Catchin' Up is Hard to Do

I'm thinking spring is here--or at least the idea of spring is here. I have daffodils with their perky yellow faces smiling at the world. I have heather looking beautifully pink. And I found this rhododendron starting to bloom two weeks ago. The rhodie gave me hope :)

It has been over two weeks since I have been here. My life has been too busy to do anything except finish the term--I still have 20 finals to grade. I needed to get the next term classes ready--I still have a bit of tweaking to do on my online course. I needed to get the next term adjusted--I finally found an instructor who can take my second class so I can open another section of my online class. I needed to create Summer term--I still need a few instructors for summer. I needed to hire a new fulltime dance instructor--we had interviews for the past few days. And I needed to sleep at some point. Most everything has been accomplished.

Gawd Winter term is the shortest term of the year and I feel it is the longest!

Over the past two weeks I hit the 45 pound mark. In fact, I have now lost 46.5 pounds. This week I have partied hardy. I have grabbed things on my run and some of them have not been the best choices. But I also gave myself permission to just relax this aspect. I think I needed something to help me breathe because I wasn't able to breathe on the past few weeks schedule. But now it is back to keep on keepin' on. Life is good.

Peace~~
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And the Beat Goes On

It's been an interesting week.

All week I have been hounded by a student who believes she deserves an "A" and I graded her with a "C." I applaud her persistence but every time I see email or hear her voice I have to take a deep breath and try to be patient. It doesn't matter that I am basing her assignment by national standards, she still believes I am being subjective. I have shown her the criteria; she has rejected it. And on top of this, she has decided I am too rigid with students and not flexible. She has continued with the idea that I am not thinking about the needs of the students but am making things easy for me.

You have to laugh :)

Now on top of this, I have a student who has plagiarized two essay exam questions, plagiarized to the point of simply cut and pasted the information from websites. When I told her she would not receive credit for the test questions, she tried to put it back on me, that I was not clear when I said to use the textbook and the Internet to support her answers. She did not plagiarize, she said, because she changed the words into her own. So I had to take both her work and the websites I found and paste them side-by-side, with all language and thoughts the same in red. Both the articles and her answers had little that was not red. A word here and there. I sent this to her. She said she understands why I might think it was plagiarism, but she just forgot to cite her references. One of these "references" was a t-shirt ad...she liked how they talked about a certain motif on the t-shirt... When I referred her to the student handbook, she asked if she could at least get credit for researching the questions.

You have to laugh :)

I lost 3.5 pounds this week, only a breath away from that magic 45 number. I asked Doug to take me out of town for the weekend as I have been feeling anxious and nervous. Probably waiting to hear back from one student of another... So we went to a hotel out of town. We relaxed. I still did school work but relaxed while I did it. The kitties were happy to see us this evening :)

Weekly pics are up. Things are not moving as quickly so I don't notice much change. Still worth seeing since I spent the weekend looking at myself with a whole different set of mirrors. Not a fun thing, seeing yourself from different angles and realizing how much you have to lose. I forget at home. I am just keepin' on keepin' here at home...go out and things look different.

But, between students and an unmanageable workload, I think I will, as Dory says in Finding Nemo just keep on swimming.
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