All Work and No Play

I have looked wistfully at my snarl of knitting projects but have been a good girl.

I actually graded and returned 7 10-page research papers. Only 7 more research papers to go, plus the 19 5-page proposal papers that came in this morning, plus the 45 quizzes coming in on Friday, plus the backlog of 23 developmental papers, plus . . . and trust me, there's more . . . my life sucks.

One paper, I actually enjoyed reading: a paper which focused on Americans' misconceptions about welfare. It was a well-structured paper, a paper from which I actually learned something, unlike the 10-page papers on how MySpace exposes teens to pedophiles, or how technology has changed in classrooms, or how binge drinking is bad, or how exposure to radiation has various effects on the human body.

I gave this interesting paper on welfare an 87, which I should point out is a B+. Not a C. Not failing. It got an 87 because it relied far too heavily on only 1 source (6 points), and because of a number of errors in pronoun agreement (3 points), run-on sentences and fragments (2 points), punctuation and spelling (2 points), citation form (1 point), and for no self-evaluation (that thing that puts me in a really good mood and reminds me that I'm dealing w/ a genuine person and not a pile of work I have to do--1 point), plus some other errors I can't quite recall (2 points or so).

Yes, I'm aware that the numbers add up to more than 13. I was kind and fudged a bit here and there and came up with 87.

This grade of 87, this B+, resulted in a complete weeping meltdown along the lines of "I should just drop out of college and work as a clerk forever!"

We dealt with it, we got through it, but remind me again why I'm not knitting?