Imagining a Dragon

Exhausted from the summer session while, apparently, still stressed, I was unable to sleep more than four hours at a time during my first week of vacation. Such a warped perspective caused me to imagine that I was looking at a dragon when I was out taking pictures last Friday. Am I wrong to imagine such a sight? (Click on the picture to see it enlarged.)

End of Summer Teaching

My summer session of teaching finally came to an end. Although I have taught four sections of writing in previous semesters, this one was particularly hard because the number of students remained constant. A large amount of attrition usually occurs in online classes. Two of my classes this time remained large because so many of the students were either transfer students from other schools or students about to start college elsewhere. Some of the students apparently postponed taking my writing class until they approached the end of their sophomore year; it’s possible, too, that some of the students may have taken the equivalent of my course at their home institution but found that class especially challenging. My course was no less challenging. I suspect that the intensity of the class was greater than the students probably imagined would occur in a course offered during the summer.

Two problems for students this summer were documentation and the bibliographic information required for a citation in MLA Style. About a third of the students couldn’t find the editors of the anthology we use in class. The names of the editors appear on the front cover, on the spine, and on the title page. For some reason, the students preferred to ignore that information and listed the acquisition editor or the editor-in-chief at the publishing company as the editor of the textbook. Some of them thought the editors had given their names to the publishing company or that the publishing company had the same name as the place of publication. I continually reminded students of their misinformation and provided citations of an article found in an anthology in the sample student essays. The handbook included examples; the students were quizzed over this information, and the class provided links to the Writing Center at Purdue University. None of that information was sufficient. The students managed to provide parenthetical documentation when working with one to three sources. Once the students began working with more than three sources and began using sources that were not found in the textbook, some of them thought that documentation meant providing the name of the source in which the article appeared. I wish I knew why these things proved so difficult.

One consolation of this online teaching, despite the frustrations and the difficulty I faced in completing the grading in a timely fashion, is having one tankful of gas last about seven weeks. When going to the movies or shopping, we usually took my wife’s car; her Camry is more comfortable and younger than my Corolla. I would have used more gas, of course, if my car had served all of our transportation needs. Typically, I go through a tankful in a month's time.

An Update at Last

I managed to get outside for a little while on Wednesday. My life for the past month has been spent grading essays. Teaching four sections has made me busier than I remember from previous summers. Last summer, after several summers of teaching four sections, I had a somewhat lighter load by only teaching three sections. Apparently, that experience last summer spoiled me because it has been extremely difficult keeping up with the grading this time. I won't be out from under these freshman essays for two more weeks. Until then, I have posted two pictures of bees collecting the pollen from the purple coneflowers in my yard. Clicking on each picture will make it larger. I recommend enlarging the first picture so that you can fully appreciate the pollen visible in that picture.

Missouri River Pictures

My blog has gained more popularity of late—all because of that painting by Lucian Freud that I added a few weeks ago. Nearly everyday now, there are people directed to this site because of their search for that particular painting and other paintings of naked women. That degree of popularity makes me lose interest in blogging. My relative obscurity was more appealing. This entry marks my first attempt at updating this blog in several weeks.





My heart goes out to those people flooded out of their homes in Iowa and those victims of tornadoes in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. A natural disaster, and losing one's home, compounds the heartache that many of us have known because of a job loss, high gas prices, and economic uncertainty in general. Our weather in this part of the country has been particularly severe. We haven’t gone a week without rain this spring. The Missouri River in this part of Kansas has been running high since May.



The first two pictures are the most recent while the other ones here record the extent of the flooding in May. Because much of the rain this spring has either been to the south or to the north, the Missouri River hasn't been as destructive as the Des Moines River or the Cedar River. The flooding around here occurred earlier in the season last year, with the greatest amount of destruction occurring along the Platte River (in Missouri) and downriver along the Missouri.

Even though Colonel Leavenworth in his 1827 expedition to create a fort on the eastern side of the Missouri violated his orders and crossed into Indian Territory, he, in hindsight, had the sense to build the fort on the bluffs overlooking the Missouri instead of on the floodplain on the eastern side. Flooding does occur here, nonetheless. Several downtown businesses were flooded out a couple of years ago when one of the creeks that empties into the Missouri grew so swollen that it left its banks and backed up to a height of at least six feet.



Back in May, the current on the Missouri was so swift that I had to use a faster setting on my camera to avoid having my shots of the river blur. The triangular cable tie-ups on the white dock in these pictures were buffeted by the current so much that the rapid up and down motion created a kind of music, making the movement of the river audible.