momingit

My online students are required to submit a rough draft of their research paper this week so they can exchange drafts and do peer reviews.  I’m not a fond of peer reviews, dating back to my own days in high school and college, but it’s required by the college for this course, so we must perservere.

At any rate, late rough drafts turn the peer review into a circus.  The drafts are due Wednesday, the exchange takes place on Thursday, and the reviews have to be done by Sunday.  This does not leave much room for error.  If someone does not submit a draft on Wednesday, I can’t put them in the exchange on Thursday, which means they miss out on the points for the assignment due Sunday.  Much whining ensues.

To avoid as much as possible, I posted a very emphatic reminder on Sunday, telling my students that they should make every effort to turn in the draft on time, or risk not being able to participate in the exchange.  I asked all the students to reply to the message and acknowledge that they understood.

Today–the day after the drafts were due–a student responds in a different thread that she does not understand.  No surprise there–I’m not sure this particular student has understood anything in the seven weeks of this class so far.  Now, it’s very likely too late to do anything about her lack of understanding, either for this assignment or anything else in the course.

Of course, this will all be my fault when she predictably fails the assignment (which she has not yet submitted) and the course.  I may not be psychic, but I’m fairly confident in that prediction!

Life in Mid-Cornfield has been chaos lately.  Just a quick recap:

•  The Bug had her first trip to the zoo in City of the Big Arch two weekends ago.  The kangaroos, lemurs, and big cats were a hit; great apes and non-emu birds, not so much.  She also had her first hot dog, which was also a hit.  I hit Trader Joe’s, which was also a hit (Cat Cookies for People are quite good, as is Three Buck Chuck).
• The Geek is doing an increased number of Geek Things (paid) lately, which has kept us all busy.
• I’m back to teaching one night a week in a classroom, in addition to my online classes, with a 50-mile one-way commute to do so.
• As a result of those last two, the Bug has a friend coming every Wednesday night.  They hang out, sing songs, read stories, and play with the cat while the Geek does his thing and I teach American literature.  So far, the arrangement works well for everyone but the cat, who is slightly put out by the entrance of a new human to his domicile.

More trips for the Bug are on the horizon.  The Geek has family in North Cornfield, including a cousin who is currently visiting from his home in Land of the Clogs.  The Geek cousin has not met the Bug yet (due to the price of airfare between all areas cornfield and the Land of the Clogs), so a trip to North Cornfield is on tap for this weekend.

Next weekend, the Bug will be making her first trip to the Northern Land of Repetitive Letters to visit her grandparents (my father and step mother).  They moved there from the Mitten a few years back, but I’ve  never even seen their new house.  The Geek has a week off from his Geek Things, it’s spring break at my college, and the rest of my Geek Things are portable.   Now to get the Geek’s parents to watch the cat, who will not do well with a 11-hour car ride.

The Geek is in the house, all right.  The dog house, to be specific.  I’m finally starting to feel human again, a week after the Geek Things Incident.  To his credit, he now knows that subjecting his recovering-from-a-cold wife to arctic temperatures for several hours at a time, after promising otherwise, is a Very. Bad. Idea.

A different brand of Geek things may be afoot for me in the upcoming weeks.  I have a somewhat unexpected job interview Monday for a full-time job doing my own Geek things.

I’m torn.  The job would be great for us financially.  However, it would mean that the Bug would be in day care.

I know there’ s nothing wrong with day care.  Kids do great in day care all the time.  But the Bug has never experienced that, and she is very, very attached to her Mama,  and especially to nursing.  She’ll be ten months old this week and she’s never been away from me for more than a few hours a time.  I’ve loved the time I have with her, and if finances would alow, I would have no qualms about staying home with her permanently.  Unfortunately, the Geek and I live in the real world, and while we enjoy our Geek things, they don’t pay well enough to allow me to stay home without some serious quality-of-life sacrifices.

So, I continue to look for online Geek things and hope it all comes out in the end.

The Bug is spending the day with the Geek’s parents so that he may partake in Geek Things with his Geek friends and I can have the afternoon off.

While I do plenty of Geek Things of my own, this is not my type of Geek Thing, so instead, I have my trusty netbook (it’s pink!  and it’s teeny!) and am trying to prevent my teeth from chattering while sitting in a poorly heated, poorly insulated garage where the Geek Things take place.  I was assured we would not be in the garage this weekend, since the average high temperature has been right around zero.

