The Slipperiest Slope

We all know that grade inflation is widespread at law schools, but I had never heard of a school's doing what Loyola of Los Angeles has now done: it retroactively changed grades, by adding half a step (actually .333) to all grades awarded in the last few years. So every B- became a B, every B+ an A-, and so on.

Apart from being a little tough on anyone who got an A+ (I presume that grade isn't being changed), such grade inflation is bad because it amounts to deception. The goal of grade inflation (apparently expressly stated) "is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market." That is, the goal is to play on people's perceptions of what the traditional grades of A, B, and C mean, while giving grades that have different meanings.

Employers might fight back by ignoring the grades and relying on class rank instead. That would work -- you could call the grades A, B, and C or you could call them Apple, Fire Engine, and Giraffe, and it wouldn't matter as long as you had class rank -- but schools can thwart that tactic by abolishing class rank. That's what GW did when we raised our grading curve a few years ago.

I voted against the change to our grading curve because I thought it involved deception. And I didn't think that the fact that everyone else is involved in the same deception could justify it, any more than a student would be excused for cheating on the plea that everyone else was cheating too.

Over time, my view has evolved somewhat. As the proponents of the change argued at the time, grades have meaning only as a result of social understanding. There was supposedly a time when "C" meant "average," but certainly today a student who got all Cs would not be regarded as an average student. (I wonder if C was ever really the average grade actually given, or whether we have always lived in Lake Woebegone, where all the students are above average.) There is something to be said for the view that we have to give grades that match the current understanding. If all the other schools are now operating on a B+ average and we give grades on a B average, we are disadvantaging our students, and not necessarily achieving the goal of honesty.

Still, the whole thing leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. As today's NY Times piece observes, grade inflation is a never-ending arms race. Everyone uses the excuse that the social meaning of grades has changed to justify changing their own grades. And there's no point always being the last to catch up to the general trend -- in fact, every school has an incentive to be the leading edge of the trend. That, of course, just makes grade inflation go faster and faster.

It's a classic collective action problem. The problem could be addressed if there were some authority that had the power to impose national standards, but there isn't, and whatever the generally accepted view of the meaning of grades is, everyone has an incentive to cheat a little and have somewhat higher grades than that. There's no good solution, and I'll be torn when it next becomes our turn to raise our grades again.

Tired Cliche

I'm nearly done with the grading process, and boy am I happy about that. Grading is the worst part of the job.

About this time of year, you often hear professors console themselves by saying, "grading is what I get paid my entire salary to do. I'd do the rest of my job for free."

This was amusing the first few times I heard it, but it's gotten rather stale by now. And I'm sorry, but it's not true. Being a law professor is in fact a great job, but it's not something I or anyone else would do for free.

Don't believe me? Here's my standing offer to any law professor who makes a good salary and who insists on this view: I'll do your grading for you. You do the rest of your job. And you'll only have to pay me three-quarters of your salary. You can keep a quarter for yourself. That way, you'll be ahead of the game, since you've stated that you'd do the rest of your job for free.

Any takers?

Here Comes Grading

My exams arrived yesterday, so I will spend the next two weeks in the semiannual ritual of grading them. Blogging may be reduced.

As bad as grading is -- and it's pretty bad -- it at least has the advantage that the task is very clear. Most of a professor's life is unscripted. The first task is to figure out what the task is. Professors have to figure out what topics to choose, what papers to write, what subjects to research. And the job is never done, either. Whatever you do as a professor, you could always be doing more -- you could always write another paper, give another lecture, make another appearance, write another book. And that means choosing yet another topic.

The freedom and autonomy of a professor's life is the best part of the job. But let's face it, it can also be a little daunting. Sometimes it's a pleasure to have a clear task before you. So professors, as you moan and groan your way through that pile of exams that never seems to get any smaller, take comfort that at least you know what you have to do.

Peer Review

A surprising new trend at law reviews: A couple of my colleagues have received requests this past week to conduct peer review of articles proposed for publication at other schools' law reviews.

How long has this been going on? I've routinely received such requests from my own school's law review (GW). But I've never received such a request from another school's review, or even heard about anyone else's receiving such a request. Maybe it's been going on for years and I just didn't know, but I would have expected to hear about it.

Is it a good thing? On the one hand, law review scholarship is crying out for peer review. That's the method used in other disciplines. Scholarly legal publication is exceptional in that it doesn't use peer review -- and the publication decisions are made by students, to boot. So why not institute peer review? Good for those students who have recognized that they could benefit from faculty input.

