Friday, February 21, 2014

so i'm sitting in my husband's cubicle at my old high school. the chatter of all my old teachers blends with the randomest collection of songs my ipod could possibly give me to form a hum of background noise. i'm grading graduate student papers on incident response. i'm drinking black tea with mint from a beauty and the beast thermos. there is such an overlap of adultish me and teenage me at the moment that i'm not sure what to do with myself. i don't think surreal is the word i'm looking for, but it feels something. the part of me that never really understood how to grow my vocabulary wants to say weird and leave it at that, but it's like a specific brand of weird. a certain weirdness that makes me feel like i'm taking a step back from my life and watching it from the ceiling (and also mixing metaphors). it's not the visiting the past feeling that i get every other time i'm here (which is pretty often). it is more of a sitting in the present as the past forms a fog that swirls around me. i don't know if i'm making any sense so i'll just stop now.

on a different note, you may all remember my complaints from previous semesters about the papers that i had to grade. about students who didn't know how to string together a sentence or failed to comprehend exactly what a paragraph was. today i was grading the first assignment for one of the classes i TA for and  the quality of work has gone up exponentially. it's partly awesome (yay for education!) and partly not because there is suddenly so much more to grade. it's surprising how much faster grading goes when twelve students all submit the same paper and no one meets the page minimum. well, actually, i guess it's not really surprising at all. fingers crossed that the lab reports for the second class have improved as well. 

2 comments:

  1. i can imagine how weird that is. i've only been back at ISA twice before, one time for danya's graduation, and then omar's.

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    1. i feel like i'm there every other day. like, i was there on wednesday and friday of last week and then was told that honor roll is on monday so i'll be there then, too. which, in my opinion, is kind of ridiculous considering i graduated almost eight years ago.

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