Grading Diary

Not to give you the blow by blow here, but grading continues on interminably. The last of my letters of recommendation are done, reviews of the work of my Honors Thesis students is more or less done. One of my students has submitted a wonderful Thesis on the way the scene of judgment in some reality television programming functions as a spectacle enabling audiences to navigate the paradoxes of the American ideology of meritocracy in a way that draws on Barthes' Reality Effect -- it's got lots of insights and lots of laughs in it -- I'll post a link to it if she puts it online. Going over portfolios for the students in the Writing Program at SFAI at the moment, those are due tomorrow morning. Even perfunctory professional activities suddenly exert an allure and you find yourself delving deep into student work, hours and hours go by, and the mountain of finals seems never to thin. It's gonna be a rough week getting through everything, I can tell. And so much of the student work is really serious and engaged and marvelous, a consequence of teaching on urgent topics like environmental politics, I suppose -- you really just can't engage with it superficially. On top of everything else, I have a splitting headache, am still fending off some bug that has been wanting to grab hold of me for three days at least, and I can't medicate too much because it will muddle my head and muss my grading! I know, moan moan moan...