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?”
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!
You should make your sprogs grade the fucking papers!