Stuck under a pile of papers again. And so the post-Thanksgiving two-week headlong rush to the end of the semester begins.
Grading Again
Preterition
pareto optimality for scholarly marginality
pareto optimality for scholarly marginality
Stuck under a pile of papers again. And so the post-Thanksgiving two-week headlong rush to the end of the semester begins.
Comments are closed.
oh yeah.
I wrote almost the same line, but said two and a half weeks. I may have more papers than you though (total of 72 students in 3 sections).
Don’t know if you ever studied or worked on the old semester system, which ended in mid to late January. Seemed in high school and college, every Christmas holiday had a term paper. I’ll take this crunch over that one.
I notice that as the blog entries slow down, the ferocity of my checking blogs (Cindy, yours and John’s as well as here and elsewhere) increases–all for the same reason. Avoiding grading, anyone?
Avoiding grading? Us? 😉
I’m not avoiding right now. I’m decompressing. I did a shitload of them today.
John, I started with 96 students this semester. I’ve lost some, so I’m probably down to around 85. But this is an unusually heavy one for me. Next semester I’ll only have 66.
My class loading this quarter was 75 (30, 25 and 20), but the 20 comes with an Honors section. Because of the budget crisis, I accepted some extras in the Basic Writing course. Next quarter I’ll have 30 and 20 in comp, and probably close to 40 in Intro to Poetry. Then in Spring, I’ll have 20 in comp and 40-50 in Intro to Linguistics. So my 8 courses for the year would enroll about 220 students, though two sections are not composition (I still require a fair amount of writing–no multiple choice exams or quizzes). That’s a low end load in California. De Anza has typically been in the top ten campuses statewide for workload. We have campuses where faculty have 5 courses a semester, 10 total, with close to 300 students a year.
We need a national study of workloads in community colleges, especially in composition. Haven’t been able to get any group interested in that yet.
And Mike must REALLY be lying low.
Not so much lying low as just really, really tired. It felt good to blog a couple entries last night — decompressing, indeed, Cindy — after all those student papers. Gave the stacks of papers back; got a fresh batch in today.
Cindy, you and John both have more students than I have in my paltry two sections of comp. I think I’ve observed before that grading (or perhaps teaching work in general) seems like the equivalent of a gas, in that it expands to fill the available time.
And, of course, as Chris observes, the more difficult things get, the more one feels a need for distraction, a need for community.
Oh, man. There is definitely a Boyle’s (Charles’?) law of paper grading out there to be articulated. I’m as exhausted teaching just two late-start classes this term as I’ve been teaching four regular sections in other terms.