Hungry for nothing

Today I encountered a group of faculty members attacking trays of food like a plague of locusts on a field of ripe wheat. They were shoveling in sandwiches and cheese and crackers and cookies and oranges and great big slabs of cake as if they hadn't eaten all month--and I was one of them. Stress-eating is what we call it, but as we grazed I wondered: what are we all so hungry for?

An end to the grading is one thing we want, an opportunity to put down the red pen, shove the papers in the filing cabinet, and walk out into the sunshine to see what's been going on in the real world while we're sequestered in our offices in front of piles of exams. But after reading all that frantic student writing, we're also hungry for sentences that make sense, that include appropriate punctuation and words correctly spelled and ideas, for heaven's sake--or if not that, we'd like to see some capital letters once in a while. We can't all be e.e. cummings, especially on the final exam.

We're hungry for an end to students' excuses, their begging for better grades, for some sincere appreciation for our work that's not attached to a statement about how badly the student needs a B in the class. We'd like to be able to use words like superfluous without getting blank looks in response and to mention prose without being mistaken for sportscasters. My colleagues in the sciences really want to walk away from the Scantron machine and give their eyes a break from all those bubble-sheets, while those of us collecting papers thirst mightily for an empty dropbox.

We munch on junk food to steel ourselves for the siege ahead, the need to transform the mountain of exams into simple numbers and letters that can be posted to a spreadsheet, and then we want to see an end to reminders about submitting final grades, assessment reports, and D/F slips. 

What we're hungry for, really, is absence: the cleared desk, the empty inbox, the crossed-out to-do list. We thirst for a great big wad of nothing where all that something used to be, but we'll never get there unless we shovel all this something out of the way, and to accomplish that, we need to build up our strength.

Yes, we're hungry for nothing--and that's why we can't stop eating.