Adventures in Grading: 'Favorite Sentences from Exams' Edition

It's just after 1:00 on Saturday and I am done with grading. Yay! I didn't collect as many gems from the flood of papers as I usually do. Most of the awfulness was just plain awful, not funny-awful. But there were a few awesome keepers worth sharing with y'all.

1) "Up through the 1900s, ethnicity threw-up boundaries between people."

It's the hyphen (that makes "threw-up" kind of like a noun--but not really--just enough to conjure the image of vomit) that does this one in, of course. Nothing major, but it made me laugh, and then gag a bit.

2) "Connie could no think at all. She is petrified in udder disbelief."

Sorry, but "udder disbelief" just kills me. I could try to explain how this is wrong, but if you don't get it, it's like a cow's opinion. And no, this student is NOT an ESL writer. He's just a horrible editor of his own work. In his next sentence, he refers to a "gold hot rub," when what he really means is "hot rod." At least I hope that's what he means...

3) And finally, I've saved the best for last: "When we think of love and sex, we think of happy endings and how the female is getting her happy ending. This semester, we looked at authors that take it beyond that."

Look--I know that on the surface, this is a perfectly harmless set of sentences, but come on, doesn't it also sound like the opening from an final exam essay for "PORN 101: New Depictions of Female Satisfaction in Adult Films"? By the way, I bet that's a real course somewhere...like Berkeley.

Dream students...

We actually got started here at Shepherd on the 18th, so we are in the middle of our second week of classes. So far, so good, although yesterday was a busy enough day that I wondered to myself how in the world I could be so far behind on only the second Monday of the semester. There will be plenty of time to write/complain/laugh about the bad students, but I thought I'd briefly list some of the impressive students I've met so far.

• The freshman girl in my ENG 204 class who has already emerged as one of the brightest and most vocal (in a non-annoying way) students in the class. She has already stayed after class a couple of times already with really smart questions and to get some reassurance that she's got what it takes for the class (because she's only a freshman). I want to clone her.
• Another student in my ENG 204 course who has already written his first paper and earned an A on it. (They can hand in their papers on any date, so long as they've handed in one by each deadline.) What pushes him into dream student land is an email he sent me while he was working on it, asking if he should cite the poems he was writing about by line number or page number. I am just amazed that a sophomore knows that we sometimes cite poems by line numbers. Most of the time, I am content if they put the darn periods in the right spot.
• The five students who've been in my classes all three semesters (including this one) that I've been teaching at Shepherd and who seem to get stronger and more confident from class to class. Yes, that's what they should do, but we don't often get the chance to see it. We started off here together--they were freshman and I was a new faculty member. I've also got about seven more who I've taught in previous semesters and have chosen me again (all general education courses). That's pretty good for the ego, too--especially if I tell myself it's all about me, and not about fitting into their schedules.
• The group of students in my ENG 346 class who--on the third day of class!--had a smart debate with each other about the heroine of The Coquette and if she is a proto-feminist. This is the kind of stuff that teachers savor.

End-of-Summer Syllabizing

I haven't gotten nearly as much work done as I wanted to this summer, but I am rather proud of this accomplishment: as of today, 2 August 2008, I have all my syllabi ready for the Fall semester. Not bad, right? I just put the Xerox requests in and everything. My webpages are ready to go. Go me!

You can check out the fruits of my labor here, if you are so inclined. While I've taught ENG 102 and ENG 204 before, I had to do some re-arranging on two counts. First, each course has switched to new editions of its respective textbook,* which meant adjusting page numbers and, in some cases, reading selections for each. Second, the days both courses meet have changed. In the past, I taught ENG 102 as a MWF class. Now it's a TR. In the past, I've taught ENG 204 as TR. Now it's a MWF. Those kinds of changes do require some reconceptualization, especially for ENG 102, which is a writing course. I rather like the changes made to the 204 syllabus--I've even included three new writers (Richard Wright, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jhumpa Lahiri). I am not so sure yet about 102. It looks a bit rushed at certain points in the semester (at least on the page), but maybe it will be okay.

ENG 346 is the new one for me--and I am pretty excited about it. It's a version of a class I taught at Richmond, but whereas that course stopped in 1865, I am framing this course as a study of the American novel from the beginning until 1900 (well, technically 1896, ending with Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs). The reading schedule is a bit ambitious, I know. I've already had one student email me and say "You don't believe in light reading, do you?" However, they can handle it--especially if they want to be English majors.

*Don't even get me started on this whole "new edition" issue. I understand the need to keep updating things, but some of these prices are insane. I don't get to choose the books for the gen. ed. classes I teach (101, 102, 204)--and if I did, there's no way I'd pick the hugely over-priced Perrine's. It's a great book, but not worth over $100.