Good luck abstracting the universal from this one

Being a teacher has been bloody enlightening in a number of ways, especially since I spent so many years being taught. For one thing, I now understand the hostility that teachers tend to direct at smart(ass) kids: because the little bastards are fucking with your lesson plan. You do not want to fuck with the lesson plan, shorty. The lesson plan is all that stands between the teacher and a classroom full of bored 18-year-olds with 40 minutes to go in the lesson and there's just been a memo about not letting them out early and there's nothing up your sleeve sweet heaven what are you going to do? This is the kind of existential crisis that leads my lamer colleagues to play Hangman for upwards of forty minutes, when by rights Hangman should not be "played" by anyone who's mastered the multiplication table.*

But that's not what I do. I'm far more sophisticated: I write the word "Sexcapades" on the board, and say, "In groups. Discuss." Because come on, that's all they want to talk about anyway, that and beercapades. Come to think of it, that's pretty much all I want to talk about, and I'm, hey, almost four years older than some of them.

This has all been a long tangent on the way to revealing: I am a really unfair grader. Well, I'm not, according to my lights...it's just that the test formats I've painstakingly come up with turn out to be kind of subjective when I actually get around to grading said tests. This can be blamed to some extent on the fact that I do the absolute minimum required to meet each successive deadline as it comes upon me...my motto is, fuck the stitch in time, let's have a beer and we'll just do nine tomorrow at the last minute! And then I curse my lazy ways the next day, but whatever, I had a good time the night before.

Speaking of procrastinating...I haven't posted anything, or answered emails, or anything for the past few days because I'm so damn busy. But this current flood of eloquence? Is because there are literally fifty phonology exams on my desk, that I should really grade before tomorrow. And it's 9pm now. Whoo.

But so anyways. I'm realizing, as I grade the fairly subjective sections of the phonology exams, that the grade I give the kid is largely dependent on how much I like the kid. This isn't as unfair as it sounds; I like a lot of the kids, but especially the ones who speak English well and participate in class actively. And, um, laugh at my jokes. Hey, it shows comprehension! And knowing what side their bread is buttered on!

And this makes me realize that probably most teachers do this. Not on, like, strictly math exams, I guess. But exams like the ones we took at the college? Totally...I don't even think you can help it, to some extent.

I'm not sure what point I was making with this. I'm just going to hit Publish now. And then I'm going to grade those bleeding Phonology exams. Yeah.

*except for the time we were driving back from Berkeley in toque's tiny little no-AC VW, all the way down the 5 in July, and I was in the backseat next to clara, and we seriously thought the skin on our legs was going to meld to the seats it was that fucking hot, and so after we got bored of trying to get bauble to flirt with girls in other cars,** we played hangman on the back of an envelope. the first word was "buttcheeks", and it was downhill from there. and then when it finally got cooler, we tried to roll up the windows some, and then we discovered exactly how much we'd all been sweating, and we rolled them right the hell back down again....good memories.

**and it worked! he smiled at them! and several of them smiled back so hard they almost ran off the road!