Not really about naming conventions

Just moments ago I graded the last final exam and submitted the last set of grades for the fall semester, which means I'm free!!!!! Hallelujah it's party time! I know I'm supposed to spend some time reflecting on the semester, evaluating what went well and how I can improve things for next time, but seriously, I've spent the past week grading something like 172 pieces of student work and my brain hurts. 

And besides, the most compelling lesson I've learned from teaching these classes is the importance of insisting upon consistent naming conventions for electronic documents. Who wants to read about naming conventions? I know I don't want to write about them, except to note that I never again want to be confronted with an electronic file with a name so unprofessional, disrespectful, and vile that it made me want to give the paper a zero without reading it.

Instead I will recall the set of final papers that kept making me laugh and think in new ways about the human condition. It's an assignment I've used before and it tends to spark a lot of passion: Imagine that a group of space aliens wants to destroy Earth to make room for an interstellar bypass; your task is to persuade the aliens that the human race is or is not worthy of preservation, based on evidence drawn from certain comic texts. About half argued for preservation and half for extinction, but either way, they were the best papers I've read all semester. Before the final exam, I told the class that their papers were great but that I'm not sending any of them to negotiate with the space aliens because if I do, we're toast.

Then they asked me a question: "Which way would you argue? Are we worth preserving or not?"

That's the kind of question that makes me love my job. Not particularly easy to answer, but worth the effort.
 
I told them something like this: "Your papers gave plenty of examples of human beings behaving badly, suggesting that we're a pretty awful bunch, but somehow someone was able to make comedy, literature, and art out of evidence of our awfulness. And that creativity, that ability to make beauty from base materials, that spark is worth preserving, no matter what."

And that, I think, is how I'll look back on this semester: an uneven mess of awful moments intermingled with occasional transcendence, but in the end I saw evidence that creativity survives, that beauty is possible, and that we've kept the spark burning a little bit longer.

Now it's time to take a match to all those final papers and dance around the bonfire--metaphorically, of course. Wouldn't want to torch my laptop just to get rid of a few awful file names.