On the other hand, there are at least some perils to instituting peer review in a discipline that isn't used to it. There's at least some potential for strategic behavior and conflict of interest. If I were asked by Harvard or Yale for comments on someone else's piece, of course I would give my honest opinion, but is it not at least a potential problem if I have submissions pending there myself -- as I usually do? Then I have an interest in having other pieces get rejected. (This isn't such a problem when a law review seeks advice from faculty at the same school, because most faculty can get published in their own school's review when they want to and so have less of an interest in whether other authors get published there.)

Presumably, disciplines that regularly conduct peer review have thought about these problems and have worked them out somehow. Maybe they have an honor code for peer review? Also, there's probably less potential for conflict in other disciplines, because they don't have multiple simultaneous submission. In law, everyone submits their pieces to all the top journals every year, so most everyone always has something pending everywhere.

As I say, I would submit honest comments anyway, as I expect most law professors would, but the problem is at least something to think about. Students deserve kudos for seeking faculty input on publication decisions, but at the same time I'm surprised that there hasn't been more academy-wide discussion and vetting of this new trend.

After the Fall

A snow day is fun, a snow week is a pain in the ass. Snowmaggedon very considerately came on the weekend, which minimized disruption, but with that much snow it wasn't surprising that most workplaces (including GW and the federal government) were closed on Monday. It was enjoyable to get an extra day to putter about and work at home in a relaxed way.

But now it's Tuesday, and schools and the government are still closed (a lot of private workplaces seem to be open), and with another big storm arriving today, there's no telling when we might be able to hold classes again. We've endured about two feet already, and the forecast calls for another ten to twenty inches today and tomorrow. Is there no limit to this? Doesn't the snow get used up?

One day of canceled classes can be made up without much trouble, but a week of canceled classes, which now seems all too likely, is a real disruption in the schedule. We have a couple of snow days built into the schedule, but not five. I don't think we can cancel spring break, and the exam schedule is pretty sacred. There'll be a lot of doubling up and we might have to eliminate reading period. It's going to be tough on both students and faculty.

What would be interesting would be if we got, say, four inches of snow. Around here, four inches is usually regarded as a major calamity, something that brings life to a standstill. But have Snowpocalypse and Snowmaggedon toughened up even the weather wimps of DC? Would we shrug off four inches and get ourselves to work? Unfortunately it looks like we won't find out. Snoverkill is on the way.

Ouch

The University of California has put faculty and staff on furloughs amounting to an average 8 per cent pay cut, and yesterday voted to raise student by 32 per cent.

That's a huge increase. It's worth noting that, even after the increase, UC tuition will still be a bargain at $10,302 -- my own university charges a whopping $41,610 for undergraduates -- but still, a 32 percent increase in any price has to cause some severe sticker shock.

Professors have a funny relationship with tuition. On the one hand, I am stunned by the tuition my law school charges -- $42,205 -- and I feel we should at least show some restraint in increasing it. On the other hand, it pays my salary. My school doesn't have that big an endowment, so we are primarily tuition-dependent. If we want to restrain tuition increases, we have to restrain my salary too. So I'm caught in a conflict of interest.

Professors also have a funny relationship with furloughs. Thankfully, we don't have any at my school, but I wonder how professors at state schools are managing. An 8 per cent furlough presumably means that they're being instructed to take about 20 days off a year. (Apparently the actual number ranges from 11 to 26, with higher-salary employees expected to take more.) But given the way professors work, days off are pretty meaningless. We already have considerable control over our time -- apart from time when we're required to be in class, we work as much as we want to and take days off when we want to. I hasten to add that for most of us, including me, that ends up meaning working almost all the time, but the point is that getting extra time off doesn't take the sting out of a furlough. It's not like getting unpaid vacation time, it's just unpaid work time.

Of course, the life of a professor is so good that it's churlish to complain that furlough days probably won't actually get taken. I'm not expecting any sympathy with the fact that we already have so much flexibility that it's meaningless to give us more. But still, an 8 per cent pay cut has to hurt. My sympathies go out to the UC students and faculty.

Course Evaluations

My faculty voted on Friday to change the course evaluation form that we ask students to fill out. It's a small thing, but that didn't stop us from debating it for nearly two hours.

The length of the debate partly reflects our idiosyncratic love of long meetings -- we seem to have a Law of Conservation of Meeting Length, so that we find something to discuss regardless of the actual magnitude of a proposal's importance -- but it also reflects the fact that, although a change in the course evaluation form may seem trivial, it can actually have subtle and important implications.

