Why I'm not grading papers tonight.

After my last class today, I participated in a Future Faculty Seminar at Stanford. I was on a panel about negotiating faculty jobs, dealing with the two-body problem while on the academic job market, balancing work and life once you have a faculty job, and so forth. It was a fun panel, and lots of good questions were asked.

But then I had to race home through a bunch of really slow traffic so I could play the sprog zone and let my better half out of the house for a Thursday night class.

And, not surprisingly, the stress of trying to get home in time while traffic was stop and go done wore me out, leaving me with next to no will to plow through the ten to fifteen papers I had hoped to grade tonight.

My eldest offspring expressed skepticism about my fatigue thusly:

"Come on! How much energy does it take to work a steering wheel and yell?"

More like this

The Scientiae theme for September is "my summer vacation." My first week of class started today, so perhaps this is a good way to remind myself of what I've done this summer. We had dinner early in May at a friend and colleague's house to acknowledge my husband's decision to step away from his…
Sciencewoman says: Some of readers have been wondering about what life is like for those jobs at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs). Alice and I are indubitably unqualified to answer that question, so Kim Hannula of "All of my faults are stress related..." graciously offered to provide…
At the end of part 2, I had just dropped the baby-bomb on my unsuspecting advisor. Happily, he did not have a cow about it. Now, as we move into the stage of this story that is A.P. (after pregnancy), we lose the coherent narrative structure for awhile. Given what the first several weeks with a…
I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic…

I always laugh when I read these posts. If I ever go into the teaching field I'll never, ever assign papers.

When I think about it, when I went to college we'd have a 20 pager due at least twice a term. So 40 pages times 45 students. 1,800 pages to read and grade per term.

If you're that much of a masochist then kudos to you.

You realize, of course, that time flies, and before you know it that offspring will be getting a driving license of their very own?

Perhaps it is time to start to broaden their horizons a bit as to the more advanced techniques involved in driving.

Actually, Elder Offspring needs to understand that it's not using energy, it's expelling frustration to wield the wheel and wail.
Time to consider having students record their papers and listen to them, a la books on tape while you're driving? But that puts us in new territory, possibly to be known as GWD (grading while driving) which could be a new source of road rage... Never mind!