I Am Alive.

(Sort of…)  No really.  I am.  This weekend was so busy that it hardly counted as a weekend, although some of the business derived from our little “fall festival,” which was at least pleasant.  I was baking in most of my “spare” time all weekend.  The outcome was delightful; more on that in a later post.

We also had to work a Catholic leadership convention of some sort at the high school.  Despite the fact that I spent precious hours Saturday morning ostensibly “working” (mostly just sitting in the staff room feeling guilty because I wasn’t grading midterms), I am still not entirely sure what happened at said convention.  But it took up weekend time.

The lack of free time on the weekend contributed to the craziness of this week.  Mid-semester grades were due last night, in theory, although I haven’t turned them in yet because they didn’t tell us how to get into the grade database until this morning.  I spent seven hours grading Philosophy midterms yesterday, after which I trotted to school and taught all my usual classes.  I was in such a strange place by the end of the day that I stayed up late entering my grades into my own spreadsheet (which had to be done before I could put them in the database anyway).  I still have to figure out how to make grades calculate accurately when I haven’t given assignments in every category, account for attendance, and enter them in the database.  Nevertheless, this is major progress.

And…we’re just going to ignore the fact that once the mid-semester grades are finished, I will have to catch up on all the other grading that has fallen behind while I focused on that.  Grades.  Whose bright idea were they anyway?

During class last night, I heard a collective gasp behind me as I faced the board.  I turned around to see a very large, bright green insect flapping around the room.  It alighted on the ceiling, which allowed me to see that it was something between a leaf bug and a grasshopper.  It was probably the length of my hand.  Thus disrupted, I couldn’t very well feign ignorance, so I asked them what it was.  The answers ranged from “night bird” and “something like a grasshopper” to “the jabberwock.”  

Which brings me to random fact number two: my students fell in love with Jabberwocky when I introduced them to it on Monday.  I brought it up during Philosophy, in reference to the conventional nature of language, but due to time constraints I ended up putting it on the board and reciting it during Geometry.  They were delighted. I wasn’t allowed to erase it until many of them had copied the entire thing in their notes.  To what academic end, I do not know.  Hopefully my point about language will stick, anyway.