Up to No Good

While the rest of the world has been deeply involved in the Congressional elections, Dancing with the Stars, and perfecting beer bong techniques, I've been preoccupied with much less momentous activities. Next week, I get to present a research paper at an academic conference. This shouldn't be a big deal for someone who talked on the air to hundreds of thousands of people at a time for decades, but it is. I am having the most horrific case of stage fright.

Anyway, the preparations for all this have eaten up every spare moment, including the time I would ordinarily spend blogging, eating meals at home, and, uh, housecleaning. Yes, the dust bunnies are back, and they are considering forming a barricade around the vacuum cleaner.

Meanwhile, the semester has reached the point where everyone on campus appears to be going through early-onset middle age. We have about a month of classes left before finals, and all the students are beginning to realize just how much work they need to complete in the next three weeks. This is also the time in the semester when the younger students begin to have emotional crises: broken hearts and hurt feelings abound just when so many people are tired out, anxious, and overwhelmed by their schedules.

The only way out is forward, both for the younger students and for me. We all need to get some sleep. Then, tomorrow morning, I'll clean up my study area, sort out all the papers and scripts for the conference, and start on the final write-through of the presentation script, the first draft of a paper for a panel discussion, and the creation of a new PowerPoint presentation on objectification. Oh, and a critical bibliography with its own PowerPoint slide. Then I get to start on the routine homework, including a paper on a bizarre poem by Robert Browning.

This is all going to seem so easy a year from now. And so worth it.

Group Projects -- Aaaaaagh!

Shared projects are supposed to prepare college students for the business world. Chores are supposed to be portioned out according to need and skills, and everyone is supposed to confer along each step of the process, from beginning (argumentative thesis, in our case) to construction (declaration and execution of methodology, writing and preparing the handouts, design of the PowerPoint presentation) to the actual presentation itself (talking points, managing the PowerPoint, stating the argument and answering questions). So far, Group 5 is stuck at the thesis, and I may be the only one concerned about it.

I know, there's always one in every group that worries more than anyone else about these things. One tries not to be that person, or the one who does all the work, or the one who never does anything. The aggravating thing about this educational model is that it has nothing to do with how projects function in the working world.

In the real world, if someone doesn't do their part of the project, and consistently follows this pattern of behavior, the boss finds out and fires the culprit. Particularly in the state of Washington, doing nothing at work has consequences.

My God, I'm getting nostalgic for the office. I think I'll go write a thesis and just get over it.