Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, December 01, 2018

Calm Before The Storm

Cool, gray, wet afternoon. Winter in the Bay Area. Swept the patio and drank in the blanket of pine needles and strips of eucalyptus bark scattered across the damp aggregate concrete like a fragrant resin tea waking me into a dreamworld, as I sweep sweep sweep the rough embedded pebbles and shells beneath my feet. For the rest of the day I'm trying to fit lecture notes for all the texts left over from my syllabus after all the expurgations imposed by holidays and wildfire days and the rest, some of my most cherished texts in fact, Audre Lorde, Combahee, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Aldo Leopold... It's a lot to expect students to have read anything for the final day, what with all the writing I am asking them to be doing at this point, and I am going to be bombarding them with new material on the last day, just to tie up all the loose threads that remain. Not that my students are likely to feel the need for this major cleanup operation, not that they are likely to thank me when after all-nighters and ramifying deadlines in other classes I drone on and on the last day through while other instructors will be letting them out early no doubt. But the class has an argument to complete and I am going to do my best to complete it, whether they are alive to it or not. Three courses means sixty unique students this term, give or take, and that's a hell of a lot of papers and reading journals and peer-edits to slog through in not so very much time given my own deadlines. And I have yet to begin the fraught season of missed deadlines, facile excuses (all of which I accept, recalling once being a student myself after all), cheerleading and cajoling them past the finish line at the last possible second, some of them.

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