OK, admission--I still haven't finished grading all the papers. They never end. As I was picking up the reading responses today I began to get a bit depressed. Do I actually have to grade these, too? Thomas saw the look on my face and said, "Boy! We sure do a lot of writing in this class!" Yes, we do.
Even though I'm not finished (and probably won't be until week 16) I've learned a few things. First, grading is never ending, and if I want to survive this experience to teach another semester I'm going to have to speed things up. I know I can't change the world, and they're probably not reading the novels I'm writing in the margins, but it's hard not to try. Sigh. Maybe I should photocopy all my comments and self-publish. Throw in a sparkly vampire or two. Reveal at the end it's all a dream, and I'm still working in the WC.
OK, maybe not.
Grading makes me feel like a failure, because I see all the things that I've not explained thoroughly enough pop up in the writing. Then again, all the things I've explained to death pop up in the writing. Do I really matter? Reading these papers makes me feel old--I want to sit down with my students and rip apart some platitudes. I start to question things I thought I knew about writing. Can I even write a complete sentence anymore? Oh, and I try not to play favorites, but that certainly is an issue. I know who is working hard and who started their essay on Sunday night at 11:53. Thank heaven for those few that answered the assignment...
Speaking of which--I hated writing it. I was ready to start protesting alongside Taylor (my complainer). I found myself writing sentences that belonged in their papers. It was like a warped case of plagiarism; I was writing the sentences but they seemed oh-so-familiar. I really don't know if I made any sort of sense at all. I wrote a couple of lovely summaries--that much I know. I should have just written a large PV at the top of the paper to alert Dr. Rogers that I chose to write in passive voice. Here's hoping he doesn't grade angry.
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