Working on the list

Today I've been hard at work on the list, you know, the one that never ends.   What have I done today?  I've finished putting together on a grant, one that involved much less work than the last one I submitted.*
I have met with three students, graded three papers, and answered countless emails.  I now need to grade about 12 more papers, but first, I'm off in search of caffeine.   

*I chose not to vet this one to the Research Guru before submitting it.  Why not?  Well, I don't really like RG, nor do I respect RG.  Further, this grant only funds conference travel, as such I didn't have to put together a lengthy proposal, so I didn't think I needed RG's feedback.  That may prove to be a mistake in the long run, but let me say my life has been less stressful knowing I didn't have to worry about RG's input. 

Holy Crap! Students can be so stupid!

I'm currently sitting in C's office trying to grade, and he keeps interrupting me to ask various questions about Turnitin.com. He's never used it before this semester, so he's a bit confused. He is trying to understand the whole report system. One report indicates that the paper is 60% plagiarized. He asked me to help he decipher the report, which I did (for those of you not familiar with Turnitin.com, it recognizes sources, but it doesn't recognize formatting. Therefore, just b/c Turnitin.com says a paper is plagiarized doesn't necessarily mean it is, as it doesn't recognize quotation marks, footnotes, or parenthetical citations).

I looked at the paper for him and explained the various color coding (each source that the student may have copied from is given its own color). This paper is clearly plagairized, as it contains entire paragraphs copied from other sources. So C started the process of printing stuff off, and then he decided to download the paper as a word document to compare that version to Turnitin.com's report. All of a sudden, I heard C utter a string of four-letter words--some words he hasn't said in a long time. Then he said, through gritted teeth, "You have to look at this." I walked over to his computer and just started laughing. Instead of typing names and words, like Raphael and chiara, the student literally cut and pasted them from Wikipedia and various online dictionaries. When the student did this, he forgot to remove the hyperlinks, so all C had to do was click on the highlighted word (in a Word document) to get to the source where the kid took the word and corresponding passage from. C is pissed, but, frankly, I'm rather amused!

Today vs. Yesterday

Yesterday was very productive for me. I wrote a total of 5 pages, reorganized a rather large section of my current chapter, and graded 3 papers. Today has not been so productive, at least not in terms of my dissertation. I began the day much earlier than usual, at 6:00 am, as I had to be on campus by 8:30 to give my final. That means the entire family had to be up and out the door by 8:00, no easy task, I tell you. As I have blogged recently, C is wonderful on many levels; he is not, however, wonderful about getting up in the morning. I could set 3 alarm clocks, and he would somehow manage to sleep through every single one of them. Me, I'm the type of person who wakes up 5 minutes before the alarm goes off. In fact, when we still lived in Southwest College Town and C had to be out of the house by 6:45 to make his 8:00 class (he had a 50 minute commute), I always awoke to his alarm and then woke him up. Getting C out of bed most mornings takes a good 10 minutes. But I digress. . . We were all up, dressed, fed, and out the door by 8:15, a small miracle because since we've moved to CU Land we're seem to be perpetually 5 minutes late.

Now that I'm nearing the end of the day, I can reflect on what I've accomplished.

• given an exam, following CU's fairly strict rules (including filling out lots of paperwork, which no one warned me about)
• graded 6 8-page papers, several quizzes, and 2 response papers
  
• graded 1 exam from a course I taught at Southwest College Town this summer (the student received an incomplete due to illness, and has only just made up the final) and emailed the grade to the appropriate person
• returned books to the library
• outlined the next large section of my current chapter, which means I should be able to write this entire section tomorrow

And for the rest of the day, I'm going to pick Wild Man up at school, and we're going to the mall. Why am I subjecting myself to this torture so close to Christmas? Well, C has a meeting on campus until 5:15 today, which means there is little point in going home as we'd have to turn around to get him after being home for less than 30 minutes, and there isn't much else to do with Wild Man on this side of town considering it is 28 degrees outside. So the mall it is!