I'd Rather Be....

I love my job; I truly do.  Few people are as lucky as I feel I have been, to know what I was put on this earth to do, and to be able to do it.  But there is one aspect of teaching that I have never and will never love, or even like:  grading.  And grading research is the absolute worst, the umpteenth circle of hell, exponentially worse than Dante ever dreamed.  I've been fully immersed in grading researched essays for about ten days now, and there are about 24 jillion things I'd rather be doing. 

I'd rather Christmas shop all day on the 71st and Hell corridor, Memorial to Garnett, than to ever try to get 100 students to complete a research paper outline.

I'd rather have fire ants invade my armpits than to drag said students to the library to (horrors!) read and take notes from reference books.

I'd rather listen to 18 solid hours of screamo "music" instead of having to listen to the chorus of "There's no information on my topic" from 75-85% of my kids.

I'd rather sleep on a bed of nails than to be forced to repeat instructions for a hanging indent on citations for each student, individually, at least 5 times.

Instead of insisting on 12-point Times New Roman font, I'd rather go back to reading papers done on notebook paper, in serial-killer handwriting.

I'd rather have to come up with 608 ways to prepare white rice than to have to read one more page of bland, boring prose on the Constitution or natural rights.

Rather than checking citations on a Works Cited page, I could happily experience another bout of pneumonia.

Finally, I'd rather have my eyes gouged out with a melon baller than to grammatically correct 1500 words of uninspired gibberish from a hormonally-crazed teenager who is convinced that spell-check is all the proofreading he'll ever need.


But oh, when that one crisply-worded, fresh, intriguing research paper comes to the top of the stack, it makes it all worth it......almost.  We'll see if I still feel the same when I finish the stack tomorrow.


(Disclaimer:  I can't take credit for that melon-baller thing; I saw it on my DVR episode of American Horror Story today, my one little respite from the daily cycle of read/sigh/laugh/weep/repeat.)