\n
Stage I<\/h4>\n
Stage I begins in benign resentment. You\u2019re determined, this time, not to let those 80 term papers and final exams destroy you. It won\u2019t be like the last grading marathon at semester\u2019s end. You will stay in charge. You have 800 pages to grade, 400 on American Drama and 400 on Literary Theory. You take out your purple grading pen.<\/p>\n
\u201cPower serves as an overhanging subconscious,\u201d says the first sentence. You experience your first twinges of pain. But it\u2019s mild, still mild. You can still giggle at the assertion that \u201cwe adopt our social roles in order to panda to society.\u201d You picture your social role\u2014your teacher persona\u2014as a black-and-white herbivore performing in a zoo for a crowd of unruly students. Then a character in a play you read this semester, you learn, suffers from \u201cpost-dramatic stress disorder.\u201d He\u2019s also in a \u201cpost-depressive state.\u201d You\u2019re still pre-, but barely.<\/p>\n
Stage II<\/h4>\n
Stage II presents with mild but steady localized pain, mostly along the GI tract, and an inability to concentrate. Despair is still contained, but it\u2019s eyeing the lymphatic system\u2019s freedom train. Women are \u201cco-modified.\u201d Men are \u201cdiscluded.\u201d Role models are \u201cimmolated.\u201d Passages are \u201ctaken out of context due to objective reality.\u201d \u201cOften times\u201d is everywhere.<\/p>\n
Bad things are happening to language.<\/p>\n
Martin Luther King, Jr. is \u201cAfrican,\u201d while Shakespeare\u2019s Othello is \u201cAfrican American,\u201d and Shylock is \u201ca Hebrew.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stage\u00a0III<\/h4>\n
This stage manifests in moderate but bearable generalized pain. However, the despair\u2014still unregistered\u2014has entered the bloodstream. You have 400 pages to go. The mind slips and slides, rebels and resists.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn patriarchy, women subvert to men.\u201d<\/p>\n
You could cry at the injustice of crimes against language.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe son remains in an imago consciousness while his father is alive, producing a haze of control around the lives he encounters.\u201d<\/p>\n
More haze than control. And the fog is thickening.<\/p>\n
\u201cSherman Alexie makes many unreliable opinions and dissertations, these constant changing attributes allow for irreverence towards his dominance.\u201d<\/p>\n
You fantasize about just giving everyone an A. You fantasize about giving everyone an F.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs her struggle with God to be taken simply for what it is,\u201d a student asks of a character, \u201cor does it represent something deeper?\u201d<\/p>\n
There are struggles deeper than the struggle with God.<\/p>\n
Stage IV.<\/h4>\n
With 200 pages still to go, you hit Stage IV. Malignant language has become metastatic. It invades organs, swarms synapses. Death is inevitable. You are awash in despair.<\/p>\n
And then: Zen. You reach the level of hysteria where language abuse crosses over into poetry. In a series of papers on an odd little play about the digital afterlife, you find the observation, \u201cTechnology keeps people alive after they are dead,\u201d only to be succeeded, shortly after, with \u201cIt is not conventional to live although dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
With ten more papers to go, you take a moment to marvel. Yes, it\u2019s true, \u201cthe world is becoming less real\u201d and \u201cwe now have cell phones instead of psyches\u201d and, most fabulous of all, \u201cthe surreal life is full of dead people being alive.\u201d<\/p>\n
You\u2019re so punch-drunk with language-love that you go back to the \u201cpanda to society\u201d that you\u2019d circled earlier and add a smiley face. You become one with comma splices and run-on sentences and dangling-ass modifiers, having once been someone who was alive and had a psyche but now knowing you are dead language ghosting the surreal afterlife with a purple pen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From McSweeney\u2019s \u2026 the four stages of grading: THE STAGES OF GRADING. BY\u00a0DEBBY THOMPSON \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 Stage I Stage I begins in benign resentment. You\u2019re determined, this time, not to let those 80 term papers and final exams destroy you. It won\u2019t be like the last grading marathon at semester\u2019s end. You will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"yoast_head":"\n
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