Bear

I feel sorry for those closest to me at this time of year. I'm generally fairly bearish physically year 'round, but during the last week or so of a semester I act like a bear too. I lumber around the house like a caged thing, growling and snapping at anything that moves. It ain't a pretty sight.

Why?

Mostly it's to do with my job. I love what I do 90% of the time. The other 10% is the time when I have stacks of papers to grade. And I'll have stacks of papers to grade from now through the 18th, two weeks' worth of werebear behavior behind the closed door of my office and at home.

During those two weeks, I'll find plenty of decent sentences and paragraphs, and plenty of ideas worth the time it takes me to read them. But plenty isn't always enough. In between the good pieces of writing and the most interesting topics will be lots of poorly written papers on poorly thought-out topics. Most of the students could do better than they do, but they don't--for whatever reason.

Actually, I should be more honest. I teach one class filled with some twenty-three of the brightest of ETSU's freshman class and another class combining graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. I'll do so much better than many of my colleagues who are teaching two sophomore lit sections populated with that strange range of students who care and those who don't. Then there are the many folks teaching freshman composition and grading ten times the number of papers I have to grade. (Some adjuncts--between ETSU and Northeast State Technical Community College--teach four, five or six sections of freshman composition!)

Still, selfishly not caring that some people have it worse than I, I'll continue to snap and growl--and occasionally scratch my back against a door post--until this period of grading is over. Then I'll return to being the happy-go-lucky wrestling bear in a traveling show or the trick bear decked out in Christmas ribbons and sitting on the ice with a bottle of Coke or a cold holiday beer between my paws.