For example, we voted to ask students to rate professors on their "ability to present the subject matter in a clear and organized manner." That seems pretty straightfoward, and it won't bother me, because the students have always regarded my teaching style as clear and organized. But what if a professor believes that the essence of the Socratic method is to revel in the ambiguities of the subject matter and to require the students to figure out the answers for themselves, with no clear guidance from the instructor? I can certainly remember professors who ran their classes that way. (Although I may be giving them too much credit for thinking about their teaching styles -- perhaps they were just intrinsically unclear and disorganized). They will be disadvantaged.

Also, we deleted an inquiry about the professor's "enthusiasm." That seems to me to be an important component of good teaching. I was sorry to see that one go.

So while it might hardly seem worth debating, the centralized choice of the specification of the components of good teaching actually has subtle but important impacts on academic freedom. Maybe our debate was worth it after all.

Curricular Reform Revisited

Another Concurring Opinions visitor, Spencer Waller, yesterday offered this post in response to my recent post on curricular reform. Spencer agrees with my basic idea while challenging the usefulness of spending quite so much time on personal jurisdiction in civil procedure.

I am happy to have this opportunity to reconsider my earlier post, which generated a lot of comments. So let’s go over Spencer’s ideas as well as some of the comments on my previous post.

The basic idea of my previous post was that the amount of time devoted to a subject in a law school course does not have to be proportional to the amount of time students will spend on that topic in their actual practice — if that was required, civil procedure would be primarily about discovery practice with much less time devoted to personal jurisdiction and Erie. My reason was that law school is not so much about learning particular skills and knowledge as it is about acquiring the ability to acquire skills and knowledge.

This basic thesis came in for a lot of critical comments. “Mike” and “shg” kicked things off by suggesting that I was in the wrong job and that I was making my students suffer by teaching a philosophy of law course instead of giving students the skills they need to become lawyers. Mike said that “In Civil Procedure, we should have learned the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure as they are actually applied,” which means “a lot of mundane memorization and synthesi[s] of many inter-related rules. That’s it.”

I disagree with these comments, particularly with the suggestion that students only need a lot of mundane memorization of rules and “that’s it.” There are many reasons for this.

Real practice is not just about mundanely applying rules. In my own practice of law, prior to entering academia, I was constantly amazed at how frequently, in routine situations that must arise every day, the law was utterly unclear. As a real practicing lawyer, I was constantly called upon to sort through conflicting opinions as to what the applicable rule was. No amount of memorization could have helped me. It was up to me to discern the rule from, and argue for the rule based on, conflicting authorities. That is the skill students acquire from considering matters from a more doctrinal, policy-oriented, and theoretical perspective.

The law also changes all the time. Suppose, in teaching civ pro ten years ago, I had avoided all theory and had just required my students to memorize the rules and requirements for complaint drafting as they existed at that time. The Supreme Court recently blasted those requirements to smithereens in Twombly and Iqbal. Now what? Oh, you say, the student (now the lawyer) will now just rote-memorize the new rules. But how is the lawyer to know what the new rules are? Everyone’s still struggling to interpret the Supreme Court’s pronouncements. The lawyers who will gain an advantage by knowing the new rules are not going to be rote rule memorizers, but those who are best able to discern the new rules, which requires not just reading them from the opinions (because there is widespread disagreement as to what the opinions means) but a fine sense of how the opinions fit with the whole subject of civil procedure and what the trend is. It requires skills not available to rote rule-memorizers.

A student who has done nothing more than memorize a set of rules is not going to be well positioned to understand and memorize new rules. That takes the skill of knowing how to acquire knowledge. The student who has the latter skill can learn the rules that become relevant in the student’s actual practice after graduation, but someone who has done nothing but memorize rules will be ill suited to handle the changes that constantly come up.

This point also addresses another commentor’s question, about why I thought it important for students to understand how legal change interacts with social change (I observed that personal jurisdiction provides an excellent illustration of this point). Lawyers need to know this because the law is not static. A lawyer’s duty to the client includes anticipating where the law is going, because it might be going there right now. A lawyer needs to understand how legal change interacts with social change because that process might be occurring right now in connection with a matter the lawyer is handling.

