growing

My belly is so round and full now I'm not sure how it could possibly get any bigger, but if the baby really does hang out there for these several more weeks, it undoubtably will. While the baby used to sit in closer to my sternum, he leans out now, and while I can't discern which part is which, I can definitely tell where he is in there. Sometime he rests legs or arms under my ribcage. My fingers have swollen-- I cant' get on my wedding ring. My watch used to move easily around, and now it's uncomfortably tight. And yet, all these changes are terribly exciting, too, in spite of the discomfort. They mean that something's happening. There's a baby coming.

bipolar grading

Believe it or not, I'm still grading. Only one huge stack of papers to go, then final grades to calculate for three classes, and boy, will I be happy when it's over.

I think I have a somewhat unhealthy attachment to how well my students do. I'm not a grading machine. I feel proud and disappointed and frustrated and sometimes even angry as I grade. With exams, the emotions seem limited to pride or sadness. When a student does poorly, I feel compassion mostly-- I feel sad the student wasn't able to recall the information needed to do well, or wasn't able to analyze a passage as thoroughly as she might have. I never take it personally if a student does poorly. Essays are a different story, though. My first-year comp. students finished up the semester with research papers (for example). Some of them turned in the best work I've seen from them all semester-- that's the idea, that's what we were striving for! When I grade these essays, I feel proud of the students. I can see how much progress they've made, I can tell that they've worked hard, and I'm glad to see it paying off for them.

But there's another group of students who, in spite of all the incremental assignments we used for the paper, appear to have turn in something they threw together at the last minute. These are the students who I've had to struggle with a bit more. I've given detailed feedback on drafts, I've met with students in my office, I've done my best to give them feedback I think can really help them improve. I don't mind spending that time, but when I see the final product, and there's no evidence of revision, I'm very frustrated. There are also students who are relying entirely on web sources, even though the requirements for the essay state repeatedly that they're to use primarily books and journal articles. I know that I shouldn't take it so personally, but I have a hard time not doing so. I work hard at trying to find the potential in each essay that I read, and at trying to encourage students to develop it-- but some of them just don't care.

And then there are the plagiarists. While I spent more time talking about plagiarism in this semester's comp classes than ever before, I am still getting students copying word-for-word from their sources and thinking it's okay to do so if they just put a page number afterwards. We did exercises in class on paraphrasing and summarizing, and they were told repeatedly that failing to include quotation marks around material borrowed word for word is not kosher. I've called their attention to this in previous papers they've turned in, and even had a few extended conversations about this in my office. And yet, here it is again, in the final paper of the semester. It's frustrating, and disappointing. I feel like I did all I could to prevent this from happening, and yet I still feel like I must have failed them.

I guess the good thing to be said is that I didn't have any over-the-top cases of plagiarism in any of my comp sections this year. That happened instead in an upper level Shakespeare class, in which one student copied and pasted pages of text from the Encyclopedia Britanica. I feel far more emotionally invested in this situation than I should be. I am disappointed, and even at times angry. In accordance with university policy, I contacted the student by email to tell him what I've discovered and what will happen next (he'll hear from the registrar). The student wrote back and claimed he cited his sources (they are mentioned on the Works cited page), so he didn't think he was doing anything wrong. I find this extremely hard to believe-- less than two full paragraphs of the entire essay are his own work, the rest is literally plopped in from an online source, and he thinks that suffices as a final essay? He expressed no concern at all in his message, just essentially denies he's done anything wrong. He seems nonplussed; I'm exasperated. Something's wrong here.

Final exam week is supposed to be a stressful time for students, and yet I feel far more stressed on this side of things than I did when I was a student and on the other side of things.

