finished semester but no break in sight

Blame the light blogging on too much work, too little sleep, and not enough hands. I finished grading in record time because the papers were very short. I may drop this assignment for the summer because it's the summer and it will give me time to think about whether I want to continue it in the fall. Perhaps the deliberations on the value of this assignment deserve a separate post, but not today. I'm considering dropping it only because it is autobiographical, and those are so hard to grade. How do you give someone a bad grade on a paper about their parents' divorce or their best friend's suicide, no matter how badly written it is? So the question is not if this assignment is valuable--I think it is--but if I can use it responsibly. Good news is that despite some unusually high grades on the last paper, the final grades turned out exactly as I thought they should. It's nice when you get to the end of the semester, look at how it all turned out in the end, and agree with the outcome. It's not fun when you get to the end and wonder, how did this person not get an A? Or how did this guy manage to pass?

So now I have to finish revising my essay that is being published. I have signed a contract for it, but I still have a fear that in the end it will be thrown out. I won't believe it until I see it in print. I think my insecurity about it is based on my current, less-than-ideal working situation--sleep-deprived, hormonal, and stealing bits of time here and there to work on it. But I did a whole year of coursework in that state, and it worked out alright. By the time I finish the article, it will be time to start summer school, and somewhere in the midst of that, I'll be moving somewhere. Still don't know where or when. I'm just teaching one class in the summer, so I won't be too overworked. And so far it looks like a very small class, so maybe I won't have massive amounts of grading to do. I do have some preparation to do for this because even though I'm teaching the same class with the same book, it's in the summer and totally online, so there's some adapting to do.

Enough rambling. This post has bored even me.