The worst part of my job is grading papers. In a typical semester I have 4 classes of around 30 students each. If I have each class write a couple papers that I have to grade, that's 240. The worst part of grading is not, however, the quantity of work.
I get frustrated, eventually, when I hit a patch of papers written in order to complete an assignment and nothing else. When students think of writing papers as merely something to get done and over with, as a chore, they write pretty lousy papers. I would hope that the act of writing a paper could be something more than a hoop to jump through, but I haven't found a way yet to make that sufficiently clear, or to produce assignments that elicit a more interested response. I fantasize about grading papers that each take a unique and provocative position and make new and vivid sense of the student's ideas and experience.
It's not much to complain about, really, and I'm not really complaining much. It is a problem in my life, one for which I'd love to find a solution.
Compared to what could be happening to me, I don't have much to complain about in general. This realization came to me in full force while watching an episode of Farscape with Lauren last night, and considering that (so far as I know) there's nobody trying to take my planet hostage or destroy it, nobody torturing Lauren to find out where I am, and I don't have to travel into an alternative reality to try to find out where she is from alternative versions of my friends, meanwhile having to watch what might be an alternative version of her get killed by my nemesis,...
It's practically Stoic wisdom: there's nothing on Earth that can happen to you that can't be helped by doctors or lawyers.
I get frustrated, eventually, when I hit a patch of papers written in order to complete an assignment and nothing else. When students think of writing papers as merely something to get done and over with, as a chore, they write pretty lousy papers. I would hope that the act of writing a paper could be something more than a hoop to jump through, but I haven't found a way yet to make that sufficiently clear, or to produce assignments that elicit a more interested response. I fantasize about grading papers that each take a unique and provocative position and make new and vivid sense of the student's ideas and experience.
It's not much to complain about, really, and I'm not really complaining much. It is a problem in my life, one for which I'd love to find a solution.
Compared to what could be happening to me, I don't have much to complain about in general. This realization came to me in full force while watching an episode of Farscape with Lauren last night, and considering that (so far as I know) there's nobody trying to take my planet hostage or destroy it, nobody torturing Lauren to find out where I am, and I don't have to travel into an alternative reality to try to find out where she is from alternative versions of my friends, meanwhile having to watch what might be an alternative version of her get killed by my nemesis,...
It's practically Stoic wisdom: there's nothing on Earth that can happen to you that can't be helped by doctors or lawyers.
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