Grading and facebook

It's once again that time of year when blood starts shooting from my eyeballs as I grind through another set of term papers. It hasn't been a good teaching term for me. Too much of the time, my thoughts have been outside the classroom walls. At several crucial moments, my mind has been pulled out of the room. The course that is normally my favourite one to teach turned into pure drudgery -- it needs a complete overhaul. These are the sad thoughts that preoccupy me as I try to find of a hundred different ways to say 'I know you could have done better, but I understand how small a part of your life this paper was....' All of these feelings have been reinforced this term by my recent, very timid, entry into the world of Facebook. This is an online social network that is most popular with high school and university students. As I browse through profiles, I notice that I am the oldest member I've found so far. Interestingly, it is a world populated by many of my students. I look them up to see what they've been doing while they've been claiming to be too busy to turn in assignments on time. There's a thundering amount of drinking going on. There's also, from time to time, a nasty comment about me, my teaching style, my course. My ego is small enough that this doesn't hurt, but it's far more useful than any course evaluation has ever been -- I've already figured out what the structural problems are in the course I've just finished, and I really don't mind all the little epithets.

On Facebook itself, I won't even try to add to the din. It's obviously a dangerous thing for many. Imagine writing email to friends, but allowing anybody who stumbles along to read the mail. Interestingly, you can make conversations private, but most people seem to choose not to. It's like overhearing interesting gossip in an elevator, but the elevator is globe-sized. It strikes me as one more step along the long road to our not really being anywhere, but that's a post for another day. At present, my brain is slowly turning to a mound of soft cheese curds as I peruse the limpid prose of a group of students who, with a few nice exceptions, would rather have been anywhere else than in my class this past semester.