That’s where I am right now.
I have been on a long daily streak of writing blog posts on my own blog and cross posting to Medium. That streak came to a crashing halt during finals week at Florida State University when I and my colleagues had to drop everything to proctor over 1000 tests for students with disabilities.
Unlike a lot of other universities, FSU has its own testing center at the student disability resource center, where we process and proctor the exams ourselves. Also unlike even the few universities who do have such services, we have a fairly substantial space to do this in. We can seat up to 30 students at a time who are taking paper based exams (that is, not needing computer access), and nine if they need computer access — which is becoming far more common and so the demand for that is growing not quite exponentially but very close to it.
For us to proctor over 200 exams each day over the course of a week requires a lot of effort for everybody involved, from the paper wrangling to the tracking to the proctoring itself. My unit shuts down completely, and I and my staff of part-timers all devote our energies to help with this massive undertaking.
To note: it is a lot more than just proctoring and watching a student take a test to insure that they are not cheating. Since the students are taking their exams outside of their classrooms, we have to organize a huge initiative to get copies of the tests submitted to us by the instructors in a secure method, then printed out as necessary, or passwords collected if they are online tests. Then, when students are done, collecting the tests, scanning them, delivering those scans to the instructors via dropbox, as well as packing up the original and sending it via campus mail to the instructors.
This is a system that has been fine tuned over the course of several decades, and the changes in technology have helped to streamline this a lot. We have a system for instructors to submit tests to “lock box” storage using our case management software, or they can email it if they are so inclined. We finally at least got them to stop faxing exams to us…mostly (there is always one).
This has meant in the past working 12+ hours a day for all staff. That’s changed with changes in federal regulations concerning overtime and salaries, so I only worked my usual 8 hours a day, but yet…it was still exhausting, even for those of us doing simple things, like crowd control or checking students, or scanning tests, because the volume is high and the stress levels are off the charts.
It’s not really a finals week until somebody cries, and I don’t just mean the staff.
To cover overlap, my schedule was changed up a little bit, not by much but enough to throw me off in the morning and get me home in time to eat dinner, walk the dog, and go to bed…before starting all over again. I will vouch for the fact that there are harder jobs in the world than working at the SDRC during finals week, because I’ve done those jobs and I know they are hard.
But this is a change up for me from my usual routine, a routine I’ve settled into now for three years, and every semester during finals week, it rattles me.
I have not edited, I have not written, I have not drawn.
I have gone to work and I have come home and I have gone to work again.
I’m not happy skipping days and like snow days — or, hurricane days, here in Florida — I will make up for them by not tallying them on my scorecard of blog post numbers. To be fair to myself, I cannot think of it as much of a vacation from blogging, I was just too busy and tired to do anything else.
I did chat with friends and I did think about what it means to be “too busy”, what it means to be unable to do the other things in my life that are so incredibly important to me.
I don’t like it.
I’ve got some blog post ideas saved up now, about this very feeling, about goals and about aspirations. Blog posts that will talk about moving forward into 2017, and (yes, really) looking back at 2016.
It’s good to be back.