oh my word

Well, here's how I used approximately the past 6 (really 7, now that I think about it - I used one hour earlier this afternoon to start) hours (with a break to eat, a break to go on here to check my e-mail and whinge about people who think "Field and Stream" and Encarta (yup, someone used Encarta even though I told them they couldn't) are acceptable sources):

Read 20 student papers through once for flow and content
Read the same 20 papers again (in a different order) and applied comments to said papers.

And one reason why I REALLY like the good papers, the ones where people followed the directions and did good background research and proofread them carefully? I don't have to write very much on them. It's the poorly-done papers that take the most effort on my part to grade, mainly because I feel the need to justify every point I take off. (I wish I could use "general sloppiness" as a catch-all reason, but I can't).

And one thing that frustrates me? When otherwise intelligent people (people I KNOW have the smarts and skills to do a good paper) don't, either because they're lazy or because they procrastinated.

I'm wiped out - and I still have to do the point tabulations and apply grades. But that's for tomorrow morning.

I just hope some of the folks read the comments I put on the paper. I try really hard to show, you know, "If you were re-writing this, this is what you'd want to change." Part of the reason I offer rough draft editing is because then people actually have a chance to put those kinds of comments in practice where it will actually affect their grades - where it is clearly practical.