Today, before midnight, I must grade 72 essays. The University gives us less than 48 hours from the exam to post final tallied grades. If you give a final on Tuesday at 7pm, you have until midnight Wednesday to grade, note, and do all the math. This is slightly difficult if you have an early morning Tuesday exam, but some of us get screwed with the late-night exam slots. 72 essays. 27 hours. I've been grading since 6 this morning and I'm already exhausted. My brain is doing a little bit of desperate hallucinating.
Let's count my misery though: this is just one job. Another teaching job has 78 pieces of homework/exams to be graded, today before 5pm. Some of these are forum posts, easy enough, others are terribly written papers, and 16 of them are pretty big end-of-term projects that require extensive review and commentary before next week's presentations.
In one class, I had a student post in the forum about how difficult it is to study about the "greatest men in history" because he is currently one of the most persecuted groups in American society: Christian. Conservative. White. Male. Middle Class. No one is there to help him, you see, no one is there with a handout. He is so isolated.
I want soooo bad to smack this kid down. But a colleague of mine had him last term. When a similar conversation arose, the kid actually slapped the University with a law suit about discrimination. The University leaned on the teacher to give this student a little bit of leeway for his "persecution" and the kid won out even though such a suit would never had stood up in the courts.
I refuse to get caught up in such bull shit.
So I am dancing around it, rather successfully, by deflecting, always deflecting. But in the end I feel like a miserable failure because I cannot use this as a teaching moment. Which makes me wonder why I am even here?? Replace me with a robot for the same effect.
Robot voice: Good job / you are great / your snowflake-ness is perfection to behold. A+
Sorry, kid, you are not more persecuted than the Jews in WW2. Or Stalin's Siberian camps. Or Mao's anyone. (all of which we were just discussing when he wrote this post) And for saying that you ARE, when you are a member of the most privileged group living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, you deserve to be punched in the face until your nose breaks and blood flows from your stupid mouth.
Ok, not really. Hyperbole. But come ON.
And then there is the kid who badgered me all weekend long, for about 4 days, about meeting him the day before yesterday's exam. He insisted that it had to be in person, that email would not work, that he had to discuss reviewing and exam prep. I was hesitant because my days were FULL. I had to cover for another prof after her mother died suddenly on Saturday. I agreed to take over her Monday exams. This was not an acceptable reason for being unable to meet with Dumbass Darling who had been emailing me. He insisted that we meet. So I stupidly gave in. We had an appointment at 7:30 at night. I canceled dinner with friends to be there. I rushed from the colleague's exam and paid to park in the expensive parking lot to get to the meeting on time.
Guess who failed to show up.
Guess who emailed me 18 minutes later from the hospital. Which is sad, I admit. But in his email, he confessed that he had been in the hospital for 5 days and had failed to mention it in any of the dozen emails he had sent me. So he KNEW he might not be able to make it. But he didn't send the email until after we were to meet. Could have made things easier emailing me 18 minutes before, or even 10 minutes before. But instead he fucked me over while giving me shit all weekend. And cost me a bit of cash and some much needed R&R.
Look, I hope this guy gets better. It sucks to be ill and I've spent a lot of time in hospitals so I know it's crap. But don't email someone from a hospital over and over and over even when you KNOW that there's a chance you might not be able to make this meeting.
Siiiigh. But hey. A few more exams, and that term is over. Sometime around 9 tonight, when all my grading is finally done and out the door, I'm getting fucking hammered. I don't care that I have to teach at a different Uni tomorrow morning at 10am. I'm getting wasted tonight and it will be glorious.
Care to join me?
Well, first off, some of these problems are your own fault. In the future, don;t make as much shit due at once! It's a hard lesson to learn, I know...
ReplyDeleteOne term, I taught at one of those must-submit-grades-in-48-hours places. Except, like you, I didn't actually get 48 hours. So I gave a lame final. There, I confess! It inflated a lot of grades, but, you know what, it really only bumped their grades by a +/-. I could live with that. I still got grade complaints though. There's always complaints from snowlfakes!
Also, keep in mind a rough grade on final essays will often do the trick grade-wise. Hopefully, 75%+ of their grade is already established, so you not writing comments won't kill them. Simply don't hand them back till after the term's over.
The 2 students though? Can't fix stupid. Sometimes I think a good punch in the face would help them. Or maybe one of those melodramatic soap opera bitchslaps. Yeah, that would be satisfying. Oh, and find a way to make No-Show pay for wasting your time. Lowered participation grade, strict attendance, etc. Irresponsibility and obnoxiousness should be punished, not simply not rewarded.
