Everyone was dragging yesterday despite having just returned from an extended break. I provided a rude awakening to one student who forgot that he's scheduled to give a class presentation on Wednesday, but mostly I spent class time trying to gently prod my students into alertness and engagement. They're tired, they say. Well I'm tired too. We're all tired. Who wouldn't be tired in the final weeks of the fall semester?
This morning I've been reading student drafts and right now I'm tired of asking students to spell my name correctly. It's not that difficult! Only five letters! One set of papers features four different spellings of my name, which is nearly as annoying as the paper that keeps referring to Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir as The Women Warrior. I'm tired of seeing references to a women and I'm tired of seeing then where than should be.
But I'm also tired of the paper that looks absolutely perfect, with no spelling or punctuation errors, but that our AI detector flags as being mostly machine-generated. I'd rather see a student spell woman wrong a dozen times than to go through the whole process of figuring out who or what wrote a perfect paper and what I'm supposed to do about it.
I'm tired of the cold already even though it's barely begun. I'm interested in seeing how my new car handles snowy roads, but not interested enough to wish for a blizzard. This morning I drove through scattered flakes that melted when they hit the ground, which barely counts as a flurry. If I'd blinked, I would have missed it.
I'm tired of class preps and grading and meetings meetings meetings, but the good news is it's nearly over (for now). On Wednesday my students will discuss their final reading assignments of the semester; after that, it's a week and a half of drafts, revisions, presentations, and final exams. So much to do before winter break! Just thinking about it makes me tired.
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