Of course, this whole discussion is somewhat unrealistic, just as the comments on my post were unrealistic to imagine that I don’t teach my students rules. It is unrealistic to imagine that anyone is either solely a rule-memorizer or solely a theoretician. A class must include both. As my old civil procedure professor, Harold Koh (now legal adviser to the Department of State), used to say, you have to consider the law on multiple levels — five levels, in his view. You need to have actual clinical practice skills, you need to know the black-letter rules, you need the doctrine and policy that underlie the rules, you need a theoretical and interdisciplinary perspective, and you need a critical perspective. All of these come into play in actual legal practice, and I teach all of them in my course, including a lot of black-letter rules and practice pointers. But theory is an essential part of the picture.

Finally, as any teacher can tell you, a successful teacher must inspire interest in and love for the subject. Some commenters on my previous post complained about those who have never practiced law but who imagine they can teach it. Well, I have practiced law quite a bit, but let me complain about those who have never taught law and who imagine that they could teach it. Let’s have one of you come in and teach a class that consists of nothing but having students memorize mundane rules about civil procedure, and I’ll teach my class, which inspires students to love civil procedure. We’ll see whose students actually learn more. I predict that all of the other class’s students will be asleep and won’t learn much of anything except how to hate civil procedure.

Now, with all of that under our belts, let’s turn to Spencer Waller’s post. Spencer makes the good point that a focus on litigation procedure (not, as I understand him, a mundane rule-memoriazation focus, but more emphasis on that part of the course) rather than personal jurisdiction might be better tied to actual litigation today and might lead to a better understanding of the litigation process. I am not wholly wedded to our customary fascination with personal jurisdiction and Erie and would be open to rethinking things. (Although actually, at my law school, Civ Pro is divided into Civ Pro I and Civ Pro II and we have to adhere to general understandings of what goes in which part, because students may have different professors for the different parts of the course.) But even if I altered my overall time allocations, I wouldn’t alter my overall approach, which would still devote time to policies, doctrines, and critical and theoretical perspectives, rather than having nothing but rule memorization. Even if I increased my focus on discovery, the course wouldn’t be about memorizing every facet of every discovery rule. There would be some of that, but more doctrinal and theoretical analysis of discovery rules.

In my view, a course that was nothing but rote memorization of discovery rules would be the course that would really make the students suffer.

Curricular Reform

Professors on the Civil Procedure professor listserv are debating the recurring question of why we devote so much energy to topics that come up only rarely in practice, particularly personal jurisdiction and Erie. Some are suggesting that the civil procedure curriculum should be much more practice oriented, which would mean spending a lot less time on these subjects and more time on what most lawyers actually do in practice, particularly discovery.

I think it is an error to imagine that the law school class time devoted to a particular subject needs to be proportional to the time students will spend on that subject in actual practice. Law school is partly about acquiring particular skills and knowledge, but also, and probably more, about acuqiring the ability to acquire skills and knowledge. We will never teach the students all they will need to know as they practice law, but we can teach them how to learn what they need to know.

The amount of time devoted to personal jurisdiction and Erie in many Civ Pro classes makes little sense in terms of the practical importance of those topics in typical litigation. But personal jurisdiction provides a lovely illustration of the process of legal change over time that students can appreciate as the law they learn changes over the course of their careers, and Erie provides an illustration about how imoprtant theoretical issues relating to federalism impact practical doctrines. The students need to know how to appreciate the ways in which legal change interacts with social change and the ways in which theory impacts doctrine just as much as they need to learn what Rule 26 says about discovery and disclosure.

The Future of Education

Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham, predicts in Slate today that the Internet will tear apart education much the same way it has affected newspapers. In the future, says Professor Teachout, most classes will be offered online, students will pay by the class, a few big star teachers will get all the money, and the rest of us will be glorified TAs. “Within a generation, college will be a mostly virtual experience for the average student,” Professor Teachout says, and degrees will come from education “aggregators” rather than traditional colleges.

Professor Teachout may be one of the big stars in the new order (well, her webpage at Fordham does say that she is “an immensely talented and creative scholar”) but I’m not buying her theory just yet. If universities just sold educations, there’d be more to it. As Professor Teachout observes, universities incur big expenses that may prove unnecessary in the digital age. If we ran universities on a business basis, employed technology to the fullest degree, and got rid of a few bits of archaic nonsense such as tenure and scholarly research, I’m sure we could deliver education much more cheaply.

But universities also sell their students something else: the reputational value of the degree. An Internet “aggregator” of education services can’t duplicate that easily. Part of the reputational value of a degree comes from just those aspects of a university that the Internet would shed: having faculty who are research stars, not letting just anyone take classes, etc. Face it: if you were making hiring decisions, would your first choice be someone who graduated from a virtual school?

