going to work

Today I am going to work. I woke up about an hour ago, ready to take some more medicine and while I will still be taking my miracle drugs that allow me to breathe, talk and not cough, I will go to work and infect my co-workers.

Ok, it is not my intention to infect my co-workers at all. I really do not want anyone else to catch this horrible thing. Unfortunately, my husband said he thinks he might be getting it. But since he works for 4 days a week, his weekend starts after tonight and he'll be able to rest for 3 or so days.

I am very glad that he will be able to do that, since I had to take a few days off after a not-so-wonderful sick weekend.

The worst thing about being sick, I believe, is my inability to eat solid foods. I love food, I adore food, unfortunately when my body is sick, my body decides to reject food and say "no". This is not just a polite "no" but an emphatic "no". I get to eat soup for almost a week, with saltine crackers, and not even the slightest bit of color in my drink - just water please. Is this what the doctor ordered? No.

Actually, the doctor did no such ordering at all. The doctor did not help me. I am mad at the doctor. The doctor I went to is not our primary care physician actually, she works in the same building and is a *new* doctor they brought in. I noticed this when we walked in, it was posted on the door: "Welcome Dr. So-and-So and Dr. Something-or-Other" blah blah blah.

So I went into the new doctors office that we are going to. The doctor that my husband and his family has been seeing for ages was unavailable yesterday because, being a good doctor he is booked. The doctor I used to go to when I was still living in California were all very personal. They always asked me how I was doing, without sarcasm. They always asked me how things were going, they always asked me about my symptoms as if it were a story - not a grocery list.

The doctor I saw yesterday, I could tell, just came out of medical school. She was looking for a way out of my appointment, she did not want to see me. I was just another patient, someone to be handled, not someone to be taken care of. It was a really big turn-off.

I told my husband about this, oh I ranted and raved on the car ride home, he was with me the entire time I was in there with her and he agreed (at least as far as I could tell) that she was not like the doctor I was supposed to see and she was not like any of the other doctors he had been to either.

Where do professional schools teach their professionals to deal with people? In my experience, there are courses on how to deal with people, or at least professional opportunities onto which you learn how to be personable. Or maybe it is just socialization. Maybe, just maybe, this doctor felt as though I was there frivolously - I should not have been there. I was there because I had flu-like symptoms. I know there is nothing she can do for me. But I feel SICK, worse than any flu I have ever had before. So I am thinking, maybe I mis-diagnosed myself and maybe I have something else. Maybe all of the things I read on WebMD are wrong or misleading or I did not read the right articles. There are tons of things I could have had, millions of things that could be wrong with me. But does she check for any of them? No.

What are your symptoms? Then you give a grocery list of symptoms.

Vomitting? No.
Cough? Yes.
Sneezing? Yes.

Etc., etc., and the list goes on.

Not necessarily in that order either. They did keep asking me if I had thrown up. They did not ask me anything about the length of my period which was a record 2 days. They did not ask me how long it had been since my LAST period before that (almost 8 weeks) and how often it normally is (usually every 6 weeks almost on the dot).

As you can tell, even though I went to the doctor and even though I am taking miracle medication (that I *myself* (Qualifier: my husband was there) went to the store to buy and decided for *myself* which one I was going to get) that does make me feel better, I am still going to work an unhappy camper, with less and less to be happy about the more and more I get better because my doctor DID NOT HELP ME RECOVER AT ALL.

To some degree, I almost feel as though they should say when you call to set up an appointment, "if you think you have a flu or a cold, we cannot help you and you should consider waiting until you have something better to come by for before we see you". Maybe that will build their customer base with customers that they would like to help.

Grrrrrr... *breathes* Ok now. I feel much better. *Cough*.

Feeling a wee bit better

Well, I was deathly ill yesterday and today I am honestly feeling a bit better. I asked my husband whether or not I should go to school and he said "no" because I told him I wasn't exactly feeling 100%. I do have late classes tonight and then early classes tomorrow morning, so maybe it is not so horrible that I am staying in today.

I did already get someone to cover my class, so that is good. I am a little weary about having this particular person cover my class, but I talked to them about the material last night and I think they are much more prepared than I would have been with the material so that makes me feel good about it.

Today it is pouring down cats and dogs. Which echoes how I am feeling about the day. Today is a depressive day because I have a ton of grading to do and no system in place to help me with it thus far. I am thinking about changing my grading system, hopefully to benefit my students, but it may (in effect) hurt some of them if they did not finish their homework.

In the department, a lot of people like to grade using "completion" as their measure for grade. What do I mean? If you did the homework you get 10 pts, if you did not do it you get 0 pts. So if you worked on a few problems, did everything completely wrong and turned it in you got 10 pts and if you really struggled on the homework, went to tutoring and did a good job of cleaning up your work then you got 10 pts.

I ask you, how is this fair?

One could argue, life is not fair. There are plenty people who get by in school, and in life, without doing a lick of work. But is this a good lesson to those who make the effort to do well despite the odds?

I have some students who are not going to pass. The have two exam grades that have placed them in the "no pass" zone. They will be *very* mad at me that they are not passing and I know I will get tons of complaints after they receive their grades back.

Although, I think they know. I think they know that they are not doing well and will continue to not do well. They may "understand" the material in class, but when they sit at home in front of their homework it does not come so easy to them. I worry about these students, do they realize that I worry about them?

I think the bigger question for me is: is it better to get them their papers back without comments and for them to feel validated about getting a grade on it? Or is it better to get them their papers back with comments and to correct their errors so they can do better on the exams?

One of the other TAs tells me that the students do not even look back at the comments on their papers, they may look back at the first few comments, but after a while the comments are lost to them - they will never read them, why write comments if the students are not going to read them? How do I know which students will read the comments and which ones won't? This seems to be an ever-growing battle against my students, or really students in general. How can I know the best way to assist you if you do not work with me (your instructor)?

I do have opinionated students, students who think they know best and who think that what they need is to see examples on the board worked out in complete detail and then to be able to replicate results. What they really need is to be able to learn how to think. I gave them an article about the college process, about learning how to think, about the type of thinking that is required of them throughout the college process. I graded the quiz I gave to them that had a question from this particular article, did it give me insight into how they think? It gave me insight into how prepared they were for class.

More than half the class did not bring the article with them. I got more blanks on that particular question than I was expecting. I thought it was an easy question to ask of them, had they put *anything* down, I would have given them credit, anything from the article that is. But did they bring the article that I told them to bring? No. When I ask them to keep a worksheet to bring to class next time, do they remember? No.

I could go on and rant and rave about my students, but I think I am going to stop here before I give myself a bigger headache than I already have because of this cold/flu/illness/something. I am honestly not at all sure of what I have anymore - but I do know that I am probably still contagious and therefore should not go to class for at least one more day. Tomorrow I will go to class, tomorrow is another day. Maybe tomorrow I will feel better about my students perfomance. Maybe tomorrow my students will do well on the quiz that I would have given them on Monday if it had not been for the fact that I was sick.

Maybe tomorrow things will be better. Maybe I will be feeling more than just a wee bit better.