I haven't been writing because respiration has been hard...literally and figuratively.
Veteran mothers will nod or shake their heads at my naive assumption that the seventh month of waiting for the big event would be as smooth and uneventful as the sixth one.
Besides chewing my humble pie meekly, I am also trying to express agreement in any way that I can (moving whatever limb isn't tortured by spasms) that now I feel like a beached whale, a trite but true metaphor.
But more than just surviving the rude awakening of being in the third semester, I am grading (or marking, as we say here in Hong Kong) papers and exams.
I presume that some angelic faculty enjoy performing this labor of love. I wish I were still full of verve and excitement at the end of a long semester to ooh and ah over their magnificent ideas, expressed fluently and vividly in a variety of forms.
But no, I am exhausted and humorless after giving the last exam (before which everyone in the class, including me, has panicked for days if not weeks).
So unfortunately for my students, I usually choose to grin and bear the task, one paper/exam at a time.
I didn't expect this round of grading to be different, except of course, as indicated above, my physical condition makes it hard for me to be as productive as I usually am. Nights are especially difficult because I expand (like an automated balloon) and so breathing, sitting, standing, lying down (virtually any position), and thinking all become very challenging.
I am used to working around the clock, save for the hours that I am sleeping (or am semi-comatose because I should be sleeping but am trying to get a few more things done), but now, I have to endure several hours of semi-productive existence every day.
All in all, it has not been the best of times (inadvertent borrowing from Charles Dickens) but for once in a long while, I have been very happy and daresay, astonished (in a positive way) by how some of my students have performed on their final assignments.
I have gotten to know quite a number of them through their papers in a different way than I did in class, and a few that I worried about throughout the semester seem to have pulled through and absorbed more than I assumed they did.
I may be overgeneralizing when I say that most university faculty are like parents -- they want their students to succeed (contrary to students' beliefs that professors withhold good grades deliberately and want to blight their academic records) and feel terrible (arguably worse than the poorly performing students) when they read sub-par papers and exams -- so it's a huge mood-booster to encounter these instances of "surprise success."
Veteran mothers will nod or shake their heads at my naive assumption that the seventh month of waiting for the big event would be as smooth and uneventful as the sixth one.
Besides chewing my humble pie meekly, I am also trying to express agreement in any way that I can (moving whatever limb isn't tortured by spasms) that now I feel like a beached whale, a trite but true metaphor.
But more than just surviving the rude awakening of being in the third semester, I am grading (or marking, as we say here in Hong Kong) papers and exams.
I presume that some angelic faculty enjoy performing this labor of love. I wish I were still full of verve and excitement at the end of a long semester to ooh and ah over their magnificent ideas, expressed fluently and vividly in a variety of forms.
But no, I am exhausted and humorless after giving the last exam (before which everyone in the class, including me, has panicked for days if not weeks).
So unfortunately for my students, I usually choose to grin and bear the task, one paper/exam at a time.
I didn't expect this round of grading to be different, except of course, as indicated above, my physical condition makes it hard for me to be as productive as I usually am. Nights are especially difficult because I expand (like an automated balloon) and so breathing, sitting, standing, lying down (virtually any position), and thinking all become very challenging.
I am used to working around the clock, save for the hours that I am sleeping (or am semi-comatose because I should be sleeping but am trying to get a few more things done), but now, I have to endure several hours of semi-productive existence every day.
All in all, it has not been the best of times (inadvertent borrowing from Charles Dickens) but for once in a long while, I have been very happy and daresay, astonished (in a positive way) by how some of my students have performed on their final assignments.
I have gotten to know quite a number of them through their papers in a different way than I did in class, and a few that I worried about throughout the semester seem to have pulled through and absorbed more than I assumed they did.
I may be overgeneralizing when I say that most university faculty are like parents -- they want their students to succeed (contrary to students' beliefs that professors withhold good grades deliberately and want to blight their academic records) and feel terrible (arguably worse than the poorly performing students) when they read sub-par papers and exams -- so it's a huge mood-booster to encounter these instances of "surprise success."
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