Fun With Paper Grading Elves

So after I get the mail order husband situation well in hand, and my floor is nicely vacuumed and all light bulbs changed, I have yet another part of the staff to make my bunni empire complete. As a child, I heard these stories about elves that would cobble shoes at night. Where are these elves now? I guarantee you they aren't cobbling Manolo Blahniks late in the night. I need to bring these elves into the 21st century-give them a little word processing training and a copy of The Elements of Style and set them up reading the 700 (no joke) pages of student writing I have in piles around my apartment. ( Somehow I came up with the idea that sorting the papers into piles makes it a less daunting task to grade them. Really it just allows me to waste time organizing and re-organizing sorting systems. By class, by gender, by how many comma errors I see on the first page.) My cat loves these piles. She regards them in the same way I regarded piles of leaves as a child-great fun to jump on and roll around in. Occasionally she chews on one, but among the other critiques I could level against these papers, they also taste bad.

I should be much farther along in the paper grading process if it wasn't for this twit and his far from popular book. ( Oh who am I kidding. If it wasn't him, it would have been distracted by old reruns of Law and Order or watching the mold in my refrigerator become sentient or reading old copies of Genetic Psychology monographs Weekly.) Part of the problem is they are boring enough to peel the beige paint off the walls. After about two papers, my stomach wants to leap up and strangle eyes so as to prevent the continuing horror. My students complain about their boring read assignments-they have no idea. Last year, I had students actually correct each others papers. At the end, one student looked at me and said, "Are they all like this?" I told her indeed some of them were worse. "That's horrible," she exclaimed, "I had no idea." No horror film yet has been able to induce the disgust I am overwhelmed with when I receive the department mandated "final research" papers.

However, elves could solve this whole problem. My research ( uh I read the pink fairytale book as a child) has revealed that elves are both industrious and easy to store. They are even low cost as stories indicate that the recipient of such elves need only be "virtuous." ( Ok I would have to work on that, but if someone would take care of the grading situation I would have lots of extra time to dedicate to describing pornography to the blind.)

Lawn gnomes need not apply.