I think the reputational value of the degree is a big part of what universities sell, and I don’t think the Internet is going to erode that so quickly as Professor Teachout seems to believe. And that’s before we get to other things that real colleges offer, such as enjoyment, friendships, networking, and other things that come from actually being in the same place as your classmates.

Well, it’s always dangerous to say that the Internet won’t accomplish something. And in fairness, Professor Teachout does say that the more elite, “brand name” universities will be less affected by the developments she foresees than smaller, less known institutions. And that makes sense: the less reputational value your degree has, the more you really are selling education. But I don’t think my job is going to be outsourced to the Internet just yet.

Back in the Saddle Again

Two hours from now I will teach my first class in 15 months. My sabbatical is over.

I'm actually looking forward being back in the classroom. I didn't feel this way so much on my first sabbatical back in 2001-2002, or even in the first semester of this sabbatical, but beginning around January or so I started to think, hey, where are my students? I miss them.

The funny thing, which I do remember from my first sabbatical, is that the students have no idea. As I walk in today, they won't be thinking, whoa, this is his first class in 15 months -- I wonder how he'll do -- better cut him a little slack. No, they'll just expect the same polished performance as always.

Which leads to a more general observation: That's what the students always expect.

Think about a water tap. When you turn it on, you expect water to come out. It occurs to you only rarely, if ever, to think about the amazing amount of labor, planning, and ingenuity that went into bringing the water to that tap. You just expect it to work.

If you're a professor, that's how your students think about you. To them, you are a water tap. When they turn you on, they expect a class to come out. They never think about the preparation and planning involved. Your need to prepare a class while juggling your writing projects, committee responsibilities, and personal life, and the possibility that you may be ill or out of temper, are equally outside their consciousness. When I was a student, I was among the more academically minded (I did become a professor, after all), and still, I had only the dimmest notion that professors spent time preparing for class.

The result is that students will sometimes be insufficiently prepared to receive the benefits of the class you have worked hard to plan for them and they may show less appreciation than your efforts deserve. Professors, never resent this or expect it to be otherwise than it must inevitably be.

Virtual Study Group or Cheating Bank?

Interesting article in today's NY Times about websites that offer solutions to problems in leading math and science textbooks, sample research papers, working computer code for computer classes, old exams, and answers to questions posted by members.

What does a professor think about such a website? Glad you asked.

The answer, I would say, is that the websites (based on the report, I haven't checked out each of them) do little more than duplicate what is already available in old-fashioned, human form. They don't pose strikingly new problems; rather, they present familiar issues about how much collaboration is permitted on different kinds of assignments.

With regard to homework, for example, the background understanding, I would say, is that, unless otherwise specified by the instructor, collaboration on homework is permitted. We all know that students form study groups and help each other out to some degree. A website that duplicates this practice strikes me as no worse than old-fashioned study groups. I would say that a student who completely copied a whole set of homework answers has cheated, whether the copying is from a fellow student or from a website, but students who get some help are OK. There's not an exact line and students need to exercise reasonable judgment. In any event, as the article noted, this problem is "self-policing," in that students who don't really do the homework will not learn the material and will suffer at exam time.

The article mentions a student who posted a question from a take-home exam and got help from the website community. That's clearly cheating. The assumption (which should be expressly stated by instructors) is that collaboration is not permitted on exams. Students are on their honor for a take-home exam, and using the Internet to violate the rules is the same as getting help from a fellow student.

As to posting old exams, I think this should be within the control of the professor, but at the same time, a professor who gives the same exam year after year is asking for trouble. Students routinely look at old exams for help preparing for each new exam, and professors should assume that old exams are available. Still, posting old exams against the wishes of the professor would be a copyright violation, so if professors really want to make a stink about it, they could.

But in the end, like so many things on the Internet, it's not as new as it might seem. It's just an extension of long-existing practices.

Ouch

The new U.S. News grad school rankings are out, and it's official, GW fell from 20th to 28th. That's a considerable drop.

Some of the drop results from a change in the rankings methodology -- U.S. news finally decided to count part-time students in a school's stats. That affects schools that have a large part-time program, such as GW. The other big factor appears to be a drop in our "students employed 9 months after graduation" stat, from 97.1% to 92.8%. That doesn't sound like that big a deal, but with most schools tightly bunched on that statistic, a small change can cause a big drop.

