The wall is approaching--but so is the bottom of the pile of papers. I'm still in the office partly to crank through a few more (which I may, in fact, find impossible this evening) but also because a student wanted to come in to see me about her paper before she heads off on vacation. I see no sign of her (she was supposed to be here about half an hour ago), but I have been chipping away at papers in the meanwhile.

The painful part to me right at the moment is how to respond to the students who have made a genuine attempt at revision only to make essentially the same mistakes all over again. I thought I had marked the first versions low enough to give myself somewhere to go in those cases, but that does not necessarily turn out to be the case. In fact, sometimes when I see the grade on the first version, I wonder what kind of happy pills I must have been on. (Of course, it's also possible I'm just crabbier and grading harsher now.) But I want to give them some kind of reinforcement and encouragement for the work they at least tried to do, something that will keep them going.

But that's always the tightrope, as I've mentioned before: simultaneously giving them an honest appraisal of their work and giving them a reason to continue to slog on. I will say that--so far at least--only one student turned in an "unrevised, uncorrected, unacceptable" version, and only one engaged exclusively in editorial corrections rather than revising. The rest have made at least some kind of effort at actual revision. I hope that continues to hold as I grade the T/Th 102 section's papers....

But in terms of their willingness to work, one student e-mailed me earlier to say that he was unhappy with his revision grade and wanted to revise again and get it to me before the break. Although I appreciate his desire to work on, I said no. For one thing, of course, I'm not interested in reading and grading it again. For another, I got the distinct feeling that this particular student didn't take the revision terribly seriously or work on it terribly hard. Having gotten his grade, he now sees the importance of the assignment--but um, no. That particular ship has sailed. I did suggest that he take my comments and try to apply them to his next paper, so he could do a better job on the first version of that one; we'll see how he responds to that advice.

In a situation like this, the result of my refusal to allow another revision could easily go one of several ways: the student could take me at my word and try harder on the second paper; the student could essentially shrug and put no more effort into the second than he did the first--or he could give up completely, either in a huff or in despair. Some students have clearly given up before we ever encounter each other, and for them, I find it very easy to simply wave bye-bye as the ship sails off. However, some students genuinely want to do well, want to learn, are working hard--and those are the ones I want to rescue, even when salvage is clearly beyond anyone's abilities in a mere 16 weeks (or at all, in a few sad cases).

Ah well.

And apparently I just hit the wall. I just sat here, looking off into space, with my brain just making white noise for a few moments. Paul is conferencing with his students this week (and he's wonderful at it: I wish I could have him conference with my students, as I think he does a better job at getting them to an appropriate level of sophistication than I do), and at the moment, I find listening to him much more interesting than reading any more revisions. So, Scarlett speaks again. Tomorrow....