GRADING. I hate it. Very much.

Of course, if I were a professor, I could make up my own assignment and then wouldn't be stuck grading bad assignments that 101 students aren't ready to do. Also, if I were a professor at an R1 institution, then maybe I would have some underling like myself who would be stuck with the crappy task of grading my crappy assignments. But, if I were that R1 level professor with some helpless grad student beneath me, I wouldn't assign 4 things in rapid succession so that my TA couldn't' finish grading one before the next was handed in. It is very daunting to just keep accumulating stacks of crappy assignments on your desk...knowing that all of them need to go through the agonizing grading process.

Oh - and I have a little problem. I have one student who has never turned in anything that is even remotely good. Seriously. I'm not exaggerating. She got the lowest grade on the mid-term (of all 280 students) and from all of her other work, it appears to me that she is not capable of recoding coherent thoughts on paper. Well, I just read her essay and it's pretty good. Leaps and bounds better than anything else she's turned in. What's the deal? Is it wrong of me to suspect that perhaps she didn't write this???

In other news, it was fall here for a few days. Now, it's back up into the high 70's. What is going on???