Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Ugh, Grading

I have not done any of my grading, mountains of which came at me last week. And tomorrow I get another set of papers. This is not good.

But I cannot make myself grade. (Lest you all think I'm some crazily productive and organized person, which might be the way I've been coming off lately.)

I think I'm giving myself permission not to grade. I think that's the only thing for it. I can grade this weekend. And dude, 2 weeks is the industry standard for getting things back, and I'm only at one week in two sections and a week and a half in another. And I feel like even 3 weeks is moderately reasonable, depending on the circumstances. So really, I'm not a bad person for not grading.

(Incidentally, I've been exhausted for the past two days. It's been all I can do just to prep - grading just seems too overwhelming and daunting a task even to begin. I suspect this is some sort of after-effect related to the book manuscript. I've decided that I should go with it rather than fight it.)

What is sad is that all I really want to do is not to do anything related to school and to just spend about 5 days cleaning my house. Sadly, this just can't happen. I did take out the trash and run the dishwasher today, though, which I suppose is something. Also made delicious pasta for dinner (with homemade puttanesca-ish sauce) and so at least I'm eating decently for a change. This, to me, seems like I'm heading in a positive direction, even if I'm not doing my grading.

3 comments:

The_Myth said...

2 weeks?!!??!?!

Gee, my students always got incensed if I took more than 2 days.

All this despite telling them I'd need at least 10 days. The university had an unwritten policy of 1 week [which I thought was ridiculous and impossible if grading more than 15-20 papers].

When I was in college, 2 weeks was the standard too, so that was always my outside deadline if something went amiss. Nice to see some places [and people] still do that. I too always thought it was "industry standard" until the last place I taught.

Dr. Crazy said...

Well, I think that my place is particularly humane when it comes to this because of the heavy teaching load with no TAs (and it's a regional U, which I think makes a difference, too). One week as the policy is, to my mind, ridiculous. It's what I aim for, but sometimes things get in the way of those aims - not life things, but job things, you know?

Inside the Philosophy Factory said...

I hate the oppression of having a huge pile of grading sitting there staring at me.

I herby grant you a break from grading jail.

Make sure you have good snacks and good music for your time this weekend.