Midterm Blues

Simon and I are on winter break right now (spring semester with a spring break everywhere else, with girls going wild and whatnot, but here in Flint with temps well below freezing, we are in winter semester on winter break and no one is taking their tops off for love or money). And, as always, winter break is filled with grading. Grading is always a downer, not merely because reading 105 papers all attempting to discuss one issue (an issue that SEEMED interesting until they got their minds on it) is boring beyond belief but because it forces me to confront all MY failures. Those lectures I gave that I was certain were great (funny, yet insightful--and they all nodded in unison when I asked, "Everyone understand?") had no effect whatsoever.

But I haven't completely abandoned my commitment to fair grades (there still is a bit of that philosopher left who wrote that dissertation defending Hegel's theory of retributivism) so I must wrestle with the problem of assigning just the right number to each and every piece of drival. And here is the rub: How do you properly grade a failing paper? On a scale of 0-100, there are only 3 or 4 kinds of any one grade (so a C+ is a 77, 78 and 79, and a B is an 84, 85 or 86 and so on) and it isn't difficult to figure out who goes where when you get all the C+s sorted. But there are 60 flavors of failure (0-59). What do you do with a paper that is truly crap, 1/20 as long as it should be, ungrammatical, and largely (yet incorrectly) copied out of the text or off some bizarre web site somewhere--give it a 15, 27, 32 or maybe a 46? Or should I just give them all 0s? But that is the grade that someone who didn't even do a paper gets. But perhaps that is fair--or, even better, I could give the ones that don't turn in anything a 10 and give the ones that write garbage a 0 as punishment for making me read it. I don't know. I am losing hours of my life trying to work each grade value out--more time than any of these people spent on their paper.

Melvin

This is Melvin:

Currently Melvin lives in our upstairs bathroom.  This, I think we can all agree, is not ideal. Here's the story.  Earlier this week, when it was particularly cold (about 5 degrees F--it's warmed up a bit since), Emily was walking from the parking lot of Family Video next door (where she parks her car because she doesn't want to get the paint scratched driving up our driveway) when she saw a small cat (at whom someone had just thrown a bologna and cheese sandwich) huddled against the wall of said establishment.  She came in and reported this to Jami who made the fatal mistake of going out to look and discovered this little guy.  Instead of running away at high speed or (what I would have done) surreptitiously slipping him inside Family Video and then running away at high speed, she brought him inside and, wishing to isolate him from our four fatties, put him in the upstairs bathroom.  She went to get a pet carrier to transport him away to the pound or dogfood factory or some appropriate destination, but, showing a quickness of wit that his tiny pinhead belies, said feline slipped into the crawlspace under the bath, which Jami only realised when she heard sepulchral wails coming from the ceiling in the kitchen.  Long story short - he came out some time the next morning, we taped up the crawlspace, Jami named him Melvin (because he is so very Melvin-y) and we appear to be stuck with him.  Emily had a happy three hours waiting around in PetSmart to get cheap shots for him (which they were out of) and we've posted signs all round the neighbourhood which we're pretty sure nobody will respond to (how would a cat get into a parking lot other than by being dumped?).  Jami's mother has offered to adopt him, but we're torn, as she is the owner of Crazy Dog (star of several YouTube videos made by Thomas and Jimmy) and Melvin is a bit of a wet blanket (or, as Jami puts it, "very sweet and shy").  I'm still rooting for the dogfood factory - any suggestions?