Attack of the "Shoulds"

I should stay here until 7, just to get into the habit of my evening office hours, even though we're not officially obligated to hold such hours until they are posted (which they are not, yet).

I should mark more student reading journals tonight so I don't start out with a backlog.

If I'm not going to mark more journals, I should do something else that's productive.

I'm not going to. I've had a few too many nights in a row of not enough sleep, and it's only Monday, and I already feel steamrollered, verging on a monster headache. I need to get a good night (or two, or three) of sufficient, deep sleep, and then I'll be swinging along just fine.

But before I flee for home and a horizontal position on the sofa, I want to do my usual end-of-day decompress and reframe.

As I'm marking journals, I find it is harder for me to give them letter grades than to give the check/check-plus/check-minus kind of mark. Numerically it comes out to the same thing, but just as students feel the weight of actual letter grades, so do I. Interesting that I hadn't considered my own reaction to that shift in procedure; interesting that I'm feeling such resistance to the whole idea.

I also find that I'm facing my usual push-me-pull-you waffling of whether to be bluntly honest about the work, or to be gentle at first and let the gloves come off later. Since the students have a couple of "extra" assignments (complicated math: don't ask), I'm inclined to be pretty brutal right up front. I may lose students over it, but I'd rather they get a clear indication, right away, what's really going to be required. I'm not going to let them inch their way into the water; I'm flinging them off the dock.

I also realize that my explanations, aloud and in writing, of what I'm looking for in terms of journals are pretty much equivalent to "blah blah blah, Ginger." (If you don't know Gary Larsen cartoons, never mind.) It seems they have to do a couple of journals and get slammed with the grades before they realize I wasn't kidding: they're going to have to change--and work hard.

Then there's the deep, visceral fury I feel when I see how many of them have been persuaded that meaningless responses are perfectly intelligent and desirable. I'm talking about responses like this one: "This paragraph is very descriptive, and paints a vivid picture of what was taking place." That's an actual quotation from a journal I just marked. I want to scream: What is being described, exactly? Why does the amount of description, the vividness of the "picture" matter? What was taking place--and how does the description affect our understanding of what was taking place? How does what was taking place affect our understanding of the story as a whole?

I could go on, but what drives me wild is that students legitimately believe that this kind of response contains some sort of analysis or insight. And they believe that it does, despite it's obvious lack of content, because for thirteen years, they've been taught to think like that--or rather, that such responses constitute thinking. Au contraire. When I read a response of this kind, it's as if someone pressed my "launch" button, and it's all I can do not to utterly go ballistic. I have no patience with it, however, and have gotten to the point where I say, "This is essentially meaningless." Then I ask a bunch of questions, like those above. And hope that the student doesn't cling like a limpet to that comfortable, familiar lack of meaning and substance.

Grrrrrrrr.

But having to evaluate that kind of response leads me to realize I hate giving grades. I simply absolutely loathe having to put a definitive mark on anything. I want to comment, and I am perfectly willing to say "This is crap" or "There's something going on here you can salvage" or "This has real potential to be good"--and even sometimes "This is very good." But I hate having to quantify, to nail it down with a letter or number or mark. Man, I just effing HATE grades.

Ah well.

Shifting gears abruptly, I had my first orientation session in the Advisement Center. The head of Advisement had gotten my hours confused (and tried very hard to believe that I'd made the mistake, until he went back to the e-mails I'd sent and saw that, no, I was right--which at least he had the good grace to admit), so I ended up getting a private preliminary orientation. But I've worked in Advisement before (under an old contract, when we all were required to do it one semester every few years on top of our regular course loads). Some things have changed, but I was involved in the changes as they happened, so I'm pretty up to speed. I spent a good deal of my time there today watching one of the professionals help students with a variety of problems: impressive. And there was a brief interaction with an intensely snotty, angry, rude bitch of a student--who wants to get into our nursing program. In another life, I'd have taken her outside, essentially pinned her against a wall and told her in no uncertain terms to lose the fucking 'tude and I mean right fucking now or lose her head. The new improved (at least in this nanosecond) me just thought, something in her life is making her feel that the only way she can get what she wants is to be viciously toxic and nasty, and with any luck at all, eventually her approach will become manifestly counter-productive--and give her one hell of a huge bite in the ass.

Breathe in, breathe out, move on.

Enh. Whatever. I'm out of gas for tonight, so I'll head back in bright and early tomorrow and see what I can make of the new day.