Nutter Butters (See Earlier Post for Reference)

I finished teaching today, which was both great and a little depressing. I liked my students a lot (though not always consistently) and, despite the growing pains of teaching a course for the first time, I was reasonably happy with my classroom performance. There are a lot of things that I'll do differently the next time around (i.e. structure my schedule around specific writing skills rather than these big abstract principles like "personal narrative" and "research"), but I think I communicated at least something to the majority of my students. I'll be interested in seeing my evaluations.

The depressing end of things comes from the fact that I didn't want to give extensive comments on these final portfolios. So, I took a gamble and told my students that they needed to put a self-addressed, stamped envelope in their portfolios if they wanted my feedback. I was thinking that - I don't know - maybe three or four students, tops, would take me up on this. This whole SASE thing is usually a pretty dependable deterrent. But, no. Eight of them included envelopes. Eight. I'm fine with several of these students asking for comments, but - and I'm going to be a complete cynic here - there are quite a few who just want to see their grade on this. Rather than a document envelope (a big orange thing), they gave me regular letter envelopes (a dinky white thing) and asked that I simply send them my comments (read: grade) that I type up and affix to their portfolios. I cry foul because I think most of them will just open the envelope, look at their grade, and toss the letter without reading it - that is, unless they take issue with their grade. And it's an extra three hours of grading that I need to do before I can see the end of my work. Boo.

I'm currently neck-deep in my writing process for my own papers. I'm still on my first one, but I'm hoping that, after spending several weeks compiling and organizing my notes, the writing will just kind of happen. Wing and a prayer. The thought of starting my second paper is already daunting, though, and there's just so much left to do before I fly out on Thursday. I was pretty serene up until this point, but now...now the dark side is taking over. Thus: nutter butters.