ah, summer (part 2)

Summer goes on, and I’m still inside, working on grant reviews. I’m about halfway through my stack, and have discovered a couple of tricks to help speed up the review process. It’s still taking me about 5 hours per application, which is really slow. I haven’t yet figured out if I’m being compulsive or inefficient. I suspect it’s both together :-S. I’m getting about 1.5 applications done per day, and am well-situated to be done with the reviews well in advance of the deadline. At any rate, as I’m now too brain-dead to work on reviews any longer, I’ll follow through on last week’s promise that I’d recount an ADD-related experience I had in my summer class.

It seems that each semester I have at least one student who has moderate to severe ADHD. My summer course was no exception; I had a student with ADHD that was sufficiently severe to require fairly intensive accommodations, which I was happy to provide in order to help them be successful in my course.

Outside of those accommodations, this student clearly had trouble in all the usual ways. They couldn’t sit still in class, had trouble coming to class on time, had trouble turning in work by deadlines, wouldn’t raise their hand before speaking, dominated the class discussion, went off on tangents, etc….. but really cared about the class and was clearly trying their darndest to do well.

My heart always goes out to these students, because they inevitably share stories of disappointments in classes and having to work so hard with professors who are less willing to follow their lists of accommodations (something I don’t understand, since these should be guaranteed to them by law).

I worked hard with this student, and was very proud of her performance by the end of the summer course. I observed a noticible improvement and substantial grasp of the course material, and saw how proud they were about their performance and enjoyment of the course. At the end of the term, my ADHD student thanked me profusely, saying that they’d planned to buy me a gift card for the local coffee shop in thanks for all my effort (of course I declined; no bribe needed, but the thoughtful gesture was definitely appreciated).

Unfortunately, on the last day of lecture, when my student went off on a tangent that took up quite a bit of course time. I did my best to divert them to get the class back on topic, and did fairly well…. but out of the corner of my eye, caught one of my neurotypically-normal students rolling their eyes and elbowing their friend in a clearly nasty way.

I almost lost it, not because of the nastiness, but because of the *nerve* it took to be nasty when this student has been nothing but open with their classmates about their disability, and asked for their patience with their quirks (something they didn’t need to do by any means). This same neurotypically-normal student had sent me an entitled message the night before challenging my grade on their paper, as well as my comments about their sloppy writing. When I replied that I stood by my comments, they indicated that I’d hurt their feelings and stomped on their pride.

It just goes to show that it’s not one’s strengths or weaknesses that determine their worth as a person. This “typical” student had the gall to be mean to somebody who has been nothing but kind and hardworking, as well as the guts to demand that I don’t “stomp on their pride” by giving valid criticism on their writing. All my student wtih ADHD wanted was to have adequate support to accommodate her learning needs, and was grateful to get it in a respectful fashion.

Now if only the rest of the world could understand this basic lesson…

ah, summer….

I haven’t blogged in over two months, and of course the reason is that I’ve been busy. It’s a common misperception that academics “take the summer off.” I can assure you that this is definitely *not* the case.  I’ve been in this line of work for a decade, and even my mom still thinks this a little bit (i.e., she’s bugging me about coming for a visit, but I don’t know how I’m going to make it fit in my schedule without having to pull all-nighters. This would be very, very bad…).

How I spent my summer “vacation”: I taught a summer class in May and June (and will post about an experience in this class soon), dealt with 3-4 Masters theses, took a few days’ off last week before the 4th of July, and have spent this week working on a paper and doing grant reviews. I’ll do the same tasks next week, and then will spend a few days in DC finishing the grant reviews. The week after that, Hubby and I go to Hubby’s home country for a week-long holiday (badly needed!). Once we return, there’s only a couple of weeks until the new semester begins. I’ve taught my two fall semester classes before, but one requires a bit of reprep, an assignment requires fairly substantial revision, etc. All of this work takes time.

It feels like summer is over before it’s really even begun. I’m trying not to think about this too much because it makes me feel sad and burned out. It also makes me feel like I haven’t accomplished anything (totally untrue, but still…). For example, I’d planned to get at least 2 papers out this summer, but now I think I’m going to have to forego at least one because I’m doing these grant reviews.

At least the weather is nice, and I get to enjoy it because I’m doing most of my work from home! If only the weather and summer could last just a couple weeks’ longer…