Saturday, December 09, 2006

In which I am... not right

I'm halfway through this last batch of grading and I just... enh. Nothing's particularly wrong with any of them, but nothing's spectactular, either. They're all solid A- papers, which is not a bad thing by any means, but I'm feeling... not right. I don't know if I'm not in a good enough mood to be grading, or not in a cranky enough place. I should be happy that this batch of upperclassmen know enough to foreground their claims, to engage with the quotations, to have a position from which to argue, but I'm getting hung up on their inability to format quotations and put the quotation marks in before the parenthetical citation.

I'm not sure what this feeling is that I'm sucked into right now. It's not the Mean Reds, it's not cranky, it's not depressed, it's just minorly annoyed with the ongoing minutae of day-to-day life. Which I'm not even engaged with, since I've left my apartment, like, twice in the last week. I have no excuse. It's almost like bershon, but the grown-up version, where the object of disgust is my pajama-wearing self.

But halfway done! Eleven more!

Oh, and I forgot to report back on What I Learned from My Teaching Observation. I don't get the official feedback from my observers until Monday, but I watched the tape and learned that I 1) wave my hands around my face all the damn time, making me look like I'm doing some kind of seizure-inflected dance, 2) say "all right?" and "yes?" pretty much constantly (I'm thinking about replacing the first with "aiight?"), and 3) I read textual quotations much too fast. C. says that, shockingly, my teaching approach, performance-wise, mirrors his. Because, of course, we share a brain. Which is just as romantic as it sounds.

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