ifeelbetter

I know a lot of people who routinely take two weeks to get a batch of papers back to students. Usually I do it in four days. It's the first time I've taken so long with a batch...and it's not like they need them back soon, anyway. That was their last academic assignment of the semester for me. They only have creative final projects left.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

PS - Students can sometimes be so adorable I want to bottle them up and snuggle them on dreary days. These creative final projects? I set no limitations, made no restrictions--they have to pitch their idea of what is reasonable to me and whether I agree or not is determined by their ability to convince. Life skills all around, right? And this one boy--who makes "duuuuuuh"-face all the time--just pitched the 36 page spy thriller he's been writing all semester and wanted to know whether he should make it longer. I would have taken 5 pages. No joke. And another kid is writing a score to a silent film version of Sherlock Holmes from 1924. And another kid is doing a fashion shoot...and another is doing performance art. I love students today.

PPS - I will keep you appraised buuuuut....one of the students is writing a kids book about the contents of the fridge trying to figure out who will be eaten for dinner. And the ketchup bottle is the detective. I bet you love my students now, too, don't you?

[edit/PPPS - I have a rule that I can only have one burger a week. You might think that's crazy--why, you might ask, do you need to have a rule like that? Do you find it that hard not to eat more than one burger in a week? Yes, internetters, I do. I find it that hard. And the one-burger-a-week rule is a vast improvement over what the rule was when it started back in first year during the first paper/finals season...then it was no-more-than-one-burger-a-day. And that was hard at first. But YES so I have this rule. And I wasted my one burger this week on bad delivery burger because grading papers sucks my brain out through my nose--that's what it feels like, OK--and I needed comfort food STAT. But it wasn't nice. And now I am burgerless until next week. Here endeth my tale of woe.]

I was reminded (by having to go into campus by 8:30AM yesterday to sign up for a slot to teach next semester) that I have to choose my course topic by Oct. 29th and my texts by Nov. 5. I had all sorts of ideas for the topic that I was batting back and forth (Shifting Perspectives, History and Literature, etc...) but I have decided to go with.... Bromance. That's my topic.

( thinking out loud about my Bromance texts... )
But enough about my class for next semester.

On another note, I had a student come to my office hours earlier this week. She's an interesting student....she wants to improve her writing, it is so very clear, but she doesn't understand that I can't wave my magic wand and just make her better. She said at one point, "so we've done two papers now. Do you want to tell me what patterns of mistakes you've found in my writing?"

It's such a good impulse, right, to be thinking of patterns of mistakes. But, really. Come on. I spend HOURS writing those comments all over your papers. THAT'S where you'll find what I think about your essay. And I can't just give you a thing like, "you need to use a quote in the second sentence of every paragraph" or something. That's not how writing works. It's definitely not how TEACHING works.

I gave a speech (a lot like Frank Chimero's post about having ideas) about how writing is hard but it pays off. She told me her parents would love me because I'm making writing ("and other stuff like that" I think meant "art in general") sound horrible. Did I? I thought I was describing the best part of art. Who would want to read a book that was churned out in an hour? We love The Mill on the Floss (I mean, those that DO love it...Dammit, Jim! I'm a Victorianist!) because George Eliot tore her soul in half to write it. Look at Keats's "This Living Hand" and tell me that didn't wring out everything he had to write.

And then...somewhere in the second hour (this was at least a THREE HOUR CONVERSATION), after we'd talked about how she thought Lady Gaga was "a bad person" because she wears lingerie and the poor are selfish to demand that the rich help them in any way...the student brought up Ayn Rand.

This was both the high and low point. Because I could die happy tomorrow if I could convince ONE PERSON to leave the Ayn Rand school of thought. I am totally serious about that. ONE PERSON and a double-decker bus death tomorrow WOULD be a heavenly way to die.

OMG I am totally just blabbering on. HAVE A MUSIC VIDEO.