Ok, well this is the beginning of who knows what. I always wanted to have a blog, but I thought I didn't have the time. Then I realized that I spend hours online and having a blog would justify some of that time.

Don't trust the description of the blog. I have no idea what this is going to become. I guess there could be some kind of appeal in watching the blog evolve over time.

Right now I'm trying to get up the energy to go and get milk for my tea or get my butt off line so I grade the huge stack of papers that are lying next to my couch. I have about forty, and each one is at least six pages. For those of us who aren't good at math (like me) that's about 360 pages of student writing, and, to make it particularly challenging, it's all on the same topic. Before any one who is reading this blog decides to say, "It's your own damn fault, you assigned the paper," I would like to state that in my own defense the university I work for not only dictates to me a minimum amount of papers, but also the length of the papers and the basic topic.(To be fair these requirements are in place because I teach a required course for all freshmen. The requirements are in place to try and make all these courses basically the same at the core.) Anyway, I'm better than most professors. Some of the people in my department never hand papers back, some take over a month. I usually take a week. I've had these papers for two weeks, and I haven't even started. Every day I tell myself I'm going to grade one or two, every day I end up watching "Law and Order" or "Life of Brian" or reading "Ravelstein." My friends jokingly offer to grade them, I seriously accept them. There was a joke in high school that teachers graded papers by throwing them down the stairs. If a paper landed on the first stair it was an 'A', second stair a 'B.' It's beginning not to sound like a bad idea.
The real reason I have an aversion to grading is because of all the comments I have to write on the papers, which my students never read. When I grade papers, I'm sure to make a lot of comments, both positive and negative. I put the letter grade on the last page. When I pass back a paper. do my students look at the comments? No, they just rush to the last page. Often they contest grades with out even looking at the comments. So I guess this aversion to grading could be a passive aggressive attempt at punishing them.

Well, that was fairly work related. Tomorrow I shall try to throw in something a little more scandalous. It's only monday, and I try to keep the depravity to the weekend. Perhaps, if tomorrow is boring, I shall relate the events of last thursday, which will hopefully be more entertaining than a Freudian analysis of why I won't grade.