That's how many students showed up for this afternoon's 102 class. One student was there at the start of class but had to print her paper. I sent her off to do that: she came back about 25 minutes later. One appeared at the beginning of class and then left. I have no idea why. He gave me a pleasant hello and disappeared, never returned. I thought he'd just gone to the bathroom, but if he did, he literally went down the drain. Of the six who ultimately were there to engage in the peer review process, one had only a rough hand-written draft, two spent most of the time working on their individual works cited pages instead of reviewing each other's papers. One pair did great work--and seemed to click well as partners, too. I joined in with them briefly: fun to participate in their evaluations of each other's writing.
When I got back to the office, one more paper from a student in that class was waiting on the office door, and I got an e-mail from another student who was too sick to make it to class (I believe him: he's a good student, and he was following my rules by not simply sending the paper via e-mail without asking first). So out of the 18 student who ostensibly are still attending the class, I got a sum total of six papers with the promise of two more.
I'm fretting about one student in that class. She did a terrible job on her first paper, and her grades have been horrific--but in class she'd finally seemed like she was getting the hang of reading and analyzing, certainly she'd started participating, which she'd not done earlier in the semester. She seemed geared up to write this new paper--but then she got back her revision of the first one, and she was conspicuously absent today. I fear that her grade on the revision was so low that she gave up in despair. I just redid the "early warning" notices and told her not to give up, but I may also send her an e-mail. I don't know why I want so badly to try to rescue her. Her work truly has been awful, not anywhere near college level yet. But she was trying; she was moving up; she was honestly getting somewhere good, and I don't want her to lose that.
Hell and damn and blast. I am now telling myself I shouldn't have given her paper all the awful penalties (which reduced it to a 25 out of 100: I could simply have given her the F, which would average at 59--not quite as painful), or that I should have found a way to talk to her first, or given her the paper back earlier, or later, or something....
She may be one of the ones who haunts me. I'm still haunted by a student from years ago--five or six years ago--who thought he didn't have to turn in his final proposal until the "drop dead" deadline: he had been a good student all semester long, but I told him his only option was to withdraw, as he'd not complied with the submission requirements for the paper. I still wish I'd handled that differently. There are others who haunt me like that, but the common theme is that they had potential, and I feel like I didn't honor it sufficiently. There are students I remember for other reasons, positive and negative, but the ones who haunt me are the ones to whom I think I did a disservice.
Let this be a reminder to you, Prof. P, that what you do for a living actually matters to you. (She says to herself, as a stern counter to all the heavy sighing and kvetching she indulges in.)
Right at this juncture, however, I'm still cooking along with a certain amount of energy, miraculously enough, so I'll organize the chaotic piles of paper on my desk, hoping to prevent the loss of anything crucial, and then--assuming I still have some mental acumen, I'll get through a little more of the pile of assignments from 229, getting my feet clear to face the 102 papers. ... Funny, I wrote that, and immediately felt pole-axed by exhaustion. But of course I'm looking forward to grading those papers as if each one were the perfect intellectual bon-bon of delight.
By the way, if y'all don't know Taylor Mali, he's terrific. Here are links to two YouTube videos. The first is humorous, the second fierce in all the best ways.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OonDPGwAyfQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpog1_NFd2Q
Hope you enjoy.
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