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Long weekend (and not in a good way)
I stayed up 'til 3:30 this morning--being a Friday night, you might think that I must have been all night painting the town red. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. I was up late grading papers. That, in and of itself, isn't so bad. What's bad is that I barely made a dent in the stack that I have to grade. Fifteen essays per class goes awfully slowly, especially early in the year when the students still have lots of things that need fixed in their essays. It all goes back to last weekend: I really have two big weekends-worth of essays to grade but only one weekend to do it.
And I'm going away for the day today, but I should be able to get some work done. Anyway, all work and no play would make John a dull boy. I was talking to one of my colleagues in the English department who had one of the English professors that I had at Kenyon before I was born (wow, that's strange to think of!) and he said that there were rumors then that this professor would stay up all night grading essays, and I can believe it: when I was a student in the mid-90s he was still returning essays the next class period after they were due, even when that next period wasn't over a weekend. It was amazing--not so much with the freshman-level class I had of 20 students, but with the American literature class I had with him my senior year, in which we must have had 40 students, all of whom no doubt wrote 5+ pages on every essay. And he did it in such detail, that was the amazing thing. I try to take inspiration from him, but it's hard when I just want to go to sleep and still have a huge stack. ::sigh::
Okay, I feel like I haven't given you anything today except a stack of complaints. Here's another poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, "Famous." And then, as an interesting complement to that (I think), there's "The Art of Disappearing." In both poems, the final lines are the keys and the most beautiful, but by no means the only beautiful moments.