Whew

[khaosworks]

Thank God the week's over.

It's been a rough week. 10-page think trying to pull together a month of readings into some coherence, two classes with a combined reading list of about 200 pages on the same day as the paper is due, and 70 freshman history exams to grade.

Pulled an all-nighter and whipped out the 10-pager, skimmed over the readings as best I could, attended both classes but drifted in and out of sleep and kept very quiet in the second, and managed to defer handing in what's left of the exam pile to Tuesday. But considering the grades, the freshmen should thank me for not spoiling their weekend.

I came back from class today and collapsed for seven hours straight. I haven't even been keeping up with the news or watched TV all week. Although I took time out to gloat over Bush's falling polls post-Iraq. I'm a proto-historian. I can't help but grin at repeating history.

And now I'm watching the American version of "Coupling".

Will the suffering never end?

Comments

[playingpossum.livejournal.com]

are you allowed to be really nasty when you're grading papers? :>

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Allowed? Probably. But I'm really cutting them a lot of slack.

[tronchin.livejournal.com]

The first time I graded as a TA, I came in with my pile of papers and the first thing the professor made me do was mark up all the grades.

I thought I was generous *before* I marked them up. But he made two good points: 1) Cs (or lower) on the first exam tend to cause students to lose hope and simply give up; 2) maybe if they all performed equally poorly, then that's perhaps they best they can do (and it may be *your* fault that that's the best they can do), so perhaps you shouldn't be too hard on them.

The first I took his word for, since I don't have enough experience to know. As for the second--maybe. But I did have a few excellent exams, so it seemed like everyone had the potential to perform better than they did.

One thing's for sure, grading isn't a science, it's an art.

welcome to grad school!

[yong-mi.livejournal.com]

I did catch a few minutes of 'Coupling' while plugged in directly to the suite's router because I kept losing the wireless connection in my room and I wanted to do a full-scale test run of my summer job that refuses to go away - the host of errors have mysteriously disappeared now that I have transferred development to the iBook from the Windows NT box at work. Argh. Time to document.

Oh yeah - I think I'm in library school?

Do you have a license yet?

[tbons.livejournal.com]

I ask this because Reo will be at the Anime Convention this weekend, and he is staying with us. If you can make it out for lunch on Sunday, we'd be happy to have you.

Re: Do you have a license yet?

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Sadly, no license yet. Been too busy to even practice.