"You do a really great job weaving quotations seamlessly into your sentences," I just wrote on a student's paper. Clumsiness with quote integration is endemic to first-year papers, so when someone integrates quotes elegantly, it's time to pass out the gold stars.
I'm seeing evidence of haste on many of these papers, which is peculiar because they had plenty of time to seek help and revise the draft. Last Friday a student told me that he had failed to look at my comments on his draft until late the night before it was due, so it was only then that he realized that I'd accidentally sent him another student's draft and comments. Oops. My mistake, of course, but then if he'd looked at the file a little earlier, he could have asked me to send him the right document.
Apparently he was distracted. So am I. In fact, these marathon grading sessions make me eager to grasp at any distraction that happens to flit past. I assigned all these papers so I have to grade 'em, but my goodness I wish I could put some of them off until, say, January. Of 2027.
But here I sit dutifully reading one paper after another after another, puzzling over peculiar punctuation, trying to untangle incoherent prose, wondering where a student ever learned that a great way to start a paper is to write something like "There are many aspects of literature that can be analyzed." When I'm drowning in drivel, an elegantly crafted sentence arrives like a lifeboat, buoying my spirits and inspiring me to keep reading.
Let's hope I see a lot more such sentences; otherwise, I'll be ending the semester with an excess of gold stars and nowhere to stick them.
2 comments:
If you have lots left over, make a garland and hang it in your home/wreathe it around your head in celebration of all the bad prose you read and commented on kindly and helpfully - you will have earnt them!
Sometimes I am SO happy I work in a subject where the end of term mountain of assignments is not essays (it's visitor trail leaflets this year - very clear rubric for marking, and so much fun variety to look at! We visited the places, and they get to pick a trail theme, choose a visitor audience, and design their own route, then create a leaflet following certain technical specifications).
So I took a break to sign some Christmas cards and I ended up with glitter all over me. Why do they have to put glitter all over cards? And how am I supposed to grade with glitter all over me? Clearly, it's time to stop. (For now.)
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