A plague on all our houses! At home we're battling the usual fall influx of mice and spiders, while on campus I fight an epidemic of frantic questions, complaints, and requests for extensions, plus piles of drafts featuring festering masses of inanity and pestiferous punctuation.
The comma problems alone! My students prefer to use no commas at all, while in another context I received a long angry screen insinuating that inserting a particular comma will destroy the writer's life. Can we please find some middle ground between apathy and hysteria?
Yesterday I encountered a colleague in the hallway and noticed that we were both carrying boxes of tissues to our classes, which are full of students sniffling, coughing, and struggling to keep their eyes open as they try to complete all their final projects in the last two weeks of classes. Two years ago, we compressed the Covid-inflected fall 2020 semester and took no time off so that we could end before Thanksgiving, which was awful, but I'm not sure that semester-long slog was much worse than the stress that stalks these hallways in the two weeks after Thanksgiving.
And to top it all off, I have a cold. It's not the end of the world and others are suffering much more severe illnesses, but the constant drainage makes sleeping difficult so I'm not at the top of my game, inside or outside the classroom. "Phlegm can't think," I told my students yesterday. "It may resemble brain matter a bit, but phlegm can't compose any coherent thought and neither can I."
But here we are slogging through the various pests that plague us, armed only with a box of tissues. (I would call out "Exclesior!" but every time I raise my voice I start to cough.)
No comments:
Post a Comment