The Reader is Interested

I’m in the middle of grading.  Grading is not fun.  It’s important.  It’s the requisite counter-balance of the soaring discourse in class.  Did you, or you, or you apply yourself?  Well then.  Prove it.  But it takes time.  A great deal of time.  If you are a student who has come across this blog, rest assured.  It is because I take grading seriously that it proves so enervating.  Each of you deserve focus, and the utmost presence of mind.  And if I read your work and I go a paragraph or two and find I haven’t been concentrating, perhaps through no fault of yours, but rather, because I have considered forty-eight other people’s thoughts on this same topic, the only proper thing to do is to stop.  And go back.  And consider your voice again, as if it was a topic I was coming to fresh. 

My wife is busy too.  The girls aren’t busy. They are done with school.  They are, understandably, hungry.  My wife decides to bring home Chinese take-out.  Fair enough.  Some of you reading this, indeed, any of you reading this somewhere other than China can imagine what you will about what “Chinese take-out” might be or might taste like.  That’s not what I’m having. 

I am having reasonably good Chinese family-style food that is served up on plastic trays and in some cases mixed up together My daughter and my wife ate at a restaurant and brought me these plastic vessels home.  The choices are not exactly the ones I would have chosen, were I to have been there with them, ordering. There’s a lot of starchy things that are compromises in the Chinese menu of my mind.  But it’s alright.  I have just finished a call.  After that I have another call. 

Everyone struggles in their own way with writing.  Sometimes English is difficult for nonnative speakers.  Sometimes English is difficult for Americans.  I say that with the utmost humility.  English was and is difficult for me.  Sometimes a paper feels obligatory.  That’s not good.  Sometimes an essay feels aspirational.  That’s generally very good as the reader is interested in being taken somewhere.  I won't grade anymore tonight, after this call, because I need to come back to these essays with a sense of freshness.  Fresh isn't the adjective I'd choose to describe the way I feel just now. 

Wednesday, 6/19/19