I'm on a low-fat ranch dressing diet.

This summer, I've been teaching two sections of a first-year college composition course, and currently I'm reading through a stack of rough drafts for the last paper of the semester. My progress has been slow. No, it's not because of the heat; I wisely placed my desk next to the AC and have been quite comfortable--strategic fan placement has also helped. It wasn't until just a few minutes ago that it dawned on me what the problem could be.

I'm trying to help them while fighting the urge to make them write like me in the process.

Without realizing it, I've been struggling within to keep from marking up drafts with an overabundance of specifics. I sit down to read each paper and am seeing exactly what I think is wrong and implicitly what I would do to fix it--if it was mine. As an instructor, I should have a pretty good grasp on what makes a scholarly, professional-grade paper, but polishing up these drafts to get to that level is not my job; my job is to guide by suggestion so they do the work, so they learn from the experience.

I guess I'm learning something as well, because it's much more of a challenge than I thought to find that fine line between telling them what to do as opposed to pointing out what they've done and nudging them in the right direction. Off the top of my head, there are a couple issues I can see with this.

First, if I give them a diagrammed walk-through on their edits, the papers come back with minimal errors (assuming they followed directions), and everyone passes with flying colors. Great and good, but I question how much would be learned by just following the recipe in order to get done. I can't help but think that the writing in subsequent classes may suffer as a result. Call me a pessimist, but I doubt it would be long before administration starts to investigate why the average grade in my class is so high and then crashes right afterward.

On the other hand, if my comments are too general, then revisions will most likely be minimal due to confusion and/or frustration, and worse yet, no one has learned anything except that writing sucks because it's so hard. And possibly that the instructor is a jerk because he gives bad grades for no seemingly no reason.

I hear seasoned veterans, those teachers who've been in the trenches for a while, say that it takes time to find a routine. They say it gets faster with experience. I'm not saying I don't believe them; I'm just hoping I don't get to the point where I sway too far one way or the other for the sake of speed.

The storm is brewing.

To take advantage of this first paragraph, I regret to inform that there are absolutely no pictures of the party I mentioned in my last post. That's ok though, because all they would've shown is drunk people talking and playing Apples to Apples. In fact, we played that game all night. It seemed like we played a round until someone got six cards, dispersed for conversation and to refill drinks, and then came back to play yet another round. By the time we quit, we suspected that we had used all the adjective cards. Of course, we realized this after berating random individuals for not putting the old cards back on the bottom of the stack. I'm sure the alcohol was responsible for our sluggish epiphany - and there was plenty of that to be had. There were gin and tonics, a bottle of rum, bloody marys, Dewars on the rocks, a bottle of some sort of Phillipino rum that smelled like Saki and received reactions varying from passive to outright disgust, and plenty of beer. It was fairly low key and no, there was no need for pictures.

Now back to the present; this is day two of my tour as a grad student, and I'm already starting to feel as if I've infiltrated the ranks of some secret club. It wouldn't be so bad if I actually had earned an undergrad degree in English, or even taken an English class for that matter. No, I had to start in computer science (which doesn't mean computer geeks don't read, it just means that they're not stereotypically a crowd that gets into literary discussions) and then end up in German. Thankfully, the beginning of the semester so far is going to be chock full of reading reading reading. I can handle that. In fact, no offense against any of my German classes or teachers, but it looks like even though I'm going to be busy all the time, this is going to be worlds easier than translating nearly everything I read or write. It's going to be the last half of the semester that's going to get a little hairy, I think, because that's when most of the writing is going to be done. I also learned that us grad students from one of my classes are going to be making a wikipedia literature review. I'll be sure to link that when it comes to fruition.

And speaking of translation, I did actually sign up to audit the translation course that I took as independent study last semester. I was invited to take it if I had time to see how it is in an actual classroom setting. It will be good to keep the German somewhat fresh in my head, considering I still have some books in German that I haven't read yet and would like to be able to tackle them without feeling like I need to relearn the language. Auditing will be nice, because I'm already suspecting that I won't be able to make one of the two weekly times, so I can still get the refresher without stressing about making up work that I miss.

As a closer, the reason I might be missing my class is because of my GA responsibilities. I have a meeting later this week to get more details and iron out a schedule, but the links my professor gave me reveal that I'll be assisting with the Final Thursday Press and Final Thursday Reading Series. I have to say, I am pretty psyched to be a part of this, because I've always meant to attend and never did. Now I have reason, and who knows, maybe I'll even take the opportunity to get in front of the mic and convince some friends of mine that should to do the same.

I need to stop typing now, because things keep coming to my mind, but time is working against me and I have places to be. Time is something I'm finding that is going to be a rare commodity very soon. I need to fully enjoy this week while I can.