Raining, Pouring

It's no longer freezing cold, but the April showers have set in, and so its pouring outside.

And when it rains it pours, not just in terms of the erratic weather, but in terms of my workload:
Two batches of paper last Thursday, Two batches of exams today, one batch of papers on Tuesday, and then a break before three batches of long papers in the week of finals. Fun!

Plus, though a unch of my service obligations seem to have wound up for the school year, a few more linger, popping up at precisely the worst moment, so I've got around 80 scholarship applications to review in the next 10 days (note paper grading obligations above), and a qualifying exam to review.

What was that about research? Oh yes. That'll have to wait a bit.

What would The Byrds Say?

Or King Solomon, or anyone who has ever thought that there is a season for compassion and a season for strictness.

A purely hypothetical situation:

A student is clearly having some issues--attendance has gone from perfect most of the semester to spotty, even dreadful since break. When said student does appear, s/he looks dreadful--not poorly kempt, just beaten down.

The problem is, the student has been dishonest--you know, in the fiddling with margins and fonts kind of way that's totally transparent, and the "dog ate my homework/email is broken" sort of way that's harder to prove but no less visible to the naked eye.

The student had tried to schedule an appointment with me today, but we crossed paths--the purported topic of the meeting was a need for a pep talk. In an email, the existence (though not specifics) of tragic events are confessed, the imminence of graduation is referenced, the possibility of a sobfest is forewarned.

What the student doesn't know: the big margin/big font paper failed, and I've found multiple pieces of evidence of the mendacity of the broken email excuse. With the current average, and without a penalty for the mendacious excuse, the student will not successfully pass the class (though it would be close). Because the student did not know this information, I am not reading the earlier email as manipulative.

There's a third exam tomorrow, and big final paper due in three weeks.

Though I know, and can more or less prove that the student has been lying to get a long extension, I think I'm going to grade the work that was (eventually) turned in. But I want a confession, partially because I don't like being lied to, and partially because I don't want the student to believe the ruse worked.

I also believe that the possibility of passing this class relies on getting some extra help from me, which I fear may, in terms of the amount of effort I'm willing to expend, may be partially contingent on the student coming clean.

I fear all sorts of things about this purely hypothetical situation--that I'm being an ass, that I'm being a pushover, that I'm being selfish, that I'm being compassionate, that I'm being vindictive, that I'm being manipulated, that I'm not being even-handed, that I'm being generous. All of these things are available, but few of them align for me in a clear course of action. Especially after the lingering embarrassment of a couple of days ago.

Perspective anyone?

The Cruellest Month

is still somehow less cruel because I repeatedly get to say the word "Starnbergersee" without sounding nuts.

Embarassing

This has only happened once before, and I recognized the truth much earlier, so as to be much less exposed.

Today, I all but accused a student of plagiarism who I am now convinced did not plagiarize.

It was as fishy as a koi pond, to be sure...because I am experimenting with not maintaining an attendance policy, the student had not attended a class except to take an exam since early February. He had access to decent notes from a friend, and so did well on them, but had only gotten the assignment two days before the paper was due, then chose to write on the longest text we had yet studied, for which he was entirely absent.

The paper I received wasn't, but the kicker--it had the wrong course number in the header, a course number not offered at this university. A little googling revealed a university course at another institution for which this assignment would've been entirely appropriate and I thought I had him.

I have confronted many many plagiarists in my time, and even the most hardened liars have a pretty clear tell when they've been caught. This guys was either cool as ice, or clueless--he legitimately thought that this was the course number for the class--I know, because I asked him, and he looked at me as if I were crazy and gave the same wrong answer as on his paper. I then asked him to forward me a copy of the paper, which the MS Word properties clearly indicated had been started at 7pm the night before it was due, and printed 6 1/2 hours later.

And if the student was smart enough to fix the properties of the document, he'd be smart enough to catch the course number.

The other piece of evidence I was relying upon? He labeled it "Final paper," which it wasn't. It was only paper #1. As I pulled out the assignment sheet to show him, there it was, on the top of the page, my own handout: "Final Paper Assignment."

Mud in my eye.

Early Returns

So yes, I pulled papers that I though might be problematic on first glance, and moved them to the top of the pile, but after 6 papers from this first batch, I have 2 Fs, 2 Ds, a C-minus, and a plagiarized paper.

Here's hoping I pulled all of the problem papers!

ETA: After 4 more papers, add another D, another F, and two B range papers (finally!) Sadly, I don't think I'm done with the D/F papers...

