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Monthly Archive for April, 2008
Tomorrow is the last day of classes, and it can’t come soon enough. Over at Not of General Interest today, there’s a post of “End-of-semester Certainties,” one of which is the fact (FACT!) that students will choose this time of the year to contact you, desperate for some chance to make up for all the things they haven’t done before, such as, oh, I don’t know, attending class, reading, or completing assignments. That sort of thing.
I feel in some ways sad and sorry for the little whippersnappers who are now facing the fact that they might lose their scholarships or sorority/fraternity standing — and believe me, according to them, it’s always some desperate case like that, where if they get a C instead of a B they will force their blind, crippled grandmother to take on two jobs to pay the tuition, or they will dishonor the spirit of all of their dead Tri Delt ancestors. Most of the time, though, I feel merely satisfied (almost gleeful!) at the thought of the worst chowderheads finally getting their comeuppance. Sleep through class the four times you actually attended? Turn in every single paper late? Skip for no reason on the day of your presentation? Comeuppance. COMEUPPANCE, I TELL YOU.
Another End-of-semester certainty I can add to the list is that no matter how hard you try to work ahead with grading, thinking you might take it easy during finals week and dead week, you will still always be sucked into a growing pile of crap so large as to have its own gravitational pull. There will be the usual late papers and other leftover detritus, for sure, as well as the general paperwork that is often forgotten but should at least be predictable. Then, just to make things interesting, there will be the entirely unexpected Other Tasks: in my case I have to write two abstracts for proposals for two different conferences, both due on the day before finals start. Of course, this bit of life is optional, but one conference is the big one for my discipline and the other is the big one for my area of study, so it would be nothing short of retarded if I did not get myself on both schedules.
In other news, I also have some (hopefully) (more) thoughtful things to say about the books I have been reading lately, but I suppose that will have to wait until the academic hurricane dies down a bit.
10:45 I stop at the vending machine to buy a juice on my way to office hours, and watch through the clear glass front of the machine as the dispensing arm fails to collect my beverage, delivering nothing but air for my $1.50.
10:48 I buy the same juice from the cooler in front of the coffee shop instead. It costs $2.69 and it is warm.
12:00 I buy a bottle of Diet Coke from the machine downstairs, still grumpy that I have to pay $1.25 for 20 ounces of Diet Coke in a plastic bottle (too much Coke and too fizzy) when I used to be able to pay only $0.75 for 12 ounces in a can (perfect amount of beverage, perfect amount of fizz). When the bottle is dispensed, it is squashed and leaking and the soda is completely flat.
1:00 I buy a bottle of Diet Coke from the cooler in the bookstore instead. It is perfectly room temperature.
Help me; I am so fucking thirsty.
It pleases me to report that I have been very good and honorable and dutiful today, spending most of the lovely daylight hours at the office grading my freshmen’s papers. What joy, I tell you.
I don’t have any too-terrible debacles to report just yet, but allow me to tell you what ridiculously petty thing is currently annoying me: the unrepentant chowderheads refuse to learn even the most basic MLA formatting. They just flatly refuse.
When they are writing the title of a film or book, they must either italicize or underline it. That’s all. Just either italicize it, or fucking underline it. Pick one and do it. Not hard, see? Well, the reason why you or I might think that it isn’t hard it because you and I, reader, are both functionally literate humans with the power to reason and to remember instructions for longer than half a second.
Next week they turn in their major research paper, and during the draft reviews before the due date I plan on telling them again - for what must surely be the tenth fucking time! - about the title formatting issue, and then, if they get it wrong again, I shall beat them senseless with a baseball bat and feast upon their raw, bloody corpses. What, too harsh?
In happier news, I had a very pleasant and relaxing weekend, before the grading all started, anyway. I spent much of Saturday lounging about and watching We (the cable network for ladies!) and then went out and saw a bunch of local bands. If it’s music you’d like to hear about, though, check here.
So how was your weekend? Are you ready to face work tomorrow, or do you think you’ll need to bring a bludgeoning implement, too?
Allow me, again, to indulge my weakness for Vladimir Nabokov. In this passage, he perfectly describes that type of girl. You know the one:
Books mean nothing to a woman of her kind; her own life seems to her to contain the thrills of a hundred novels. Had she been condemned to spend a whole day shut up in a library, she would have been found dead about noon. I am quite sure that Sebastian [a novelist] never alluded to his work in her presence: it would have been like discussing sundials with a bat. So let us leave that bat to quiver and wheel in the deepening dusk: the clumsy mimic of a swallow.
How much do I love that last sentence! But now, back to the books.
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