Two days of no work

I have been doing stuff, of course--life maintenance, mostly, and I read placement essays today, but I have spent two whole days not doing anything pertaining to my classes or committee work or my promo folder (apart from going to Staples to get dividers that can be seen beyond the edges of the plastic sleeves enclosing all the stuff in the application). It has felt right to ignore everything for a while--this has been the theme of recent posts (except the ones about plagiarism, of course). I am aware that I will feel better on many levels if I get all that stupid homework marked and back to the students. And I will feel better if I do some busy-work that will ease things at the end of semester. For instance, I put together detailed grade sheets, showing every assignment with a numeric value, and demonstrating the math I use to weight categories as stated by my syllabus. I used to get final papers graded before the last day of each class, fill out those sheets, and on the last day, give the students their grade sheets and marked papers. My logic was, if there were going to be any complaints, I'd know about them right then and could handle them one way or another on the spot, instead of having them trickle in via e-mail over the winter break (which annoys the bejabbers out of me).

My new logic is, A) the vast majority of the students don't give a rat's petite patoot about the marks on their final papers: they just want to know their grades and 2) why should I knock myself out over a detailing of the procedures when those rat patoots are going ungiven. But it does help me quantify the unquantifiable when it comes to figuring final grades. I will fudge grades sometimes--or, as a student wrote in her placement essay today, I'll "fangle" them (I think she meant "finagle")--if the math and my genuine evaluation don't match, but there's only so far I can go with that. (Which is why the extra credit thing I tried this semester is a bad idea that must be either adjusted significantly or deep-sixed.) Usually I enjoy organizational futzing around, but I haven't got it in me to do even that--at least not today.

My emotional state also has not been entirely conducive to looking at student work: I don't want to be unnecessarily harsh--or too distracted to evaluate at all--and at the moment, those are likely to be the options if I try to handle even dopey homework detritus. So, I'm going to lapse into my sea-cucumber impersonation for the evening and re-evaluate my level of preparedness and discipline (self and otherwise) on the morrow.