Hi, friends. It’s your on again off again newsletter pal. I hope you are well. I’m in the home stretch of a semester that’s felt simultaneously very long and extremely short. There’s a stack of grading to do, but it’s no longer endless. There’s nothing left to fret over. There is just the finishing. There is a kind of Make-it-Work energy that exists at the end of the semester I need to bottle. Yesterday, I was grading research papers. They are long and tedious and I try to do five a day—it shrinks the stack without causing despair. I’d graded two that were meh and wanted to stop. But I opened the third to see if it was going to be an easy grade or not. In the comment section, where students generally vent their frustrations about why they can’t get their margins right or why it’s an hour late, was this message: Prepare to be Amazed! I’m sure you could hear my laughter a block away. Was it amazing? Not so much. But the writer brought more energy to the essay than the two lifeless ones that proceeded it.
Thank you for this, Marsha! Here’s to finding the magic again.
Marsha McGregor