Thoughts while working

April 7th
- Wow my back hurts. Words cannot express how much I regret missing that Groupon for the massage place across from the Coop.

- A student today reaffirmed my recently slipping belief that the vast majority of students see anything below a B as an actively bad grade, which makes me feel better about my grading this year. I've been trying to toughen up my standards but I still sometimes worry I'm too lax - but if it is in fact true that most of them are upset at receiving a C (rather than indifferent with a splash of "darn," as I'd been starting to think), then my usual spread of a few in the 90-95 range, a few in the 72-78 range, and the rest in between puts my course about where I'd want it to be in terms of difficulty and standards. Not that every assignment every semester plays out in that range, of course. But the point is - I'm much less afraid now that I'm either too hard or too easy.

- I'm loving this weather. Is spring finally here??

April 18

- HOW did it take me this long to start using Zotero?? While I don't quite have the hang of how best to use it yet I can already tell it's going to save me a lot of time. That is, unless I become unreasonably anal about how everything is organized and waste hours arranging things for no reason aside from my own neurosis.

- My search for prelims readings just turned up an article entitled "Review Essay - The Internet."

- ...wow. So the Council of Writing Program Administrators just put me through literally 10 attempts at making up a password secure enough to be deemed worthy of defending my WPA conference submission form and the like - strictest most annoying standards for a password I've ever encountered in a civilian context. And then when I finally found one and finished registering, they promptly sent me an unencrypted email containing my new super-secure password plainly written out. Amazing.