Yawn

Wow, teaching owned me today. We had our first quiz, which I would almost qualify as an 'unmitigated disaster' except for the fact that at least a third of my collective 60 students did well on it. But grading, oh my god, is there anything more mind-numbing than writing the same damn comments on sixty papers? For example, even the kids who did well generally answered the question of "why was the Parthenon built on the Acropolis?" with some mix of "it's really high up and easy to defend and it's close to the gods and you can see the whole city from up there!" I think I wrote the phrase "The Parthenon replaced an earlier temple destroyed by the Persians; it celebrated Athenian victory and democracy" at least fifty times. I kid you not. I may dream that phrase tonight. Also, the Acropolis does not mean "city of the dead," the Pharaoh Akhenaten's images were not destroyed so that "people wouldn't steal them," and you cannot call someone who tries to force monotheism on the polytheistic culture of Egypt "way ahead of the curve."

And even now, after all 60 quizzes have been graded and entered into the labrynthine online system, there are still 60 museum trip papers to read, grade, and comment on. At least now the comments are mostly different, but here's the next phrase I'll be writing 50 times: "You must use a citation each time you use outside information, whether that is the museum label, the book, or me, even if you're just using a single source throughout the paper." Yes, the Parthenon phrase was much, much shorter. Hand-cramps are in my future.