P. and I recently finished reading this excellent book (aloud, to eachother, mostly in the car). The writer is a psychoanalyst from Britain who has a lot to say about developmental psychology and biology in babies and young children. She claims that human responses to stress are wired in babyhood (during the time the brain is growing and new synapses are forming, etc.), and can even be somewhat influenced while the child is still in utero. So every time I feel stressed now, I start to worry about the large amounts of cortisol I'm sending baby's way. I wish I could just calm down. I want to create an environment that will allow the kid to feel safe and confident. I'm hoping some of this time away from work next semester will help, but I have a lot of work to do. I'm not in control of myself as much as I wish I were. I need to develop some new strategies for soothing myself and for keeping my mood at a more even keel. Where to begin, though? When to begin is a little easier to answer: as soon as I get the rest of this grading done.

highs and lows

There are probably Kubler-Ross -like stages for dealing with news like this. I think I got the shock and (misdirected?) anger all at once. Now I'm blaming myself. I'm still not so happy with how the doctor presented this to P. and me the other day, but since we've been talking and reading more about clubfeet and possible treatments, we feel better able to assert ourselves at our next appointment and to ask the questions we need to.

Yesterday was a day of highs and lows. We attended our first childbirth class at the hospital. We had a tour of the labor and delivery rooms, nursery, etc., and got a lot of information from the nurse leading the class. I had no idea one needed to have a pediatrician already lined up before the birth! The nurse suggested interviewing doctors before choosing one. If we really are dealing with a birth defect, that's going to be terribly important. As nervous as I might sound now, the class itself was a bright spot in the day. I was excited about going, and I'm excited thinking about our little guy arriving. I think these classes (every week for six weeks) will make the time go by faster. We start separate Lamaze classes next week, too.

Here are the lows. First, I got the idea in my head that if the baby has a problem with his foot, it's my fault. Maybe I didn't take enough folic acid; maybe I shouldn't have had caffeine those times I've had it while pregnant. Maybe I squashed the kid accidently or did something else wrong. It's torture.

The other complication is this: while I'd been trying to deal with the situation by telling myself that we just don't even know if there's a problem or not yet, P. has been preparing himself for the worst. He handles all sorts of stresses like this, figuring that if he can resign himself to bad things happening, he's better able to deal with whatever comes. But his communicating these feelings of foreboding to me ("I'm pretty sure the baby has problems," he says) has made me jumpy and sometimes even panicked. I get easily overwhelmed thinking about this too much, especially now that I've started thinking I may be responsible for the problem. The "if this is the case, we'll do that" approach feels much safer to me. But P. works differently, and so we clash. Last night after getting in bed, P. started looking up yet more information about club foot on the internet, and it just got to be too much. I tried to explain the panic it was causing in me and wound up causing more tension between the two of us than I ever wanted. I guess I need to get a better grip on things, somehow.

Better news? Only a few days left of this crazy semester. Maybe I'll calm down a bit once my grades are in.

baby feet

We had a second ultrasound today, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. The doctor said the ultrasound technician had made a note about one of the feet, which could have just been in an awkward position at the time of the ultrasound, but which also could be a club foot. "I'm sorry to hit you with this zinger," she said. Whatever that means. She said that in six more weeks we can have another ultrasound to check and see how things look then. The whole conversation took only a few minutes, and she was speaking so casually, it was hard for P. or me to figure out how seriously we should take things. I'm confused. The ultrasound technician spent very little time with us: if there were something present that looked like a problem, wouldn't she take a little more time to check things out? Or wouldn't the doctor take a closer look herself? And why wait six more weeks before we can check again? Why not have another ultrasound at the next appointment (in 2 weeks)?

P. & I did some reading about this when we got home, and it wouldn't be the most terrible thing ever if a club foot were what we're dealing with-- there are ways to correct the problem after birth. The news is still a bit unsettling, though.

I have to confess that I chose this ob in part because she's a she, even though a friend at work had much to recommend another (male) doctor in town. My ob has always been very business-like and a little abrupt with us. Most of our appointments haven't lasted longer than 10 minuets. That was okay with me. But this time, that quickness and demeanor didn't feel quite so good. Moving early is starting to look less daunting-- maybe a new ob would be a good change?