Don't Grade Angry, DON'T GRADE ANGRY!!

I've had to remind myself of Dr. Rogers' advice a number of times over the past few days. And it's not my screaming kids, my psychotic cat, or the piles of laundry I've neglected while grading these essays. It's the fact that the problems I'm finding are the same problems I've been marking over and over again on their reading responses.

I echo Cheyney's sentiment: "Introduce the #@$@#& quotes!!!!" (maybe my outbursts are a little more profane than Cheyney's). But, yes, we've discussed it repeatedly in class, I've written encouraging but insistent notes in the margins of their responses, and we covered it in workshopping. And the drive-by quotings still pepper the papers.

The other problem that is driving me insane and also making it difficult for me to grade is that many of them simply didn't do the assignment the way it was assigned. They're evaluating the essays, writing personal narratives on marriage, giving opinions on Bartels' wife--just not doing what I asked them to do. If it looks like they're actually *trying* to show where one essay is incomplete and how the other fills in the gaps, I'm more likely to go easy on them, but in some of the essays, it looks like they just threw their hands in the air and said, "This assignment sucks, so I'm gonna do whatever I want."

Then, of course, I have the three that are three pages, in 18 point Helvetica, and are nearly incomprehensible. I think I'm going to go ahead and ask them to rewrite. Two of them are students who really try hard, are in class *most* of the time, and really care about their grades, so I'm pretty sure they'll do a rewrite. As for the third, welll...we'll see.