20141006.0712

The mid-semester grind is upon me again. I am perhaps halfway through the current term, and I am beginning to feel overwhelmed by the work and by the tedium. There is grading to do, of course, with student projects coming in today as they did on Friday, and my own work still presses upon me, too often shunted to the side in favor of my freelance paying gigs or what I am supposed to do on behalf of the few students who actually care and the entirely too many who do not. How I will ever get caught up, I do not know, for I continue to carry fatigue despite making sure I go to bed earlier and, for the most part, sleeping straight through the night.

If I call it a grind, I have to call myself the grist. (With the image only now coming to me, I find that I wish I had thought to write a bit of verse today. Ah, well.) I feel I have been uprooted and stripped of much that was part of me and am now being turned over and over under the millstone or under the pounding of a water-current-driven hammer, a wooden pole thumping upon my head again and again. There is some consolation in the certainty that I have something in me worth having, else I would not be subject to the treatment, but that does not mean that the treatment is enjoyable--nor what is to come. For the ground grain is gathered as flour, wet and kneaded and baked and eaten; who will consume me? (Damn, but I wish I had had the image earlier and written it as a poem!)

Others are worse off, I know. I chose this kind of life, I know. That remarking takes up time and energy that could be better spent otherwise, I know. All vitiate against my making complaint (although I would note that we do not condemn those who "work hard" for groaning at rising once again to face the day or noting the aches and pains attendant upon their work). Yet still I feel it must be said. Still I feel that not enough is noted about what the work that most who teach do does to those who do it, or not enough of it is heard. For the work of teaching seems bounded by the classroom, and it is often only dimly and later that its effect is known. The work of grading that takes up so much time is done away from the eyes of others, save the unfortunate few who happen to love those of us who do it (unfortunate because we are not only gone from them in doing the work of teaching but in doing the work of grading; the multiple-choice test makes more sense from that perspective). (Damn, but I should have written this as a poem!) It is not seen, so it is not understood, and because it is not understood, it is dismissed.

The bell needs to ring to have the class resume.