Needless to say, I will be much harder to convince to attend Geek Things in the future.  Assuming I ever get circulation back in my feet, that is.

I knew he was a geek when I married him.  The first time I ever met his friends, it was to do Geek Things.  I’m always amazed that men in their 40s still do this sort of Geek Thing, but no one asked me.

Other than the Geek, only one other member of the group is married (and that memeber’s wife is also part of the group–they’ve been married long enough to have a child in college and another in high school, so it’s a different dynamic).   So here I sit, with people who have been friends as long as I have been alive, trying to keep my fingers from turning blue and mostly succeeding.

Mostly.

The Geek knows he’s in the doghouse.

“Your great you are write.”

It pained me just to type that out.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to have been painful for one of my online students to write.  That little gem was part of a class discussion.  The student in question was trying to give credit to another student for the second student’s contribution to the discussion.  The first student, however, apparently needs to go back to the second grade and figure out homonyms.

Even more unfortunately, this student is not alone.  I have been teaching college composition classes for five years now, and mistakes like these are very common.  They are more blatantly obvious in an online classroom, where every bit of communication is written, but when I recieve papers with text-speak, wrong words, and sentence fragments galore, something is horribly, horribly wrong with the state of higher education.

These are not remedial developmental classes.   These are college-level composition classes for students who either tested high enough to be in a standard Comp 101 or passed a developmental course previously.  You’d never know it by the quality of the writing I get.  For that matter, you wouldn’t know that some of these students passed the second grade.

The Geek assures me I am not alone in my thinking.  He deals with people like this as he does his Geek things.  When I worked at Big Green Tractor Company, I was offically an IT analyst and unoffically the IT department proofreader.  At least many of my colleages there had the excuse of being non-native English speakers.

My students were, mostly, born and raised in the United States, speaking some form of English at home.  They were educated in English speaking schools, with a few exceptions.  And yet, my nine-year-old nephew knows more about nouns and verbs than my college freshmen do.  What on earth is wrong with our educational system today?

I must admit, I haven’t gotten much writing done since I got married over a year and a half ago.  I love to write, and I have great intentions, but those intentions got lost in the shuffle in the whirlwind of moving, marriage, job changes, and mommyhood.  I love the Bug to bits, but she’s on the high maintenance side, as is the Geek (though he’d never admit it).  I have so many works-on-progress it’s  not even amusing any more.

So why am I writing this?  If I can find time to do this, I can find time to work on something else a little bit every day.  I’m posting this, in public, and people can feel free to nag and ask if I’ve written today.

The Bug has a cold.

I have one, too, but there’s something distinctly miserable about a baby too young to blow her  nose with a head cold.  She hateshateshateshates the snot-sucker, and there is all-out mutiny when we attempt to use saline drops.  I did manage to get her into a warm shower today, and the steam seemed to do some good.  I’ll have to have the Geek refill her humidifier before we go to bed.

This is not boding well for her sleeping in her crib.  She can breathe better upright, so is asleep on the Geek’s shoulder.  Her pink sleeper with castles and crowns and his navy plaid pajamas make a cute combination.

Geek things are afoot in our world.  After a holiday break, the Geek has returned to his geek things this week, leaving the Bug and I at home for our first week of “just” staying at home without Mama working from home.  So far, Bug has responded predictably—we’ve had nursing and naps and eating and fussing and dry diapers and nursing and fussing.  Rarely out of her sight these days is Dolly, who is apparently the best Christmas gift ever.

Dolly spends all night in Bug’s crib.  Bug, however, has decided that Dolly needs the crib to herself and spends most of her night asleep on Daddy.  We’re hoping to figure out a way to avoid this in the future, but for now, she’s a snuggly little Bug.

The Geek claims he’s not fond of it, but watching the two of them right now, Bug asleep on her Daddy, I’m not convinced.  He talks a good game, but his inner marshmallow comes out in the end.

I’m doing my own geek things these days.  Online classes have started up again for me, and I have 40 students in two classes.  This could be a long 9 weeks!

Welcome to my corner of the world!  I am Jo, wife to the Geek and mom to the Bug, age 9 months.   We live in the middle of a corn field in the Midwestern U.S., where the Geek does geek things on a daily basis and the Bug continues on her quest to get the cat.  As of the first of the year, I am a full-time at-home mom, a part-time English teacher, a freelance editor and writer, and a (still) wannabe novelist.  Moming It is about life with a baby, a husband, and a cat–and hopefully, some level of sanity.  Check back often for updates!