"I've been eating for 18 years, and I feel fine; why should I care?"

That was a student's response to the entire agriculture-environment-health topic. I tried to suggest to the kid that it might be nice if he thought about someone other than himself. "I care about my little brother." Or your immediate family. And--to avoid the impulse to just say "get the fuck out of my classroom, you little shit"--instead I suggested that his group mates might talk to him about reasons why he should care. I only realized when I started to write this blog post that the more effective response might have been, "Why should you care? Because you have to write an essay about it, and if you can't come up with something to actually say, you're going to flunk."

I'll breathe in just a moment in order to regain a little patience and compassion, but before I do, let me just state that the "I only care about me" attitude infuriates me. We see it all over the damned place, and it's a significant contributor to everything--and I do mean everything--that's wrong with the world right now.

And--regaining some equilibrium--I think of yet a better response. "Why should you care? I don't know; why should you?" If the kid can't come up with a reason why he should care, the response would then be, "OK, so you don't have any reason to care. Nothing for us to talk about then, is there. See you next class."

As a rule--and as a member of P&B--I don't think I'd consider it good pedagogy to spend the last seven weeks of the semester saying, "If you want to learn anything, please feel free to stay. If you don't, see you next class." But for the last seven weeks of this semester for myself, it may well be the way I can get through it. No essay? OK, that's a zero. Let's move on. No homework? OK, that's a zero. Let's move on. Nothing to contribute? OK, see you next class.

I always said I wanted to retire before I became either completely jaded or overtly hostile to the students--and somehow I'm managing to hit both of those bases at once. Not good for me, not good for the students. Time to go.

On a much happier note, however, I did have some great conferences with students today--including what turned into more of a mentoring session with a student who submitted her essay too late for me to give it a grade or provide any comments, and a very pleasant and wide ranging chat with the Mom of the mother-daughter duo. I want to give her a different identity, though, not just as someone's mother but as a student herself--and she is like a whole string of firecrackers going off, hyper and filled with ideas and quick-fire associations. Paul said he'd find her exhausting. I have a family filled with people with ADHD and ADD, so I'm pretty used to it. And she is interesting, if a bit hard to follow. I also got to praise a student whose immediate affect is that of an earnest lunkhead--but he's actually quite bright and he picked up on a key detail in the poems he was writing about that no one else saw. It was fun to be able to enthusiastically praise him and his work.

And one student is capable of being a real star in the class. He's very quiet (and absent a lot; I think he may have health problems), but his essays are truly first rate. My work with him is getting him to be more focused on just close reading, not making the larger step into socio-historical significance. On a sentence level, I can't find a thing to suggest. Seriously. I'd love it if some of my colleagues could write as well.

So, that was today. I might put in a few more minutes on stuff here; I'm meeting a friend in the city this evening, and I don't have to get a train immediately, so I can noodle around here for a while longer. It would be nice to chip a few little bits off the triage list. And this weekend, I am somehow going to have to find time to grind through the revised essays for the 101s--around seeing my kid sister and going to a talk she's giving and doing general life maintenance. Somehow it will all get done, and I'm trying not to exhaust myself by thinking too far into the future (like knowing that next weekend is also going to be a huge grind, as I'll have first versions of essay 2 from the 101 students--and first versions take a lot more time). But let me now express gratitude to the cosmos. I was not at all happy about taking a 102, initially, but now I am overwhelmed with relief, not only because it's turning out to be a pretty great class but also because their essays are on a different schedule. If I were grading three sections of 101 all at the same time? Well, let's not even go there. The cosmos saved me once again, giving me what was right for me instead of what I thought I wanted. Thanks and praise.