’Tis the season

Friends, family, people at the gym all keep asking how my “vacation” is going—as though I teach kindergarten or something. Well, let me tell you: I had basically divided all the time until next semester between making edits to the criminal procedure textbook that West (indeed, the world) is expecting around March and grading the evidence exams. (Only 106 to go!) But then I got a cheery email message from the law review publishing my next article with “just a few relatively minor questions” that I will get to very, very soon, I promise. So, vacation is awesome, and thanks for asking.

The good news is that I got through the tiny percentage of exams that were handwritten already, so it’s pretty much downhill from now until the new year. Kids these days generally type their exams on computers that have to be locked down with special software so the students don’t Ask Jeeves or each other for the answers. And this year we got the good exam-writing software that runs natively on Macs as well as PCs and has this great secret feature that I learned about last year at DU: You can have all the exams converted into PDFs. Then, you just throw them into your Dropbox folder and, boom, just like magic, you can grade them anywhere, even on your iPhone, though I haven’t yet had to resort to that. I did grade a few the other day on the Fourth Floor Faculty Sundeck® using the laptop, which made the chore much less tiresome. (If you’re reading this from up north somewhere: Yes, it’s still pretty balmy here.) You’d be surprised how much time you can save by grading the exams with full-screen Quick Look rather than flipping through actual pages, particularly when it’s windy out, as it tends to be if you’re on the Bay.