Happy End of Term!

This (by far the best comic that I have yet seen in the York newspaper--usually they're just terrible) is in honor of my poor history of psychology students who probably felt this way about their final. Tomorrow morning bright and early I'm off to torture...I mean proctor a make-up exam for those who missed a exam at some point in the semester, and from there back downtown to the Toronto bus station to take the Greyhound to Buffalo, and from there I fly to Chicago, and from there to LA, and from there home. Yup, I sure know how to take the direct route home. At least I'm not backtracking all the way to Boston this time!*

The upside to being a grad student is that you don't usually have scary end of semester exams--it's all papers and presentations. But the downside is that you aren't done when you finish your own work, you still have to do grading for the class you TA. So I'm heading home with 84 student papers to grade (or mark, as they call it here in Canada) as well as several unfinished projects of my own. Luckily the papers were electronically submitted, so they only take up space on my laptop, not in my luggage! At least it is an interesting paper topic: students are supposed to choose two women from the Feminist Voices website, one from the Women Past section which covers women from psychology's past and one from the Feminist Presence section, which profiles modern feminist psychologists and then write a fictional conversation between the two women about psychology, their research, their experience of being a woman in academia, or whatever! So it should be fun to see what the students have come up with. Some of the titles I've seen are quite clever (like "Hard Times at Harvard" or "Fierce Spirits Within").

If you have a couple minutes you should check out the profiles on the website. Each woman has photographs and a brief biography on their profile page, and some even have videos associated, like Psyche Cattell* (who not only has a video, but who also has the most awesome picture of her climbing a tree in full Victorian garb). Eleanor Gibson and Milicent Shinn also have profiles on the site, which I wrote. Did I mention that this website is the project of my advisor and that I've been responsible for adding most of the 'Women Past' profiles to the website? No? Ah, this must be one of the things I meant to blog about and didn't. Well, it debuted this summer at several conferences, and in the spring my colleagues will present on how to use the site in the classroom at a couple of psychology conferences. So marking the student papers is actually a meaningful task--I'll be looking to see if they understood the instructions, noting any consistent problems across papers that suggest we ought to modify the assignment in the future. But I had better get back to packing--despite the fact that I'm not carrying any student papers, I'm still having trouble closing my suitcase!

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* True story. It was cheaper. Not recommended.

* If you're marveling about the odds of a psychologist named Psyche you should know that Psyche's father was James McKeen Cattell who was an early psychologist. But he didn't think she ought to be a psychologist--for a bit more of the story, see Psyche's profile!