bipolar grading

Believe it or not, I'm still grading. Only one huge stack of papers to go, then final grades to calculate for three classes, and boy, will I be happy when it's over.

I think I have a somewhat unhealthy attachment to how well my students do. I'm not a grading machine. I feel proud and disappointed and frustrated and sometimes even angry as I grade. With exams, the emotions seem limited to pride or sadness. When a student does poorly, I feel compassion mostly-- I feel sad the student wasn't able to recall the information needed to do well, or wasn't able to analyze a passage as thoroughly as she might have. I never take it personally if a student does poorly. Essays are a different story, though. My first-year comp. students finished up the semester with research papers (for example). Some of them turned in the best work I've seen from them all semester-- that's the idea, that's what we were striving for! When I grade these essays, I feel proud of the students. I can see how much progress they've made, I can tell that they've worked hard, and I'm glad to see it paying off for them.

But there's another group of students who, in spite of all the incremental assignments we used for the paper, appear to have turn in something they threw together at the last minute. These are the students who I've had to struggle with a bit more. I've given detailed feedback on drafts, I've met with students in my office, I've done my best to give them feedback I think can really help them improve. I don't mind spending that time, but when I see the final product, and there's no evidence of revision, I'm very frustrated. There are also students who are relying entirely on web sources, even though the requirements for the essay state repeatedly that they're to use primarily books and journal articles. I know that I shouldn't take it so personally, but I have a hard time not doing so. I work hard at trying to find the potential in each essay that I read, and at trying to encourage students to develop it-- but some of them just don't care.

And then there are the plagiarists. While I spent more time talking about plagiarism in this semester's comp classes than ever before, I am still getting students copying word-for-word from their sources and thinking it's okay to do so if they just put a page number afterwards. We did exercises in class on paraphrasing and summarizing, and they were told repeatedly that failing to include quotation marks around material borrowed word for word is not kosher. I've called their attention to this in previous papers they've turned in, and even had a few extended conversations about this in my office. And yet, here it is again, in the final paper of the semester. It's frustrating, and disappointing. I feel like I did all I could to prevent this from happening, and yet I still feel like I must have failed them.

I guess the good thing to be said is that I didn't have any over-the-top cases of plagiarism in any of my comp sections this year. That happened instead in an upper level Shakespeare class, in which one student copied and pasted pages of text from the Encyclopedia Britanica. I feel far more emotionally invested in this situation than I should be. I am disappointed, and even at times angry. In accordance with university policy, I contacted the student by email to tell him what I've discovered and what will happen next (he'll hear from the registrar). The student wrote back and claimed he cited his sources (they are mentioned on the Works cited page), so he didn't think he was doing anything wrong. I find this extremely hard to believe-- less than two full paragraphs of the entire essay are his own work, the rest is literally plopped in from an online source, and he thinks that suffices as a final essay? He expressed no concern at all in his message, just essentially denies he's done anything wrong. He seems nonplussed; I'm exasperated. Something's wrong here.

Final exam week is supposed to be a stressful time for students, and yet I feel far more stressed on this side of things than I did when I was a student and on the other side of things.

P. and I recently finished reading this excellent book (aloud, to eachother, mostly in the car). The writer is a psychoanalyst from Britain who has a lot to say about developmental psychology and biology in babies and young children. She claims that human responses to stress are wired in babyhood (during the time the brain is growing and new synapses are forming, etc.), and can even be somewhat influenced while the child is still in utero. So every time I feel stressed now, I start to worry about the large amounts of cortisol I'm sending baby's way. I wish I could just calm down. I want to create an environment that will allow the kid to feel safe and confident. I'm hoping some of this time away from work next semester will help, but I have a lot of work to do. I'm not in control of myself as much as I wish I were. I need to develop some new strategies for soothing myself and for keeping my mood at a more even keel. Where to begin, though? When to begin is a little easier to answer: as soon as I get the rest of this grading done.