Killing time

Big mistake: I seriously miscalculated the amount of work I need to keep occupied while my Concepts of Nature students take their final exam. I finished a big stack of grading with more than an hour to spare in the exam period. What to do? Sit and watch students struggling to pull ideas out of thin air? It's not exactly a pretty sight and it makes me nervous. I don't know, maybe it makes the students nervous too. At any rate the room is buzzing with nervous energy already and I don't need to make it any worse.

Start by putting graded papers in alphabetical order so they'll be easier to return. Done--with an hour to spare.

Look around the room. Wonder who decided to cover the back wall with a mural of Don Quixote tilting at windmills. If that mural is to scale, then either the Knight of the Mournful Countenance was 14 feet tall or the windmills were manufactured by the Little Tykes corporation. What message does that mural send to students? Are we trying to warn them of the dangers of reading too many books? Judging from the number of students who ask "Who's the funny-looking guy on the horse?" I suspect that the warning is falling on deaf ears.

My ears are being tickled by the gentle clickety-clicking of fingers on laptop computer keyboards. Sounds like raindrops. The students using laptops are ranged around the room close to the wall and I notice they're sharing power outlets in a friendly fashion. I hope that's all they're sharing. Yesterday in another exam I watched a student blatantly leaning over to look at the paper of the person in front of him and I was briefly tempted to warn him that copying the answers of the stupidest student in class is not the most reliable path to academic success, but then I had to wonder: who is stupider, the stupidest student in class or the one who copies his answers?

Forty-five minutes to go. Wonder whether all this scribbling is adding up to anything interesting. Yesterday's American Lit students labelled the Roethke poem "The Waking" variously as a villente, vaninelle, villinelle, villenelle, vilanette, villonelle, and, finally, villanelle, but seven students labeled it nothing at all. Several wrote that Ginsberg's "Howl" is "really out there" or "over the top," phrases I'll need to add to my glossary of technical analytical terms. One student wrote about "The Church of Jesus Christ of Ladder-Day Saints" while another wrote about the Denise Levertov poem called "The Jacob's Latter." On Ladder Day, I believe I'll climb the latter.

Forty minutes left. Look around again. Notice that at least three-quarters of my students are wearing flip-flops. This room is cold enough to hang meat in but most of my students are essentially barefoot. Not bare-headed, though. Wonder when I stopped caring whether my students wear baseball caps in class. Students have been known to write cheat-sheets on the bills of their caps, but that wouldn't help much on an essay test. A colleague of mine has a statement on his syllabus prohibiting a long list of student behaviors, including hat-wearing and spitting. In my classes, students can spit all they want as long as they spit directly into their hats. So far, it hasn't been a problem.

Thirty minutes left and what do I hear? A rustling of papers, a gathering of books, and yes! The first finished exam hits my desk. That's one down, 22 to go. Even ifI grade this one very slowly, I'll still have at least 20 minutes to kill, and then what?

Most of these students will do well on the exam, but if I'm being graded for my time-killing abilities, I get a good solid F.