The Reading Rainbow

The anticipation of having to read final class papers has me driven to drink. (Well, that just might be an excuse for the lovely cocktail in my hand…at an hour of the day in which one should not be imbibing.) Anyway, after spending a semester with a class you have an excellent idea of what kind of papers to expect. I grade the ones I know will be easy first, I shouldn’t do this, but I inevitably do. I start with the “easy because they are short” (and/or) “are so terrible that there’s nothing I can do” and then usually move on to the “good but problematic and I’m gonna tell you what’s good and what’s wrong” papers. The latter group takes some time. The worst group of papers, the ones I should never save for last but always do because I dread them and have to force myself to read them are the “not good at all but I put effort into this and I really deserve some form of feedback” papers. (That’s one crazy sentence I just wrote.) They take forever to grade. These papers fucking suck.

We can add an additional dimension to this paper breakdown: curiosity. Curiosity level is a distinct factor in my paper reading order. Some papers, even ones that suck, are about things I at least find interesting. Some great papers are about things that I find painfully boring. I hate staring down a paper to grade that is about tedious minutia. I know, I’m supposed to be objective— but some topics are just fucking boring. Boring because they are inconsequential, overdone, wrong, and/or just undeniably boring, boring because they just are. These papers fucking suck in a different way.

Formatting. This matters to me too. I will not allow you to become the kind of asshole whose sloppy/non-existent attention to formatting will piss off your co-authors, editors, and colleagues in your future employment years. These people take suckitude into a new realm.

Ugh, just when the semester is almost over, the impending paper stack emerges. I don’t want to think about it anymore. I’ll have another drink.