I have, I fear, become a lady who lunches, at least if this week is any indication.
Sunday – lunch with Mum and two Lennoxville friends in Knowlton, prior to seeing ‘Lend me a Tenor’ (featuring my high school drama teacher and attended by my grade six teacher, who remembers me after 24 years);
Monday – impromptu lunch with Dina and Naomi on Monkland;
Tuesday – the aforementioned Lennoxville ladies joined me on a bike ride along the river into Lachine, lunch on a terasse, and the return bike ride along the canal;
Today – lunch with Sophia, my bestest buddy from the engineering company days.
And I’m waiting to hear back from a couple of Vanier colleagues about lunch tomorrow or Friday.
Next week, I have no lunch plans (so far), which means that I’ll end up scarfing down crackers and peanut butter instead. So really, this whole lunch date thing is much healthier.
Assessment as Learning, Journal #4
I just got home from the last Assessment course and the celebratory dinner that followed. I got a lot out of this course, and I’m excited about the next one, Developmental Psychology, which starts in June.
My most recent journal entry is based on notes I made while reading Grant Wiggins‘ articles on assessment. Wiggins’ model of assessment is PBA – performance based assessment. Although this entry is late, I decided last week that I would rather suffer the late penalty than write something sub-par; my intention, once upon a time, was to compare the two Wiggins articles with the now-infamous Ramsden, Chapter 10. I’ll start, though, with my responses to the ‘Thinking ahead to assessments’ handout:
Doing our part
Yesterday was another beautiful day, despite the dire predictions of thundershowers. I met Mum for lunch, then she and I met the kids at the bus, dropped off schoolbags and lunchboxes, and went down to the river for another walk along the bank.
When the kids and I were walking there last Sunday, we were a little dismayed at the build-up of garbage over the winter, and we said that next time, we would bring some bags and pick up some trash. So, this time, that’s what we did:
Colin, Mum and Robert (foreground), hard at work
Tada!
We each filled up one bag, and then Robert found a discarded shopping bag and filled that up, too. We found a garbage bin, dropped off our contribution, then continued our walk down to the playground, where Mum very kindly treated us to a reward:
Burning bridges
So today I took a deep breath and told Dawson thanks, but no thanks.
I was offered courses for the summer, y’see. This offer was the end result of a long, painful process which began in January, stalled for a while, and culminated in a phone call from the department chair.
I then met with the chair, who, it turns out, was the comfy chair. She tried to seduce me with all that Dawson has to offer (including its proximity to my house) while at the same time impressing upon me the importance of taking anything Dawson had to offer, lest they stop calling me.
I tentatively agreed to take the two courses, since there was no guarantee that Vanier would have anything for me for the summer.
I spoke with my Vanier coordinator on Friday and while there is still no guarantee that I’ll have anything this summer, I will have full-time work in the fall, and if summer courses open, I’m first in line.
Essentially, I had to make a choice, because if Vanier has summer courses it will be at the last minute, and I didn’t want to pull out at the last minute with Dawson.
Thankfully, it was an easy decision – I love working at Vanier. My colleagues are awesome, my students are enthusiastic (mostly), and my mood lifts when I step onto the campus. And now I’ve committed myself.
I walked home from Dawson, since today the weather is fantastic. I was just past the Atwater market when I felt something warm and liquidy hit my hand – for the first time in my life, I have been shat upon by a bird. I’ve heard it’s meant to bring the shittee good luck. So I’m taking the incident as a sign that I’ve made the right decision (and that whatever is out there has a twisted sense of humour, but we knew that).