Snow days, snow days

This semester is off to a strange start. I had to cancel classes last week due to a stomach bug -- a horrible, horrible stomach bug. Had to cancel my undergraduate class (Fiction into Film) and my graduate course (What is College Writing?). Canceling both of them has thrown me, but the grad class is once a week, so we lost a whole week.

Then, we had a snow day yesterday. Well, an ice day, really. So we missed the undergraduate class again. There's a snow day today, too, but I don't teach on Tuesdays. So I'm trying to catch up from being sick.

Right now, I'm about to finish lunch and read one of my graduate student's final writing project draft. Where I work, M.A. students write and continually revise a 25-35 page essay that they might have started (hopefully have started) in a previous class. They defend a proposal to a 3 person committee, revise revise revise, and finally defend their essay to the same committee.

When I was writing my dissertation (and my dissertation proposal), I often felt completely adrift. My advisor was absolutely amazing. She IS absolutely amazing. I can't imagine a better advisor. But I think one of the struggles of advising is trying to figure out, trying to remember, where students ARE. I often felt my advisor was holding me to her standard, and she was done, with a job, working on a book. I wasn't there yet. In some ways, I now appreciate that standard, and I'm well aware that I might be misreading that whole situation. But as I read through my students' work, I, too, struggle to remember where they should be in their 3rd and 4th semesters of an MA program. I talk to the GTAs about realistic and fair expectations of first-year college students and I encourage them to try to find an essay they wrote their first semester and then also remember that they're likely strong writers, English majors. Most of their students will not be English majors.

I should probably do the same, huh?