My problem isn't creating the deadlines, which are created by administrators. My problem is having too many jobs at once. Any one of these would be fine. Even two would be manageable. All four and it gets sucky.
DeleteBut you know: money. Student loans. Fear that nothing will come next semester. So I say yes to everything.
Your last paragraph was satisfying to read.
snowlfakes
DeleteTypo for the win. I really do like this one; it resonates. Especially as a term for the one with delusions of persecution.
I still have a month to go and I'm totally joining you!
ReplyDeleteWhat's wrong with students? Seriously? What is wrong with them?
Agreed,
ReplyDeleteon the other hand, try uttering something about God's grace when you make it to class after almost getting bludgeoned to death by a runaway two by four while you are biking up the highway.
How fast can that cause YOU to be put in the bread-line (which IS a form of persecution in my humble opinion).
But don't get me wrong, that kid has some issues to deal with and it sounds like he's had things handed to him on a silver platter for far too long.
Use Stella's rubric. Grading flies.
ReplyDeleteThe 48-hours rule never made sense to me, either (officially, we have it; unofficially, we have until 48 hours after the *last* exam is given, which helps. a lot.). There may be some forms of exams for which it makes sense, but it definitely makes no sense at all for final papers. The only solution I've found is the one The_Myth mentions: set deadlines earlier. But that doesn't work, of course, if you can't control deadlines, or have to fit grading/commenting on and returning a certain number of graded writing projects into a certain too-short period of time.
ReplyDeleteAs for Mr. Persecuted? Well, you're not going to change his mind; in fact, if you disagree, you'll just feed his sense of victimhood. But is there any way you can give him, say, a B, rather than an A+. If not, don't sweat it; it's not your fault that you have neither the time nor the academic freedom to insist that he actually think, support his arguments, etc.
Some sort of R&R is definitely on the horizon for me, too, but I fear it won't come until *after* I've turned in grades *and* started a summer term class. But boy do I need it. Hope you enjoy your own blow-out, and I'm sorry you missed dinner yesterday. We do, indeed, need such breaks.
48 hours is probably an out-of-thin-air deadline that was established just to make sure there is a deadline of some sort. Seniors where diplomas need to be printed/shredded would be one such example where taking 2 weeks to do final grades wouldn't be acceptable. Or Spring semester classes where a student might need to know their final grade to determine whether they need to take a summer class, which start the Monday after finals week ends.
DeleteThe graduation issue is tricky. My own college class hung around for a week or so between finals and graduation, getting into various sorts of fun and trouble, then received actual diplomas at graduation. I believe that my own institution mails diplomas, since there simply isn't time to verify graduation before the ceremony (and, yes, before the first summer term starts). A lot of the summer classes, especially those scheduled for the first term, are already full up by finals period. I try to fill in the obvious failing grades (mostly MIAs) at the very beginning of the final-grading period, but realistically, even those students (as opposed to those who withdrew during the term) might have to wait until fall.
DeleteOne of my institutions starts graduation on the last day of class -- before most students have taken any final exams. The possibility of flunking hangs in the air even though they already walked.
DeleteI routinely violate the 48 hour grading deadlines at the universities where I teach, and no one has ever said a word to me. What are they going to do? Not let me submit grades? I also can't imagine not getting my contract renewed because of missing the deadline. Hell, I can't imagine that there's any actual person who would even notice.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I suppose this may just be the places where I teach. Have any of you ever not finished in time and been punished somehow?
I was going to chime in with this as well. Do you really think there's some lackey out there enforcing the 48-hour rule? I have routinely violated it (although not egregiously) and no one has seemed to notice.
Delete48 hours is insane: I've never heard of it. I can't honestly remember what the deadlines were for institutions where I've previously taught, but I think they were around seven to eight days from the final exam. Where I am now it's ten, or eight after the last day of exams. I just can't see the need for such a short deadline other than viciousness on the part of the administration. If you have any type of a faculty organization, maybe it could survey comparable institutions and show the results to your admin. Otherwise, surely there's an exemption for illness, so just pull a snowflake and get a doctor's note....
ReplyDeleteWhy are you stressing so? Your students will probably not return to pick up their papers. Just do a quick skim and put a grade on it. If a student indeed comes back to get his/her paper, pull it out and do a more thorough analysis before giving it to him/her. But most likely no student will come back.
ReplyDelete