Happy New Year

Perhaps the most difficult thing about being a professor is the final grades of fall semester. For me, there's no getting around the fact that my judgment ruins a fair number of people's Christmas. The joy and relief of being finished with a semester, and the long slog of grading final papers, is always tempered by the plaintive emails and meetings with students who will suffer rather harsh consequences from--in almost every case--their inability to simply follow directions or consistently submit even substandard work.

Intellectually, I can acknowledge that I don't fail people in my course; they fail themselves. Yet for some, the material results are sometimes devastating. The student who cannot graduate. The athlete who will lose a scholarship. The stakes are depressingly high for some, and no matter how often I remind myself that it is the student's responsibility to manage that risk, the solitary, quiet moments inevitably bring to mind imagined conversations with parents, blank stares at a mirror wondering what in the hell they will do next.