Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Grading...

I guess I haven't been posting a lot lately, but it's been a pretty busy semester.

But there's a light at the end of the tunnel! This week I have to grade about 50 final papers for the class I'm TAing for. I hand those back to my students a week from today, and after that I am FREE of this class until January! (When we will be meeting up to grade the final exams, at which point I will be free for reals). Tomorrow I teach my last 2 recitations of the semester, and while I'm a little sad that I won't be teaching again for a while (I'm taking next semester off to finish my dissertation), I'm not unhappy to be done with this class in particular. I don't want to go into detail on a public forum, but lets just say...it's been rough. I'm really looking forward to getting my weekends back, as this whole semester I have spent at least 1 weekend day (and usually both of them) reading and grading for this course. The prof required something due every week (either a quiz or an assignment) so every weekend I've had 50 of something to grade. Bleh. But after these 50 papers, and the 50 quizes they are taking tomorrow, I have nothing to do until the final exam! :)

In part to celebrate the end of this horrific semester, B and I are taking a road trip to Virginia from Friday-Sunday to see the Charlottesville- Phish show on Saturday night, and will be staying by good friends of ours who we haven't seen since the summer. On the way we will also be taking a detour to visit the National Mall area of Washington DC, and another detour to visit the ever-awesome Quiet Girl. We will have Barkley with us, so we can't go to any museums in DC or anything, but we plan to visit the Washington and Lincoln memorials and walk around outside the White House. Hopefully when we visit Quiet Girl her American Bulldog Bella won't eat Barkley, as I hear Bella likes to eat other dogs.

10 comments:

  1. why don't you give a minimum word/caracter count instead of pages?

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  2. Well I'm not the professor, I'm the TA, but personally when I assign papers I give a wide range of page limits (I say something like 5-10) and emphasize that its the content and quality of the content that matters, not the number of words.

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  3. Vey iz mir. Good luck with grading, may your soul come out intact.

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  4. Please give Ms. Quiet Girl my love and tell her I miss her so very much. And you and B. have fun!

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  5. They're using the same tricks we tried to get away with 25 years ago, and no one was impressed then. Funny how that hasn't changed.

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  6. As a fellow academic, AE, I really have to suggest that you not print excerpts from your students' papers on your blogs. It could get you in big trouble.

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  7. Good luck. Let me commiserate as a fellow TA (although in math, not sociology).

    However, one minor quibble: The democracy v. republic thing really isn't great. Yes, we don't have direct election, but almost everyone uses democracy to mean a system where the people vote. If one wants to talk about direct democracy than just say direct democracy. (Indeed, if one takes this sort of argument to its logical conclusion, even Athens was never a democracy because only a fraction of the populace could vote. That suggests this isn't a great definition).

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  8. ugh katrina you are probably right. Bahleeted.

    And what i found most amusing was saying the US was the "birthplace" of democracy, as that sounds like something out of a 4th grade essay on why America is awesome, and is not true at all.

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  9. I would think that very short excerpts that are completely anonymous might not be a problem. (If for example you just quoted the terms in question). There is however, a real worry. I know that at least one student in one of my classes apparently found my blog (why she was googling my name is beyond me). But you seem to have your name more disconnected from your blog.

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  10. You should post their names and the names of their rich, legacy parents for the purposes of public shaming.

    That's the problem with you academic liberal types, you have no stomach for making people feel as stupid as they really are.

    See ya at home, love ya!

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