Fiddling while the students fall apart

I was working on grading the essays for the SF class--and I graded one of the essays for the Nature in Lit.

I despair.

So, I switched to placing my book orders for fall. That felt relatively productive--but I realized two things. One, the book I was so happy to find--Edgar V. Roberts's What Every Student Should Know About Writing About Literature--isn't really helpful at all. I can assign the stuff, and students can diligently regurgitate it, but it does absolutely bugger all in terms of making them understand how to write a literature essay. (I don't know what will make them understand. I'm going to try doing a video for the online students, and I'll go back to doing a talk for the face-to-face classes, but ... well, they just don't get it.)

Two, the anthology I've used for Native American Lit is insanely expensive: $140 new. I understand why--lots of living authors whose work needs to be paid for under copyright laws--but still, given our student population (and the cost of other textbooks), I just don't feel right using a textbook that costs so much. So I'm looking at other less-expensive anthologies--but that means my book order may change, and, more important, well, I have to look at the less-expensive options. Not just glance at the cover, but read them. And, if I use one of them, figure out the readings to assign. In other words, pretty much reinvent the wheel.

I also made the snap decision to teach Ceremony again--even though I'd rather hoped to find something that is newer, and even though it's a plagiarism trap: there is so much out there that students can raid from online, some of them are bound to do it.

(Oh, but that reminds me: the essay from a student in the SF class that put me over the edge tonight was notably awful not only in having no argument and in being rife with word-salad sentences but also in using an online summary of the novel rather than any actual quotations from the literature itself--and putting those bits from the online source in quotation marks but otherwise not citing them. Fuuuucking hell.)

The 101 students--those who actually came to class (all six of them)--were mostly eager to talk about the sources they found and their concerns about writing their essays, but ... I kept them about 40 minutes, then let them go. They didn't have anything else to bring to the class, and I wasn't going to force them to stay and do busy work. Peer review on Wednesday. Conferences Monday. The painful process of grading those final essays next week. Then done.

Oh, god, we're almost done--but I feel like I'm barely going to make it over that finish line. I'm in a bit of the usual end-of-semester panic about all the work I have to do (grading those essays, yes, but also P&B stuff), but I'm even more just hanging on by my fingernails, which are bending backward with the effort.

I am going to move the deadline for revisions of second essays for the lit electives closer to the last day of classes; I want to give them a little more time, since I'm so late getting everything back to them. It will make the last days of the semester a little more harried for me, but I'll be doing the students a favor. I don't quite know what to do about the fact that their essays are so ungodly bad, but that's a worry for another day.

And the system keeps locking me out--when I'm typing in the correct password. So I have to wait until it unfreezes and try again. But not tonight. Tonight, I'm going to fold my tents and steal away. (I like the idea of stealing away, as in taking "away" and not paying for it...)