Friday poetry challenge: relishing the niceness, for now

The other day I asked my first-year composition students what has surprised them the most about being in college, and several said they were surprised by how stinking nice all the professors are. Give it time is what I wanted to say, but I bit my tongue. 

I've been doing that a lot lately. My tongue-biting skills are legendary, developed over long years of being a pastor's wife, but right now I'm privy to way too much information that I'm not allowed to share with the general public, so I find myself keeping silent when every muscle in my mouth is screaming to speak out. The stress of keeping silent makes niceness much more challenging.  

Students, though, deserve the extra effort required for niceness. I try to be as pleasant as possible to all my students, but there are times when harsh truths have to be conveyed, like You're in danger of failing or This looks like plagiarism or even You need to work harder on getting the details right. Often that kind of message doesn't feel particularly nice to the listener, while an Honors student may consider a B+ positively brutal.

This early in the semester, though, I've had little opportunity to be anything but nice. I've written some pointed marginal comments on homework assignments, but at this point I'm overlooking small issues while balancing out positive and negative feedback. There's no particularly nice way to say Add quotation marks, but at least I'm not prefacing my comments with Hey, stupid.

As the semester goes on, everyone's workload ramps up and sleep becomes more fleeting, niceness starts to fray around the edges. If I wait until after midterm grades come out to ask my students whether they still think all their professors are so nice, I suspect that I'll hear some different answers--if I can hear anything over all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Today, though, I'll relish the niceness and hope that it hangs around as long as possible. 

Nice work! Nice font! Nice title too!
Good vivid verb in sentence 2!
Your punctuation's rather strange;
your spelling is downright deranged.
Your paper lacks a thesis, and
its logic stands on sinking sand.
There's no citation--not a one!
The final paragraph's not done.
This thing's a mess! But one thing's nice:
you've spelled my name correctly--twice!