So I celebrated my day off from work by doing a crapload of grading. It wouldn't have been so bad if the students hadn't done, well, so bad. Sometimes I really wonder if they are thinking while they take their tests. It's painful. Then I realize that in that brief moment of frustration, I probably cared more about their success than they did. Well, that's not entirely true. They care. They care about succeeding in the overall game of being a 'success' in life, but they have a hard time focusing on the immediate problem or question that's in front of them. I need to remember that the mode of thinking that I ask of my students is not how most people engage their brains most of the time. Furthermore, they don't realize that the purpose of the class is to get them to engage their brains differently. That's the key. That's the credit they earn. Forget the GPA. It's about exercising some mental muscle.
God, I sound like a public service announcement.
The other thing that happened was that I discovered some serious cheating on the last exam. This is the first time I've found such a blatant example. The really sad thing is that the guilty student is really nice. But he/she is also a total stress-case and probably freaked during the exam and just peaked at his/her neighbor. Now I've got to deal with the situation. Ugh. Had this happened a few years ago when I was just starting out, I probably would have just brushed it under the rug, but my philosophy on such things has changed. I'm not so concerned with students liking me - getting tenure helps with that. I'm sick of seeing people who don't take responsibility (observe any level of government, business or dysfunctional family) and end up getting in trouble because they're not facing the reality of the situation. It's a shitty cycle and one that I don't want to help propagate.
Therefore, I will find myself feeling like a total schmuck telling a nice person they did something wrong and penalizing them severely for it. I wonder if this is what parenting is like.
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