Fridays are always nice, but usually in a mixed way. I schedule assessments - quizzes or tests - so most of my classes are pretty low maintenance. On the other hand, I seem to be more concerned with my students' performance than they are. They have never learned to be careful and double check things in a world of endless do-overs in video games, spellcheck, autofill, and general apathy to doing their best. So I spend tons of time going from desk to desk, basically re-teaching lessons during exams. And while I am with one students, several others will be taking advantage of my distraction and cheat, talk, or goof around.
Then the weekend comes, and the grading of the aforementioned papers reinforces this despair.
Today, though, had some nice changes to it. Not the test/quiz part. That is pretty much the same. But I returned an "out of the blue" call from a national career college that has a small campus here in Memphis - the message said he had found my resume online, which means it has been floating for months. I didn't know if this was another potential scam (hey, job opportunity - come to our "interview" then pay a bunch of fees and nothing will happen) but it turned out they were looking for an adjunct professor to teach algebra. Too bad the class was on Tues/Thurs from 8-10:30am. He is holding on to my resume, though, in case they expand to a night or weekend session.
Part two of being wanted for my brain was exchanging emails with a contact at Christian Brothers University here in Memphis, to firm up a meeting prior to my conducting the two graduate school entrance exam refreshers. Money is good, and the meeting is a formality, since I come with the guy who has been doing this for a while with them, plus it is only in two weeks. When I mentioned this to my wife, it appears the money has already been spent - she said we would apply it to the Amex bill, which is kind of sucky, since most of that went to replacing her outdated computer. Money I make on the side, in my opinion, should be like "found money" - at my discretion, but I seem to be the only one with that opinion. Back in the glory days, I used to squirrel away leftover lunch money each week, so as to purchase an extremely expensive 10th anniversary ring (and matching earrings) without setting off alarms on the bank account or credit card bills. Now days, I get handed $20 a week if she remembers, to be used for paying for my trivia night tab (which amounts to all of maybe $6 including tip - Diet Coke and onion rings) or comic books, or fast food for me and the daughter. Maybe I should start stashing away some of this money for a good lawyer.
Enough sidetrack ranting - the diabetes study people called me back and want me back in, soonest. I signed up a couple years ago - they were looking for people who had a parent with diabetes (dad has developed Type 2) for a bi-racial cohort. I go in every 3 months or so for various tests. Sometimes it is just a weighing, measuring my waist and stomach at the ribs and a blood draw. Other times it is a glucose tolerance test, a couple of times I have been given IV glucose which is not bad, but you get REALLY hot fast. Least favorite is the insulin tolerance test where they give you insulin to burn out your blood sugar - drawing blood from an IV every 5 minutes. Once 2 hours have elapsed, then you have to gorge to get your blood sugar back up before you can leave. Anyhow, this past visit my blood sugar was high for having been on an overnight fast - too high to account for my recent change in antidepressants (Prozac can mess with blood sugar - rest assured I will go into all sorts of side-effect ranting about that drug soon enough), so they want me in for another test, to make sure I am not developing diabetes, which would suck. In the meantime I am trying to exercise and eating more sensibly. I get a little money from the study when I make it through to the end, plus a little less than $20 each visit for "parking fees," even though the hospital lot is free.
Finally, going to sell a pint of blood to the researchers for $50 - only possible every 8 weeks, though. Personal sacrifice = spending money. Then again, as this Christmas has shown, there isn't much out there I am interested in enough to register to anybody else, let alone spend my own money to obtain.
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