{"id":656,"date":"2006-07-31T18:35:57","date_gmt":"2006-07-31T22:35:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=656"},"modified":"2006-07-31T18:35:57","modified_gmt":"2006-07-31T22:35:57","slug":"grading-doggerel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=656","title":{"rendered":"Grading doggerel"},"content":{"rendered":"

profgrrl<\/a> inspired me, even though I’m not teaching this summer:
\nIn grading some are at their best
\nbut others can get quite depressed
\nwhen marking “wrong” and sometimes “right”
\nand eat and grade all through the night.
\n(Halvah’s great, but M&Ms
\nfeed the brain cells and the stem.
\nWhat helps read mensch<\/em> or plain mean jerks?
\nFor me, just theobromine<\/a> works.)
\nFor those who come from overseas,
\nculture gap’s far from a breeze,
\nthey must think U.S. students nuts,
\nall pupils who think with their… lower spines.
\n(I exaggerate, of course.
\nWho work as hard as a horse
\nwill earn high grades and my respect,
\nbecoming close to the Elect.)
\nThe homesick blues I’ve seen in peers?
\nThe folks who all dissolve in tears?
\nThe stuff most prone to gradingology?
\nYep, it’s paleontology.
\nSix TAs in a lecture hall
\nthought it all was just a ball
\nuntil they had to grade the final.
\nThen they learned the screaming primal.
\nSix TAs from overseas
\nwho though that grad school was a breeze,
\nwho hadn’t met their match, quite yet,
\nBut horrors waited, you can bet.
\nThey fought through hundreds of exams.
\nThey read Sue’s, Al’s, and even Sam’s.
\nThey marked some unreadable text
\nand purple pictures of T. Rex.
\nThey X<\/strong>‘d some here , and cross-hatched there,
\nand slowly they pulled out their hair.
\nGreen pen for wrong and blue for right.
\nAnd red their eyes half through the night.
\nWhen all was graded, all was done.
\nThey squinted at the rising sun.
\nFour were left as psych-job wrecks,
\nthe other two were just blue Czechs.*<\/a>
\nPlease treat your TAs kindly, peers,
\nand don’t ignore the flowing tears.
\nTheir organizing’s not a sin,
\nso show the grad school union in.<\/p>\n

\n*<\/a>—profgrrl’s poem refers to “blue checks.”
\n(And now I’ll flee with rapid run
\nfor writing such an awful pun.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

profgrrl inspired me, even though I’m not teaching this summer: In grading some are at their best but others can get quite depressed when marking “wrong” and sometimes “right” and eat and grade all through the night. (Halvah’s great, but M&Ms feed the brain cells and the stem. What helps read mensch or plain mean […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-aA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}