Some professors put on a show of not caring about rankings, but in fact people care a lot, and it's especially important for schools that were hanging on to the edge of the top 20 -- i.e., us. There's going to have to be a lot of soul-searching and some tough decisions around here as we figure out how to regain our traditional ranking.

No Response

No response from any AALS official to my messages of yesterday. I know they're busy, but you might think that someone could reply.

Dumb Smart People

You might think that an organization of law professors would know how to conduct business in reasonably smart ways. But you would be wrong.

I just got a message from the AALS -- the Association of American Law Schools -- asking me to update my information in the AALS Directory of Law Teachers. In the past, they've snail-mailed every law professor a paper form to be filled out and returned. This year, I believe for the first time, they've switched to an electronic system. The e-mail asks that we each login to the AALS website and update our information electronically.

Great idea. There's just one thing. To login, we need our username and password. These were included in the e-mail. And guess what? Both the username and password are trivially deducible from the law professor's name. I won't post the exact details, but let's just say that I now know the AALS username and password for every law professor in the country. I could change any of their directory entries. Any of them could change mine. Well, actually, they couldn't, because I immediately logged on and changed my password. But I bet 98% of law professors haven't done that yet. So if you'd like to go crazy with the AALS Directory, now's your chance.

This has got to be the worst security system ever devised. I e-mailed the President and Executive Director of the AALS to suggest that they shut down the system immediately and keep it down until they institute proper security. I'll let you know if they respond.

Commencement Day

It's time for our annual spring ritual -- sending our students out into the great big world. It's Commencement Day.

I'm prepared with my regalia as usual, although as usual slightly disappointed that Yale's regalia regulations require its graduates to wear a mortarboard. I always wanted one of those cool tams.

When I got my regalia, I thought about cutting loose and getting a tam anyway, cheeky rebel that I am. But just about that time, the head of the Navy, Admiral Michael Boorda, committed suicide after a reporter questioned whether he had worn a medal to which he was not entitled. I decided to stick with the mortarboard.

Also (to the considerable mirth of my Ph.D.'d girlfriend), we lowly J.D.s wear a master's hood (only 3.5 feet long) instead of a doctoral hood (4 feet long with side panels). And we don't get to wear a gold tassel. But that's OK -- I like my purple tassel.

Of course the other burning question is whether it is permissible to bring a book or other reading material on stage and read it surreptitiously while 500 students are getting their diplomas one by one. I'm in the "no" camp, but I can't deny that my mind wanders by the time the Gs and Hs are crossing the stage.

Congratulations to graduates and best wishes for the future.

Almost There

Reached an important milestone -- made it through the last pile of exams. I'll still be crunching numbers and doing other grading stuff all weekend (and I still have four term papers to read), but it's a big moment. I was singing "Zip-a-dee-do-dah" as I started preparing the spreadsheet.

As bad as grading is -- and it's really bad -- it does have the redeeming aspect that the task is relatively clear. Most of a professor's life is a plunge into the unknown. In the most important part, scholarship, there is no clear goal, no easy way to tell what topic to take up next, no obvious set of tasks to do each day. Of course that's what makes the job so great, but it can also be daunting. So although grading is painful, particularly when you have 144 exams and have to grade 10 to 14 hours a day, day after day, it's refreshing to have such a clearly defined task to do for a change. I'm definitely not volunteering for more, but, with the exams safely shelved for another year, I can see some slight pleasure in knowing what I'm supposed to do.

Still Grading

Just in case you were wondering. There's nothing like a pile of 104 exams (I finished the 40 in my other class) to keep you in a grading daze. And then I also have four term papers. I should be done May 12. Blogging to resume thereafter.

Grading

Sorry, faithful readers, I'm busy grading lots of exams (145 of them, but who's counting?), and you know what that means . . . not much time for blogging.

Remember, you can't spell "grading" without "grrr"!

No More Pencils

I just taught my last class -- for 15 months! Now I just have to get through every professor's second-least-favorite task -- writing my exams -- so that I can then do every professor's least-favorite task -- grading the exams -- and then -- yes! -- it's time for my sabbatical.

May 18 is the truly magical date. That's Commencement. After that, I am not required to be any particular where on any particular day until August 2009. Oh yes, this is what professors dream about. It only comes once every seven years, but we're thinking about it for the other six.

Of course, I hasten to add, a sabbatical is not a vacation. I'll be working hard on writing projects. But boy, it sure will be nice to work anywhere and anywhen I want.

Bring on those exams! I can't wait to be done with them.