Gradedown! Post 5

Thursdays are usually given over to planning for section, so you might have imagined that my habits would lead me to focus on pushing through grading hebdomadals. Hah! Today was more of a packing (and video games) sort of day than yesterday was, but that's not to say it was a complete wash. If my counting skills aren't letting me down, I have left

• 31 exam essays
• 47 hebdomadals (still)

Unless I get overwhelmed trying to move my books tomorrow, it might in fact be possible to finish grading by the Tuesday deadline. (I have an ugly history of turning in my grades at the last possible second -- it's a wonder that MOR agreed to let me teach for him again.) Weirdly enough, all this blogging seems to have helped keep me on track. Huh.

I found that the second essay topic -- about violence in the action and structure of texts -- was a serious stumbling block. I've graded all the essays on the first (texts within texts) and second topics, and for some reason essays written on the first topic were substantially better than essays written on the second.

I wrote the second topic, actually, so it's really important to me that I figure out what went on here so I don't do it again. It doesn't seem to me that the second prompt is inherently more difficult than the first -- both ask writers to engage with structural and thematic analysis. Is it simply that we've had a couple of discussions that center around the texts-within-texts problem, and that we only began discussing violence last week?

By the way, if you could read through all the answers I got to this topic you might get a better understanding of why I appreciate essays that make use of unexpected texts. I read four essays in a row that looked at violence in "Porphyria's Lover," Disgrace, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The two of you who used Middlemarch get major props for venturing beyond the obvious -- thank you. (Weirdly, almost no one wrote about "Goblin Market." I guess it's hard to predict exactly what texts count as obvious.)

By the way, thank you guys for the comments on earlier Gradedown! posts: you're helping to keep me awake and working away.