In the grips of Grading Brain

This time of year college campuses everywhere experience uncontrolled outbreaks of a virulent malady. I'm not talking about Covid-19 or flu or the million little viruses causing coughs and sniffles all over final-exam classrooms but a more cerebral disorder I call Grading Brain.

When there's nothing left to do but grade final papers and projects, we sit in our offices or at home staring at screens and grading one fool thing after another until our eyeballs want to jump right out of our heads and run away to some island or mountaintop or desert where they can look away from whatever isn't pleasing and seek something more soothing.

My head hurts. My neck hurts. My eyes are really angry, and my brain is twisted into knots from the effort of wading through tortured prose. It's not all tortured, of course; this week I've read quite a few original, clever, witty essays that fill me with hope for the future. But mostly I'm reading the other kind: not bad enough to be amusing or good enough to glow but just dull, mediocre, uninspiring.  

And of course at this point there's no respite from grading. Final grades are due next Tuesday, so procrastination is no longer possible. I move from one paper to the next to the next, inserting comments into margins and punching numbers into rubrics. Every once in a while I get up to take a walk around the building just to reassure myself that there's a real world outside the realm of final papers. Recently I discovered something remarkable: for the first time in what feels like weeks, the sun is shining! Too bad it's too cold to grade papers outside.

The grading process so dominates my brain that I find it difficult to communicate off-rubric. I see someone in the hallway and the only phrases that pop easily into mind are things like "nice thesis" or "abrupt transition" or "where's the apostrophe?" I see semicolons in my dreams--which, I guess, makes up for how few of them I see in my students' papers. 

But the end is in sight. With every number I punch into a rubric, the pile of grading gets a wee bit smaller. At some point I'll look up from a paper and realize that there's nothing left to grade, but by then I'll be so deeply in the grips of Grading Brain that I'll just sit here wordless, with empty eyes and drool rolling down my face, hopelessly transformed into a sniveling lump. 

There is a cure, however: it's called winter break, and it's coming soon to a campus near you. Without it, we would all be gibbering idiots.