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.