back from grading camp...

... a.k.a. the AP exam reading, where I read and scored 1,007 exams in seven days. It's oddly soothing. I think this is because you don't have to justify or comment on your scores at all, and also you don't feel EVEN REMOTELY responsible for the students. I kind of take it personally when our own, homegrown students can't manage subject-verb agreement, or when they can't spell words that are IN PRINT RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM, or when they say completely daft things about people in other countries. But when it's someone else's students, far away? Pfft, those things are mildly amusing at best, and at worst not really infuriating.

I think I need to cultivate the grading-camp Zen feeling during the regular semester. (It might help if my normal employer would put me up in a nice hotel with little bitty baby quail.)

Grading camp

Here I am at grading camp. It is the end of Day 3, and I've read about 360 essays so far, not counting the sample ones they use to make sure our internal grading scales are calibrated properly. This year the topic is about literary foils, or, as one student explained it, “In some novels the main character is befriended by someone of the opposite personality, creating a ‘good cop, bad cop’ type of unity.”

Lots and lots of essays about The Kite Runner, Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice, Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, Don Quixote, Crime and Punishment ("Raskolnikov is a murderer, making it seem his morals are not good"), The Awakening ("This event completely throws Edna off her happy horse"), "1984 by Orson Wells," "the overexxagerated play ‘The Importance of Being Earnest,’ by Scott T. Fitzgerald," &c. One on Harry Potter, and one on a Russian play so obscure I had to Google it. (The one about the Russian play was rather good; the one about Harry Potter, not so much.)

And one kid wrote a poem instead of an essay. It was the only poem I've ever read that rhymed "thirteen" with "crack feen." I hope never to read another.

Four more days to go, with overtime pay since a bunch of people didn't show up. Yay, I think?

it is a snow day and I am bored

Direct quote from this year's AP reading housing form:

In order to place you with the appropriate roommate please check all of the following that apply:

__ I snore loudly.
__ I prefer to stay up late.

One wonders precisely what they intend to do with this information. Do they put the snorers together? Do they put them with the people who prefer to stay up late? Do they, perhaps, have a special file of people who LIKE having roommates who snore loudly? Inquiring minds want to know!

I guess this is no sillier than the form I had to fill out as a college freshman, which included such items as "I prefer that my roommate not use drugs" (they did not ask about one's own habits, so my mom pointed out, quite sensibly, that some percentage of the people who ticked that box probably wanted to keep all the drugs for themselves). Times change, and every dorm claims to be substance-free these days, so I expect they don't ask that any more. They probably still don't ask the questions that matter: the Unmitigated Disaster that was my relationship with my freshman roommate could probably have been avoided if only there had been a box that said, "I am rather immature for eighteen and something of a judgmental snot." (OK, both my roommate and I could have honestly ticked it, so maybe it wouldn't have helped.)

So yeah, I think this was a completely mundane post, but as the subject line says, it is a snow day and I am bored. I'm very pleased that we get a snow day on a Tuesday, because Tuesdays are usually my least favorite day, but at the same time I can't help noting that it is a balmy 68 degrees in University of Basketball Town, and remembering that I could have had a postdoc if I hadn't decided to go chasing dreams halfway across the country. I guess I don't regret it. It has been a good year, in spite of everything, but I wish I had a clue what happens after this, and whether these are the last weeks of my academic career, or just the beginning.

Home

Back from the AP reading. I can say for sure that Louisville is not nearly as pleasant a place as Daytona to read exams, although it had its points. As before, I've learned all kinds of things I didn't know about classic literature:

"David Copperfield is the bastard son of a famous man and the crazed erroneous widow." (Apparently there is only one crazed erroneous widow in the world, which is reassuring.)

"Without the past, exsistence would not be."

"This paranoia causes Winston to start hiding in an owl cove away from Big Brother."

"After Blanche's husband died, she began to sleep arond. Once you someone starts in that business, it is hard to get out." (I assume that the kid realized, with horror, that he or she had just implied that the exam-reader might have "started in that business," and hastily crossed it out.)

"At the end of the novel Gatsby gets shot and around that time in the 1900 many people were getting murdered. The reason being is because of slavery and Holocaust. Which and a very negative impact on people in the past and present, as a whole."

I also learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a great admirer of Keats, and that Gatsby, who is in a sense trying to make his life into a work of art, is a bit like the "bold lover" in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" -- who can't ever quite reach his ideal, but will never see it fade. Only his tragedy is that he's human, stuck in the real world and at the mercy of time and change. Yeah. A seventeen-year-old writing a forty-minute timed essay came up with that (although I'm sure this student had thought about Gatsby before, a lot). Gives me hope for the future, I tell you.

Off to New City on Tuesday to look at apartments. I am SO not ready for this.

Almost halfway through...

Three days of exam-scoring down, four to go. Roughly 330 essays read so far. So far, the major trends include:

-- A hell of a lot of essays on The Awakening, Beloved, The Great Gatsby, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Death of a Salesman. While I've read all of these texts at one time or other, or at least seen the movie, Gatsby is probably the only one I can talk intelligently about. (Not that this stops me from scoring essays on these works.) Between Gatsby and Salesman, I am getting very sick of the phrase "American dream."

-- A lot of very bad essays about Shakespeare. Perhaps I'm pickier about the Shakespeare essays than I ought to be, but really, what do you do with a student who argues that Hamlet was written to teach people that they should always think twice before taking action (Dude! That's what got Hamlet into trouble in the first place!), let alone one who thinks "Claudis" and Gertrude are biological siblings?

-- A great many high school seniors seem to be under the impression that the sole purpose of literature is to teach moral or practical lessons, and the quality of the work is directly related to the quality of the lesson it imparts. (I've noticed this in my freshmen as well.)

-- A few students have written essays about works I've never heard of before. (I just score away, because that's what we're told to do.) One of these works is a novel by Camus whose protagonist, apparently, "wants to be known both Biblically and famously." Don't we all?