Marking is alchemy not chemistry.
Tag Archive — academe
Referral: Collaborative Learning Final Exam
Henry Jenkins shares the fascinating—not to mention fairly intimidating!—final exam from his recent Collaborative Learning class: http://shar.es/C2yzO
Exercises for Marking Month Wrist Strain
This is a post for all of my academic colleagues who are currently in marking hell. Up until a year ago, I would always end up in a wrist brace come the end of term due to marking strain. With the combination of final term papers, exams, and the inevitable end-of-term influx of regular work—it’s [...]
Brief Aside on the Power of Editing
I’m marking my finals and noticing that a student with in-progress writing skills has handed in a final that is obviously his work (especially since I saw a much rougher draft of the same material) but much cleaner and more well-wrought as a piece of writing. My intuition sees in this the marks of this [...]
What Price Access?
As my packed teaching schedule has now waned to a shrinking pile of making on my desk, I will be able to post a bit more. Looking forward to May and June since I won’t be teaching at all and will be able to finally focus on getting my book Non-Monogamies in the Public Sphere [...]
Sessional Reflections
There’s an odd kind of alienation that comes with doing sessional teaching. Because there is no provision for prep time built into the contracts—other than the suggestion that your overall salary, in theory, includes the time you spend before and after the contract devoted to the class—you can find yourself working 2–3 months on a [...]
Moments Worth Holding On To
I’m sitting in the Drake Café, at the border of West Queen West in Toronto, sipping a coffee and marking the last paper of my summer graduate course. After an hour-long walk up through Roncesvalles village where I live, and down Queen, in increasing frustration as I looked for a non-Starbucks café open past 8pm [...]
On Radio Silence and a Referral
Sometimes silence on a blog can mean good things. In this case it means I’m getting some work done on my book, on which I shall have to blog more extensively later. In the mean time, I will continue to post drips and drabs, maybe even occasionally a full post. Today’s drop in the bucket—courtesy of [...]
Conferences and Live-Tweeting
I just got back from the 2011 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences1 in Fredericton where I was presenting at the Canadian Communication Association (CCA) annual conference. It was a great conference and I was especially excited to take part in an impromptu lunch-time “Grad Pub Summit” around the idea of forming a CCA interest group [...]
On Note-Taking
I have a note-taking problem. Well, not a problem, as such, but an inconvenience. Whenever I have needed to take notes—as a student, while doing readings, at a conference, whenever I have been asked to keep minutes at a meeting—I find that I want to note everything, to record, annotate or make note of every [...]
