended mine. Freelance work is also among the things I need to do, as ever; the allure of the money it brings in is difficult to resist, and I do not think it is actually worth the effort to refuse it. I have bills to pay, after all, and I nurse some hope that I may want to have nice things again at some point. At some point, too, I may want or need to retire--but that is a long-off thing unless I luck into wealth early on, and that is not likely to happen. I probably ought also to continue my job search, looking for permanent positions, and there is still a short stack of announcements on my desk that awaits my attention. I have been looking in earnest for a while, though, and I am ready to be done for a while. For my research still needs attention, as well, and I have not been giving it where it is due.

This is not to say that I have not been writing. My freelance work is almost all writing, and I have been doing a fair bit of it, as noted. Grading involves a fair bit of writing, as well, since what I grade are papers of various sorts, and I do not subscribe to the old idea of simply slapping a grade onto a sheet of paper and having it suffice. If the idea is to coach the students to write better, I have to make comments--although I likely need to rethink some of the ways in which I do so, both for my own ease (since I have other tasks and grading takes much time) and for the benefit of the students. Too often, they evidence feeling trapped into programmatic, dogmatic methods--as do I, since I am not much in a position to alter course sequences and obligatory assignments. There is only so much I can do, though, only so hard that I can work on that task; I am mortal and thus limited, and there are other things I must do, as well.