20151208.0741

The first of the four exams I was assigned to administer this term is done. I have graded it and calculated my students' scores; they are more or less what I expected. There is a fair spread of grades among the class, ranging from an A to a couple of Ds; students tend to fail my classes only because of excessive absence or non-submission of work, and the one class suffered neither of those. How the other three classes will fall out remains to be seen. There are students in them who have failed out from absences alone; there are students in them who have not turned in the papers they are supposed to submit. They are not in all cases the same students. I imagine the complaints will be numerous and loud; they always are. But I can at least attest that I have done what I am supposed to do; they will not stand.

As exams draw on, so does my freelance work. I am in progress on a job, having read the assigned text and stubbed out the write-up I will be doing of it. I should be able to knock it out today, depending on how Ms. 8 acts. She has been acting out lately, screaming and stomping her feet loudly, shrieking for what seems like hours but really ranges only to one. I know that she is at the age where such is to be expected, but that does not make it any easier to endure--and there is little solution other than to endure. Disciplining her would be counterproductive at promoting quiet, after all, and I am not sure that it would teach her the lesson I want her to learn. The fact that I am not sure what that lesson is does not help me, either. The joys of parenthood are many and varied, it seems, and I find more and more of them.

I continue to wrestle with my cough. Things seem to be easing in that line, which I appreciate. I will be taking some important phone calls in the next few days, and it would be better for me not to hack my way through them. Also, coughing is exhausting and painful; having not often had lingering coughs, I had not remembered or realized that the act of coughing engages so much of the body and so sharply as it does. I live a sedentary life, anymore; the exercise is unusual and, in form, not entirely welcome. I need to get exercise, to be sure, but some that I control rather than that which breaks upon me without warning and wracks me sharply. And I imagine that I am not alone in making the assertion about needing exercise; it is getting to be the appropriate time of year for resolutions about new beginnings. I try not to make them, but I do need to get into some shape other than pear- or round.

That will have to happen after exams are done.