Midterm Mania

This is the part of the semester where I want to put straw in my hair and call it a life.

There will be another part of the semester like this close to the end, but for now, I'm still wallowing around in crazy. Midterm portfolios are due, along with my own assignments. This year, the second paper came due as part of the portfolio, so that the normal grading process has just been squared. It takes a while to really read 45 essays and give feedback--not a letter grade--to all of them. Especially if that's not all you have to do. But to have to grade 45 portfolios after you've done that and again provide feedback on all of them....blech. Eventually you just want to start writing things like "U did gud."

In addition to slogging through portfolios, which have to be turned back to them tomorrow, I have my own tidy little assignment to write: a short essay on some ecocritical perspective of Moby Dick. The irony of a short essay on an epic novel has set very heavily on my gut for several weeks. To paraphrase how a buddy in the department explained the book, "They chase a whale. It takes a while." But good god, there is so much going on in that book, that if you choose to Sparknote it (which I have never done), you're asking to get your ass handed to you. It's the Great American Novel for a reason. I actually liked the book. But it did indeed take a while. Now I think I'm going for some argument about the danger of conflating primary nature whales with secondary nature whales as resources. It's a Marxist argument, and the gist of it explains quite a bit about modern environmental problems. It makes my brain hurt to think about it.

Looming in the future is tomorrow's class discussion about a reading I assigned on Friday. My resident class Christian apologist has already emailed me concerning the essay and how best to approach class discussion, as he always sees any readings I give as being anti-Christian when there really isn't anything there to see. He's trained to see it. But he knows there are atheist tigers in the room ready to jump on him for saying the G word. Because it's discussion, he gets to say the G word, and the atheists get to counter his point. Which then sets them up to get *totally* derailed on the question of whether G even exists or not, and has nothing to do with the damned reading, which is about how doing small acts is just as valuable as doing big acts. He's intent on making his point about theology, and wants to be "mentally prepared" for what is ahead. Sigh. The other students don't really care for him because he makes sweeping generalities that he can't support; because they're fed up with neocons, they jump on him, and I have to educate them on attacking arguments instead of committing ad hominems left and right, but at that age to attack there argument is by default to attack the person, or so they feel.

Gad. Tomorrow should be fun.

-- Strawheaded Virgil