I Stayed Late Tonight

I didn't leave campus till after 8--I absolutely wanted to finish grading the first class' design exercise, and I did finish that. I have great plans for staying late tomorrow and Wednesday, and getting them all graded so I can give them back on Monday. Then I'll only have their damn memos and audience exercises to grade, and I'll be all caught up...

Of course, I realize how ridiculous that sounds... I mean, these damn things have been waiting for weeks for me to grade. They sit in condemning piles around my house, filling me with loathing. If I could just grade the papers when they came in, it wouldn't be such an ordeal. But my behavior never seems to change.

I wish I could teach, but not grade. I suspect all teachers feel this way. But I know there are conscientious, ethical teachers who really do their jobs, read and return papers in a timely manner, and don't hate every single day they're in the classroom. I don't know how they do it. I really admire them. I can't seem to manage it.

Oh, this is a rambly, useless post. More of the same. Sometimes, I can't even stand myself.

Another Weekend Wasted

Great, it's 7 p.m. Sunday evening, and I've not done a damn thing this weekend except brood about my shitty life and wish all the grading I haven't done would just mysteriously disappear so I wouldn't have to look at all those piles of uncompleted work.

I've decided that what I need to do is start staying at school till 8 or 9 pm--just grading. I'd like to be able to go home for T'giving without carrying home 300 papers to grade. It's quite obvious that when I'm home nothing gets accomplished. Part of that is the depression. Part of it is just hating hating hating Tech Comm and everything to do with it and not being able to motivate myself to get it done. It's terrible--I'm practically phoning in my work. I go to work, but I'm not there. I'm not answering student e-mails. I'll probably get the worst evals of my career. And I can't even seem to care, not even a smidge.

It's really, really bad. I've never LOVED grading--who does? But at least when I was reading comp papers, there was the POSSIBILITY of finding something interesting that engaged my intellect. But there is no such experience in grading effing memos.

I wish to Goddess a miracle would happen, and they'll hire me full time for advising. I pray for it.

This & That

This weekend I read some poems at a "Local Authors" reading. I didn't really want to, but I did because I was asked to. Well, alright, that's a complete lie. I was told, rather unceremoniously, in the middle of summer that I would be reading at this thing. If I had realized back in July that the 2nd was Labor Day weekend, I would have passed. As it was, I went, read 7 poems, and then headed down to visit B/f.

He and I had a good time, even if it was just for Sunday night and yesterday day. Of course the house was beyond the pale, but he had fresh sheets down, so I'll take what I can get. We had a good time with each other. I really do love the big goof.

In other news, today and tomorrow are more long days at the office. And then my Mom is coming in for a few days on Thursday. So after I do accumulated weeks of laundry tonight, I have to clean the house. It's not really bad--it never is--but it could use some straightening. As always, the stacks of crap on the coffee table need to be beat back from taking over the living room, and the bathroom needs cleaning. Nothing arduous, just a bit time consuming.

And I still have to do the reading and assignment stuff for tomorrow. Bleah. It's always something.

I Do This Every Semester (DAMN ME!!)

I am sitting on my bed, surrounded with about four bazillion student papers and wondering how the hell I'm going to get it all graded. Now granted, I've got a whole week before grades are due (I think--I best check that out!), but I'd rather get them done sooner rather than later (like I usually do)--which if I had done the grading for the annotated bibs ontime, then I wouldn't be having this problem. On the other hand, half the classes turned them in late, so that also put me behind--but that's no excuse. The truth is, I suck when it comes to grading. Plus, I still have to grade reading journals --which I mostly just spotcheck--and the webpages--which won't take long, but it's still ONE MORE THING--and then do all the GD adding of points and blah, blah, blah. Well, you know how it is. Maybe one day I will not procrastinate like I do. But let's face it... the habit is ingrained. And I never change... I mean, hell, speaking of procrastinating--I'm here writing this blog, aren't I? It's hopeless. Oy.

I guess what I really ought to do is when they turn in their work, I should just stay at the office till I get at least 2-3 hours of grading done. If I did that every class day, I'd be in a better place than finding myself at the end of the semester inundated with work. Part of the problem too is that the first part of the semester, the workload is light, and then in the last month of teaching, I get in 500 points worth of work to grade for each student. For instance, I picked up the annotated bibs on 4/13; their final reading journals on 4/18; and had final projects from 4/23 to 4/27. It's easy to get behind when you get so much work at the end. But the long and short of it is, is that I procrastinate like a maniac. Because I suck.

In my only defense, I have to say that I've had terrible migraines for the last two weeks, and the only thing I can do when that happens is crawl into my bed and sleep. Which is also not conducive for getting work done.

And finally, I'm PMSing bigtime... bleah.