POST-MIDTERMS

In these short 8-week "sessions" we have here at AECP, bureaucratic stuff like grades pops up every other week, so it would seem.

This past week was once again "midterms", (the last "finals" push was only Oct. 16) so I dutifully spent Wednesday night late at the office, working till after midnight putting in scores, discounting absences and missed homework, etc., and coming up with - I hoped - accurate and fair grades for my 35+ students. Only one E (failure) so far: a Saudi student who seems to think that 8 absences and no homework are an acceptable academic performance.

PROPOSALS

Not the marriage kind. Conference proposals. To keep professionally "in step," I try to present at a conference at least once a year - especially important this year as I determine whether to stay at ASU or interview elsewhere next spring.

The usual computer-aided langauge conference I usually attend, CALICO, will actually take place next march HERE on campus at ASU, so it was sheer insanity NOT to submit a proposal for it. I penciled in three other teachers as "co-presenters". (Still waiting to hear if it was accepted.)

My former boss at Cal State - Long Beach (Go, Beach!) reminded me several weeks back that CATESOL (the California state ESL teachers' organization) had a proposal deadline this past week, so I got in another proposal for that - that conference was attractive to me especially since, this year, it takes place in the LA area (Pasadena), thus offing two avian creatures with one lapideous object.

ROACHES

I am only recently back in my apartment this week after being chased out for six days by an inexplicable chubby chestnut cockroach that stared back at me from my bedroom window blinds Nov. 10, the day after I got back from my weekend in Prescott. (In the bedroom, not the bathroom or kitchen? Yech.) The unit owner agreed to pick up the extermination fees, and now, post-spraying, I am back in. (Bill Graham, the old family Aramco friend with whom I stayed when I first arrived in Phoenix, graciously took in the cockroach refugee till the exterminator could come do his business.)

But I'm looking to sublet the place in the not-too-distant future and find another apartment. My downstairs neighbors have been having a, shall we say, hypersexual lifestyle, the insulation quality between apartments is substandard (although "code", the realty company insists), and with my long-hours at work, the last thing I need is an unquiet home environment to drag home to at the end of a long day. So maybe the cockroach did me a favor. It initiated the second letter to the realty company complaining that the apartment was making my life miserable and asking to be given some other option. Both Gerson Realty and the anonymous owner have now agreed (perhaps with relief) to let me look for a sublessee.

THANKSGIVING

Coming up soon after only a three-day work week next week. I drive to Bakersfield first to celebrate the slaughter of the fatted turkey at the parents' of Kim Ayer's husband Allan Petker. The rest of the four-day weekend I'll be down in LA visiting old friends.