A little whine with that?

I've managed to do nothing at all the last two days. Thanksgiving I spent with my dear friend Szilvia, laughing and talking and relaxing (ate a little, too), but yesterday and today, I've been holed up at home. I went for a walk yesterday, just to get out of the house for a while, but today was incredibly windy and I didn't feel like wrestling against it, so I've been house-bound. And truly, I've done nothing--except to being getting caught up on sleep, which has been heavenly. I'm hoping that by tomorrow I'll be able to suck it up and get some work done. Or at least vacuum, even if I can't face the stack of student work I should be working through.

I know the students and I are in the same boat; we're just done with this semester. There is still a lot to do (more for them than for me, at this point; I've wound them up and now I just turn them loose to show me their stuff), but I have very little enthusiasm for it. I'm already starting to think about next semester, especially my 102 classes. I'd kind of like to change the readings a little bit, but I don't know if I have the oomph to find replacements that I like; nothing springs to mind, and I don't really want to go digging. But honestly, I don't really want to do anything related to teaching. The next three weeks seem hardly worth the effort--even though this is for all the marbles for the kids.

Part of the problem, of course, is that having just graded the second papers from 101, I see all the same mistakes they made in the first one--this always happens--and I truly wonder why I bother, as nothing I say or do seems to stick at all. I'm sure there are small improvements in some of the papers, and intellectually, at least, I am aware that there is often a lag between when one understands something conceptually and when one can put it into practice (so the students probably have learned more than they can demonstrate in their writing just yet). But I am also painfully aware of that horrible chasm between where they are and where I believe they need to be.

But the other part of the problem is that I wonder if I'm living in some time-warp, and if what I believe should be expected of a student at the next levels is no longer correct. It's been a long time since I was an undergrad, so I know the rules and expectations have changed. Oddly, in some ways, I expect more from my students than was expected of me (I never had to document my sources in any of my English classes, and the one paper where I was expected to footnote and provide a bibliography, I was very much at a loss--and had to teach myself, probably pretty badly. I didn't learn MLA citations until I was in grad school.) But in other ways, I wonder if our society has given up on a particular kind of literacy. I don't know if my vision is skewed because I work in the odd backwater that is a community college (so students and society in general seem worse than they are) or if it's skewed because I am a mastodon, still working under assumptions that have long since died away (so my students and the society I see reflect a reality I do not want to believe in).

This doubt plagues me because I see the lack of literacy--even basic, fundamental stuff that I thought people were supposed to learn in 4th grade--all around me, even in sources where one would expect better. Certainly amongst the hoi-polloi, the kind of word use that I think is vitally important as the mark of a thinking, modestly educated individual, is decidedly not practiced--possibly not even valued. I sometimes get the impression that all but a few of us in the Ivory Tower think "What's the fuss? None of that word shit really matters." So why do I bother?

Um, yes. One can see the despair galloping in. I do what I can to hold the line against the barbarian hordes, but I often get the feeling there aren't many of us in these trenches. The vast majority don't even seem aware that there is a fight going on.

Right. Well, I'm whining. All I can do--as I say to the students--is all I can do. One cannot do more than one's best at the things one finds important. But about this point in semester, it always gets hard to keep up the slog. I can't imagine grading papers for 229 tomorrow will help with this particular malaise, but it needs to be done. And hope springs eternal: maybe a few students will have done a better job on the second paper, having had my feedback on the first to help them along. I'm sure I'll have something to say about that tomorrow.