topsy-turvy world

I hate the quarter system–ten weeks is barely enough time to get into the rhythm of things. Right when you have things figured out, you realize that you should have already started your papers the week before and are terribly behind. This week has been rough. I haven’t been able to sleep from stress. I have been researching and worrying constantly about my papers because usually I am a bit more organized about it all. I’ve been writing this afternoon and now I realize that I actually should be fine. I’m a bit relieved. Really I should have just written an outline last week because I would have seen that I will easily have enough material for 15 pages.

Students have been kind of a pain for the past couple of days. Not many have emailed me about their paper topics and the ones who did have kinda needed more help than I would have thought. I’m worried that they will be really bad. Also, they have been complaining about their first papers. I had a guy argue with me for half an hour about whether his paper was unclear and had run on sentences. He actually said that I just don’t like long sentences, which is absurd. I don’t like grammatical errors; he just couldn’t tell the difference. He had to agree when I said I read a lot of papers and if it wasn’t clear to me, then it wasn’t clear, dammit! Writing is a skill that one needs practice to do well, so it never ceases to amaze me that students who only write papers for GE credit one class a year are surprised when they don’t get A’s. They even sometimes have the gall to tell me that they take all kinds of “hard” classes, thereby insinuating that I must live in some kind of topsy-turvy world if I think I can give them a B-. Apparently they think that the fact that they write like shit shouldn’t bring down their GPA. Bah.