Weekend Update

It's late on Sunday and I'm looking at the back end of another weekend shot to hell. I spent much of the weekend preparing for lectures next week and grading papers. I hate grading. I really hate grading piles of garbage. I know that I'm supposed to offer helpful comments and find at least one good thing in each paper, but when over half of the papers are repetitive, redundant, repetitive summaries of crap, it's hard to be nice. For some, I was reduced to something that sounded a lot like: "Dear Student X: In your paper, you managed to spell your name correctly. Congratulations. It's too bad that you misspelled my name and Fredrick Douglas (the subject of your paper). Better luck next time." I'll just say one thing: Frederick Douglass's name has 2 Es and 2 Ss.

My lecture is incomplete. I want to use clips of oral history interviews and have run into technical difficulties. The CD is a companion to a book about African Americans' memories of Jim Crow segregation. When I did this lecture 4 years ago, I popped the library's copy of the CD into my computer and presto! It loaded straight into Media Player. From there, I could embed individual sound files into my Power Point presentation and really looked like a real techno-badass teacher.

Fast forward 4 years to a new computer, new operating system, and new CD. I put the CD into my computer and I can't load it onto my hard drive. I can play the CD and I can create a playlist in Media Player, but I can't put the individual files onto my hard drive, which means I can't easily embed them into my Power Point presentation. I don't know if this is a copyright issue, a Vista issue, or just God's wrath raining down on me. Grrrr. Very frustrating. Now, instead of looking like a techno-badass professor, I'll look like a techno-idiot, trying to construct a coherent lecture while juggling at least 2 different pieces of equipment. I'm not giving up, even after a major techno meltdown last Thursday.

Late this evening, I checked my email from the northeastern post-industrial wasteland. Second on the list was: "Job Offer: Secret Shopper." I like to shop, I thought. I don't like to grade, but grading salespeople might actually be fun. Just so I don't have to read any papers about Fredrick Douglas waiting on people.