Paper grading begins

OK, I officially am pissed off with students. I canceled 265 this afternoon so I could go home, nap, and then come back to get working on papers for 101 and 102 (about which more later). (And I came back because it's easier to work in the office--plus Paul and I had a date for dinner that I didn't want to miss.) So I left the 265 students a note saying that they should leave their papers in my departmental mailbox. I left specific directions about where the mailbox is (including that it's below my name). I came in, and there was ONE paper in my mailbox. There were five in the box above my name. There were a bunch more in the box on my office door.

Now I ask you, what is so difficult about the instruction? Of course, I know the actual answer, which is they didn't fucking READ it. (One student did. I need to give him a gold star or something.) I came in an immediately ranted to Paul about it--and he said that of course I should go in on Monday and say that I only got one paper and have no idea where the others are. When students panic and tell me where they left their papers, I'll say that those in the box above mine were probably swept up by my colleague, are now in a huge stack of things and won't be uncovered until May--and that the cleaning staff routinely clear papers off the office doors overnight as they're considered a fire hazard, so those got thrown away. And of course, by the time I see them on Monday, it will be long after the 72-hour grace period for submitting papers late, so any papers I don't have will not be accepted and will get zero credit. I should give the students fucking heart failure--and then tell them that I was actually kind and generous enough to hunt down their papers. It's typical of their haphazard and irresponsible approach to, well, just about everything, and I'm not amused.

OK, I'm a little amused, mostly because I'm thinking about how I can wind them up.

More on the "I'm pissed off with students" front, yesterday's 101 was a manifest disaster. I arrived and there were six students in the room, two of whom did not have papers to review with their peers. They told me they didn't know the due date had changed because they missed classes last week. I reminded them that the due date had been postponed: if they didn't know about the new date, they should have had their papers ready last Thursday. I also reminded them that it's their responsibility to find out if anything changed when they miss classes. One of them hasn't turned in a thing all semester and has missed something like five classes. Clearly he's a wash out. The other I may be able to salvage, but it's dicey. Then as the class period continued, six more students showed up--one without a paper at all, one with a hand-written and incomplete draft, all of them anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes late (out of a 75 minute class period). So the peer review process was a mess. And my Indian student (who speaks too fast, too quietly, and with such a heavy accent that I cannot understand him 90 percent of the time--and who is always so busy trying to justify himself that he doesn't hear what I am telling him) had a paper but didn't want to turn it in until after he goes to the Writing Center. I reminded him of the late penalty, but he kept saying he needed to get a good grade on the paper. OK, but he won't get a good grade on the paper because now it will be late....

In any event, it seems I now have to not only specify that it's an absence if they show up without a paper, I also have to specify that they must be there with a paper within the first five minutes of the class period. That way, once I go over the various handouts and the instructions, I will know exactly how to match students up and they can just work without constant interruptions.

From that debacle, I went into my 102, and I told them how frustrated I was about what I'd just been through--and said, "Don't you guys do that to me. Be here, with your papers, right at the beginning of class, OK?" We'll see. Today's 102 was fine: two students were there without papers; four students were not there at all; the rest were ready to roll and did a great job of working with each other. I feel pretty good about how I put the pairs together, too. It will be interesting to see what feedback they gave each other.

Having come back here to get through some papers, despite a fair amount of preliminary noodling, I did in fact get a few marked. I'd be more panic stricken about having them ready for pick-up according to the conference schedule, except that a bunch of the students who would be picking up tomorrow didn't turn in papers at all, so I caught a break--and that's why I feel I can take the time to blog tonight instead of putting my head down and cranking away. Scarlett speaks again, that whole thing about tomorrow....

And despite the nap, I'm still seriously tired. It was a championship nap, too. So, dinner with Paul, home and abbreviated wind-down, and up and at it again in the a.m. As for tomorrow and the weekend, I know what I "should" do. Whether I will? Moot point.