Counter-bitching

I complain about my job and my students so much that I feel as though I should swing the karma the other way for a bit. Today, I was thanked by a first-year student for pushing her so hard, after I congratulated her on coming from an insecure student and a bad writer who was prone to weeping unnecessarily and uncontrollably in my office to a confident, talented reader of poetry and a rigorous critical thinker in one semester. It was a pleasant post-semester exchange of academic back-patting.

And yesterday, an undergrad who wrote an excellent, possibly original pipece on The Faerie Queene came to ask my advice for working it into a conference paper or a publication. She wants to do independent research! She wants to do more than is expected of her! What the hell?

So it's not all bad, even at Nowhere College. Six of my students failed and not many got A grades, but sometimes surprisingly encouraging things do happen.

That said, I have more hilariously awful bits of student writing to show you all.