ETA, again: Halfway through the batch and the average grade is still only a high D. Uggh. Fortunately, I think the next paper on the stack'll be an A

Hung Like a Horse

When it came out in the early 70s, Equus was pretty cool. Though it was hardly the most avant-garde piece of theatre available, it brought a lot of very interesting avant-garde theatre tactics to the mainstream, taking huge risks, drawing on several different sorts of Japanese theatre, working with masks, creating a sense of ritual, exhibiting a (comparative) freedom with staging sexual bodies, etc. It was a sort of middle-browed avant-garde, but to my mind, a fairly compelling version, borne out of the cultural moment of its production.

However, the playwright, Peter Shaffer, made an interesting choice in the way he chose to publish his play. Instead of keeping his text to a minimum, and preserving the same sort of openness that the first director was able to bring to that exciting theatrical moment, Shaffer scripted in virtually all of the design and directing choices of that first production, which has meant, effectively, that most subsequent productions have been little more than mere mimicry, an homage to a very alive theatrical moment that is now over thirty years past.

In some ways, this scenario is the perfect one for young Daniel Radcliffe's stage debut, a scenario whose theatricality is almost a repetitive as film, whose actorly risk is tempered by three decades of success, and where the primary theatrical excitement is a sort of celebritized spectacle crafted for a big, ornate West End performance space.

Don't get me wrong, Radcliffe is actually pretty good, especially if you can get past his "petulant face" which he exhibits in every Harry Potter film. You know the one, body stiff, leaning slightly forward, arms ramrod straight down his sides, ending in balled up fists, a hard little anger on his face. It's how he started the performance I saw, but it was better than Richard Griffiths' slow start (for such a seasoned stage vet, I was surprised to see that it took the entire first act for Griffiths to develop enough pacing on his lines to sound like he wasn't still learning them).

But most in the audience weren't there for the acting, or the theatricality, or the spectacle of technically slick theatre. Most were there for what my students lovingly called "Harry Potter's junk." To illustrate. The class I went with included ten young ladies and one young man, all hetero to my knowledge. My ticket was several seats away from theirs, and I sat between, on one side, a teenage girl and her doting parents, and on the other, two college age American women. Over 50% in attendance were probably women between the ages of 15 and 30. In the first act, when Alan Strang (you know, the character played by Radcliffe) first acts out the events that form the crisis of the play, he narrates taking his clothes off, and does indeed take off his shirt. The psychiatrists ask, "You took off all of your clothes?" and everyone in that damn theatre held their breath and leaned forward. Oh I was no exception, except that I noticed it as it happened, and then remembered quickly that the full frontal is not until the second act.

That second act was better theatre all around--Radcliffe had fewer opportunities for Petulant Face, and Griffiths hits his stride. Joanna Christie, who plays Jill Mason, Strang's love interest, was a compelling presence as well, and she has more stage time. And of course, the climactic scene, with Strang and Mason trying to consummate their relationship, sustained real dramatic tension, which was almost certainly heightened by the stifled glee of hundreds of young ladies checking out that seventeen-year-old body.

To give the goods: One of my students who brought opera glasses says that the tackle in question is perfectly acceptable, but that the bottom is the main draw. For 17, he is in great physical shape. I was personally surprised that any hetero seventeen-year-old (no matter how professional and/or jaded), naked and in that close proximity to an attractive naked woman (part of the scene involves the couple at the threshhold of genital intercourse) could stifle an erection, but good for him, I guess.

Here's the thing. I had hoped that the theatrical excitement of the original production would have held some force here in this hyped production thirty years later, but all I could think of as I watched that young actor working so hard on stage, completely in the buff was, "He's got to be cold." Because for all its roots in a collaborative, commmunal kind of theatrical event, this production of Equus, with its dry-ice effects, its cavernous proscenium space, its fancy lighting gimmicks, and its careerist celebrity star felt, well, cold.

I'm thinking about an article about middle-browing the avant garde with this play (both the original and this most recent productions), and so I've got a more thinking to do about it, but for now, my take on it was that it was a highly, even surprisingly, competent theatrical piece, a slicked up, somewhat dehumanized and rote version of a play that once stood for the best in mainstream theatrical creativity.

London Pics

So here is a quick preview of the pics of London, available on my personal Flickr site...If you want to know the address, leave a comment or drop me an email, and I'll send you to the site (which reveals my super-secret identity!)