It never fails, no matter how much I try to vary my teaching schedule, slow one class down, speed another class up, it seems like first papers of the semester all come in at exactly the same time. Four classes, 80 students, 80 papers to read over a weekend. From Thursday night until - well, until I'm done, I do nothing more than sit, read, eat, bathroom break, walk around a bit, repeat until done. Luckily, this only seems to happen for the first paper, but, all the same, I hit a point in the reading where I feel as though I have stepped into the Twilight Zone and am living in the lines and lives of my students. It's a strange, eerie feeling, when I lift my head from reading and wonder where my reality lay amid my vision. A quick phone call home to my husband helps to ground me, or, as happens once in a while, a line from a student paper that makes me laugh out loud. I always swear I'm going to start a notebook of funny things my students write, I jot them down on scrap paper and then they get lost. So, before I forget, here's a couple that got me laughing out loud in the library.
"I turned the page and couldn't believe what I was seeing. A menashatwa."
(Okay, so here, I'm pronouncing the word: men-nah-sha-twa, thinking it's some kind of Native Amerian Indian terminology for something...)
"One man and two women."
(Oh! menage a trois!)
LOL
The next one:
"When I got to work [at the nursing home], I started my shift by passing ice."
(Ow! Ow! Ow!)
So, it's not all drudgery. A few light moments like this, and then tactfully finding a way to correct the writer as to the spelling or correct grammatical usage. Back to work, passing comments.
No, I really mean that one.
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