The Easy Week

In my mind, the week of finals is supposed to be easy for a professor. Officially, I believe all I need to do between now and Friday is show show up for exams, grade them and turn in grades. This misconception, however, combined the Mister's and my desire to leave town immediately after graduation in order to take advantage of the professorial time schedule, leads to the barely controlled chaos that I am looking at over the next eight days. Somehow, between now and when we board a plane on the 12th, I will do the following:

• Write three exams and copy them, the first being 8 a.m. Monday (tomorrow) morning which will involve fighting with the slow copy machine on Sunday night.
• Give eight one-hour oral exams to graduating seniors. This is cruel and unusual for everyone involved.
• Grade 80 exams, all of which involve some short answer, half of which are entirely open response.
• Attend two on-campus pre-graduation ceremonies, graduation itself and personally host a croquet party for the biology seniors*.
• Give three laboratory make-up practicals (for two different classes) including finding fresh specimens to replace the stuff that dried beyond recognition over the weekend.
• Clean up the practicals, and, if I were good, the labs in general so that the teacher teaching summer school could find stuff.
• Find, organize, grade, and enter scores for 80 lab reports, 200 quizzes, 20 lab practicals, 8 ten page papers, 20 semester-long projects, 20 oral presentations and 20 short papers that I misplaced in March.
• Answer who knows how many questions about grades and when grades will be available on-line.
• Seek out my allegedly graduating senior and find out why she has not turned in a final report for her research and why her research area is still a mess.
• Find the hippy non-trad student who just gave birth and convince her to turn in something so that I can complete the paperwork to change her incomplete.
• Meet with my student whose parents were murdered three weeks ago and arrange a plan for her to finish her work over the summer while we both try not to cry.
• Organize the gift basket from the seniors for their grieving classmate.
• Find out the results of a student's test for ovarian cancer and try not to cry when she does.
• Track down a failing student who failed to arrange a time to give her presentation to my lab instructor (who was gone last week because her day job is the county sanitarian and the emergency swine flu meeting was during lab) and make her give a presentation.
• Write a letter to perspective students telling them how wonderful our program is.
• Fight so that biology 101 does not get overfilled so we still have room for incoming freshman majors.
• Wrap up a search committee (for my job for the fall).
• Clean up my office so that the women teaching over the summer could use it.
• Find home for the plants in the lab.
• Meet about summer science camp.
• Work on the ethnobiology network grant (that was funded) that I should contribute to before the first big meeting at the end of the month.

• Go to the doctor.
• Ask my doctor to write me a letter saying that I really do need to carry-on syringes on a plane flight.
• Somehow translate this letter into Italian.
• Go to the pharmacy.
• Have my hair cut (for the first time since September).
• Paint my toenails and have my legs waxed.
• Clean my house before the croquet tournament.
• Attend a baby shower as guest of honor (2 if the Mister's department gets their act together).
• Write thank-you notes to the dear friends who threw me a baby shower in Kansas back in March and the students who attempted to throw me a baby shower last week.
• Attend an end of the semester brunch.
• Learn key phrases in Italian.
• Take the car in for its annual state inspection.
• Plant the herbs we bought yesterday.
• Send mother's day stuff.
• Send birthday stuff to my neice and brother.
• Clean, block and mail the baby blankie featured last week.
• Talk to the fabulous cat sitter who is willing to do odd jobs while we are gone and amass supplies so that she can actually do the odd jobs.
• Send cards and or gifts to the other two friends who had babies in April, the friend with the March birthday that I bought a gift for last summer, friends and relatives with health troubles and the colleague whose wife just died last week.
• Cancel a credit card.
• Treat my cat's fleas which have returned with the warmer weather.
• Celebrate my cat's first birthday (today!).
• Pay household bills.
• Bleach the clothes that turned musty when I left them in the washer last week.
• Figure out what in the world I am wearing in my seventh month of pregnancy in Italy in May.
• Figure out where we are going in Italy.
• Eat lots of vegetables including fresh Russian kale and pea shoots from the garden.
• Celebrate the blooming of the dogwoods, azaleas, alliums, columbines and hopefully the baptisia.
• Quit typing and do something.

*I am well aware that many of these things are my choice or fault. Of course I could give fewer assignments and have much less to grade. Nobody is forcing me to throw a party for my seniors. If I weren't leaving town I could do most of this next week. . . I'm also not complaining: the length of the list is directly related to having a job I enjoy and give my all (and that ends seasonally), being in love with spring, and having strong interpersonal relationships. Despite resulting from good things, though, I am currently overwhelmed.