All Hopped Up on Caffeine and Bitterness

I got only 90 minutes of sleep last night. 90 MINUTES! Grading papers is hard! But allow me to back up for a moment...

I am a fifth year graduate student pursuing my PhD in Women Studies so I can go on to be a...professional feminist or something. I have plenty to say about being a graduate student (ask anyone who has said so much as, "How are you?" to me since September and they'll tell you how un-fond of school I am right now), but that's for later. First I want to talk about my job.

You see, I fund my grand academic marathon-of-punishment-that-has-no-end by serving as a TA within my department. This is a job I generally love and for which I get paid and have my tuition waived, so you know, it's pretty sweet.

Usually, for me, TAing (which is a term we all use as if it even makes sense as a verb when it totally doesn't...Teaching Assistant-ing? Yeah, not so much with the making of sense, but I have to move on or we'll never get anywhere with this, so bear with me and my linguistic idiosyncrasies), means attending whatever class the professor I'm hired to assist is teaching that quarter, grading papers, and sometimes teaching discussion sections once or twice a week. I looooove the teaching part. I don't so much love the grading part. Which means this quarter I have the kind of appointment I dread, in that I am only a grader, pretty much (I don't have any sections to teach this time around). I get the yucky part of the job without the fun part. Boo!

So my students turned in their first papers of the quarter about a week and a half ago, and I then began the task of: 1) Figuring out what the hell it was they were supposed to write; and 2) Actually grading the papers.

Just for some context, I had 55 papers to grade, and the page limit for this assignment was 6 pages.

Here's where the bitterness comes in. First of all, a few of my students managed to write six pages SINGLE SPACED. Who does that? That's ridiculous! Everyone knows at this level of education that single spaced papers are a bitch and a half to read and that assignments not specifying spacing are to be ASSUMED as requiring double spaced pages. (I feel like Napoleon Dynamite, all, "GOSH!").

Then there are the other annoyances I have to deal with. Behaviors that include: not using paragraphs (I know, right?), totally fucking around with MLA (which is just completely not okay in the presence of English degree-holding style-worshippers like yours truly), confusing the words "women" and "woman" (hold on, I'm still crying about this), and choosing not to make a discernible point at any moment in the paper.

Needless to say, it took a long time to wade through the mess. By yesterday, the day before the papers were due back in my students' eager little hands (okay, they're mostly 20 year-olds so that's kind of unfair, but I'm cranky so go with it), I still had a mountain of papers left to grade. At around noon this mountain began valiantly competing with an equally high mountain of panic, building somewhere on or about my sternum, around the very real possibility that I would never finish on time. I had to be a machine in order to get it all done.

Which brings us to today's list.

Yesterday, while simultaneously grading papers, I:

1) Consumed 2 liters of water (yay! I finally met my daily water goal for once!), one Diet Mountain Dew, and one Diet Cherry Coke.

2) Entertained my dog.

3) Hated life.

4) Iced my elbow.

5) Watched (well, listened to) ten minutes of an old episode of CSI: NY.

6) Hated life some more.

7) Mentioned something to Chrissymine about wanting to smack several of my students. Hard. In the face.

8) Kissed Chrissymine.

9) Rehearsed a hypothetical speech meant for my students about how rude and lazy it is for college students in a 300-level class to not PROOFREAD their MOTHERFUCKING PAPERS before I have to SLOG THROUGH THEIR RIDICULOUS MISSPELLINGS to try to figure out what the HELL they are TALKING ABOUT.

10) Took a bath. While grading. Seriously.

Now I'm in my office waiting out my office hours and trying to stay awake. The papers were successfully handed back in class this morning, and I've been here for forty minutes already without even one irate student coming by to issue death threats over his or her grade.

Things are looking up.