until commencement.
And truth be told, for the first time in four years, I actually feel like I'm on top of things. I know, I know, I can't believe I just said that out loud myself either. I'm sure tomorrow morning I'm going to wake up and realize I forgot to grade some major assignment, and have a major article rewrite due, or something equally disastrous, but for now, I'm happily basking in the glow of feeling like I might make it out this semester relatively unscathed.
Granted, the semester didn't appear to look that way when it first started. First, there was the surprising and exciting, but less-than-perfectly-planned revise and resubmit that Steve and I had to complete in the first weeks of the semester. When I was only teaching a 1x1 (did I really at one point in my life only teach one class per semester? Really?), an r and r* was enough to send me spiraling into an "Ohmygod I don't have the time! I can't do this! Why me?" tailspin. But now, teaching 5x5, I just shrugged, put on my big girl pants and completed it within the set deadline. At night, and on weekends, but it got done.
Then there was the online class that needed developing, and the totally awesome (not!) news that our self-study report was so well done, we were going to be used in a pilot study and had to rewrite the whole 50-page document. So much for the age-old adage that you better things right the first time around. Then of course there were races to run, conferences to attend, and various student-centered issues to deal with. Oh, and did I mention my hard drive crashed about a month ago? No? Well, it did. And I lost all of this semester's grades and lesson plans. I know, it was bad. But then, after our IT department had given up on it, the magic hard-drive fairy (i.e., a guy in husband dear's unit) stepped up and fixed it.
So, was Fall 2011 a great semester? Well, no greater than any of the other semesters I've survived here in Georgia. But for some reason, it's the weekend before commencement, and I only had two papers left to grade. I had time to stop by the post office and pick up my parents' Christmas package, do some Christmas shopping, go for a run, a long bike ride, and go out to a nice dinner with husband-dear. I even managed to get two nights of about 10 hours worth of sleep.
I'm telling you, I simply HAVE to be forgetting something. This cannot possibly be right. Now if only I could remember...
* r and r = revise and resubmit: whenever a journal asks you to rewrite your article and then resubmit it - it sounds bad, but it's actually much less common than an outright rejection, and therefore considered something like a minor triumph
1 comment:
What you are forgetting is that you need to call me! ;)
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