No Relief In Sight

The essays keep piling up. There's so many of them. They are not going anywhere. They haunt me. I take them out of my teacher-satchel at home, spread them out on the table, and then promptly go watch the West Wing or read in our innovative "Hallway Lounge" (no one has ever thought of this before, really, this placing of comfy chairs and end tables in a hallway). The essays are ignored. At 5:45 in the a.m. I gather them back, put them in the bag and go to work. In the classroom, I put on the lamps, take them out, and find excuses to do other things. I hang the reward rings. I straighten desks and pre-pass out work. During my prep period I ready the rest of the day's lessons and activities, knowing I could maximize efficiency to grade like four of them, but I do not. I read about my alma mater's prospects for making it out of the Minneapolis bracket, the upsetting of the 1-seed I believe is all-but-inevitable. When the day ends, after my pseudo-optional 8th period reading intervention ("We just read?" "Yes." "Really? That's it?" "Yes."), I pack them back up and take them home. They are sitting next to me now, as old-school Clapton has mercifully replaced crap-ass techno in this-here Valencia Street coffee-shop. Right next to me. Talking to me. Whispering.

Grade them. Pick them up and start. It's really not that bad.
It is bad. It huuuuurrrrts.

They are fine. It's pretty good writing for ELL kids who could not write sentences in August.
It's stilted and awkward and unimaginative.

Yeah? And who's fault is that?
Mine. My fault. I made them write like that.

Why didn't you do better?
Because it looks good in class, and it sounds good in class, but when I go home it's like swallowing barbed wire. I haaaaaate it.

Suck it up and grade them.
What if I blog instead?

You're just making yourself miserable.
The techno was making me miserable. Tennessee getting a 2-seed over the alma mater makes me miserable. J.J. Reddick makes me miserable. This is on a higher level.

If it's that bad, throw them out. The kids'll never know.
You're right. 97% of them have forgotten ever writing these damn things.

Good. Throw them out and move on.
They'll haunt me. The visions of all that effort in a recycle bin that ends up in the same place as the regular garbage cans will haunt me.

You have a rubric. It won't take that long.
I feel guilty if I only use the rubric. I feel like I owe them personalized comments beyond the rubric.

The rubric is an 11 X 5 grid with detailed remarks within each box, as well as comments on the categorical scores they earn and their connection to traditional grades as well as your 3-in-1, 2-in-1, 1-in-1 evaluation mechanism.
Then why does, "Well done. I like your second R/A" feel superior?

Cuz you're literally insane, still struggling with the guilt that you demand a greater level of effort and achievement from your students than you ever demanded of yourself, a person with far greater opportunities to ease the travel down the ol' road of life, and such guilt manifests itself in a bizarre desire to over-do things that simply do not require the aforementioned over-doing, even as a measure of such over-doing might be perfectly acceptable and wildly successful if put into the big ticket items you occasionally formulate, but never fully develop, mostly because of the previously mentioned tendency to not demand the highest levels of achievement from yourself.
Shut up. Asshole.