Paving the road

And we know what paves the proverbial road to hell. I'm not so certain it's the road to hell that I'm on (in fact don't feel that way at all), but the paving material is identical. I shoveled a ton of snow on Friday and then promptly collapsed into a heap, kept saying "I really will feel better if I do even five student assignments" but, well. I foolishly counted on being able to grind madly on Saturday, but woke up at 5:30 a.m. with a monster headache, which I couldn't shake until late in the afternoon, by which time I was zonked. I still got a little work done--including drafting a letter of recommendation for Paul--but when I woke up this morning, I was wondering if I'd have to set the alarm for 5 a.m. tomorrow. Facing that fear, I worked to make up the lost time--and actually did relatively well. Took the train to and from dance class (and yes, I still gave up two hours of assignment-marking time to do the other kind of hustle), and I got quite a bit done on the train. I like this system for my Sundays: I feel less guilty about the dance time because I spend almost as long on the train, working.

The most important things to get done were the draft working theses for 102 and the mini-papers for 265, as in both cases the students need lots of feedback before embarking on their first significant papers. Both sets of students will be shocked--especially 265. As I feared, most of the papers were dreadful. I got too many "I could relate to this poem" papers (aaaaaahhhhhh!!!!) and overall, far too much unsupported blather having nothing in particular to do with the poems. Not to mention all the sentence-level stuff--and these are students who have passed not one but two levels of composition to get where they are. I know I also pass students who are still struggling with sentence-level stuff, because I know it takes a while for the surface knowledge to work its way into the end result. But this is also why I am glad I am grinding away at process process process with my comp students: it's OK to make the mistakes, but students need to learn to catch and correct them in steps between first thoughts and final product. I am more and more unhappy when I get papers that are clearly just what fell out of the student's head in one (shaky and not very well thought through) pass by the ideas.

Well, the 265 students will have heart failure when they get their mini-papers back bloody with red ink: I am going to have to tell them that I won't mark their long papers so extensively, or I will go mad. Theoretically, I don't need to focus on teaching them how to write any more--though of course I can't stop myself from trying. I just have to be a lot less obsessive about that attempt--or how much of it I put into ink.

I also need to try to remember to tell the comp students (101 and 102) that I won't mark their entire papers fully: I'll put one of my little slips in at about the half-way point, saying that I'm going to mark less if at all beyond that point, and then by gum I'm going to mark less if at all beyond that point. I wish I had a system like Paul's. He has standard boiler-plate comments in the computer, so he can essentially Chinese-menu his way into printed comments: one from column A, two from column B.... That way he doesn't have to repeatedly write out the same remark about missing thesis, or transitions, or whatever. (I'm still looking for the best way to say some of those things, so I use different versions with different students as I use up gallons of red ink.) At least I have made myself confine remarks to the relatively small blank portion of my review sheets; that keeps me at least somewhat concise. Somewhat. For me.

The main problem is that I am very much my mother's daughter and am an information junkie (OK, only certain kinds of info, unlike Mom's all-inclusivity, but still). Consequently, I assume that students will want more information, and I forget that they simply get overwhelmed. So I continually try to balance my "need" to over-explain with the genuine need to keep things concrete and clear for the students.

That said, however, I do find value in the shock factor of those bloody first papers. The sea of red certainly gets their attention, which is the point.

But right now, there are two cats trying to get my attention. I'm getting very clear messages that they don't have thumbs and thus cannot open their own cans of food, so dammit, what am I waiting for.