Currently I am watching “Toddlers and Tiaras” on TLC. And I know I’ve been desensitized to the toddler-whore set up of all these pageants when I’m exclaiming that there’s no way in HELL Elexia should have won talent with her warbling, not when the Bronx girl was the WIND for her talent. For god’s sakes, the WIND. It was so… classy. And let’s not even talk about Morgan’s stripper dance. Let’s not even go there.

OH WAIT WHAT THE FUCK MORGAN WON THE HIGHEST TITLE. She’s fucking diamond supreme. With her stripper dance and everything. Well kudos to you, doll. You have the face of a 57 year old Floridian retiree and the wardrobe of an L.A. escort. Go on with your bad self.

Ha, sorry…. I don’t mean to be awful to these little girls. I’m sure they’re sweethearts and I’m sure they’re really having fun like their moms claim they are (“oh my little girl just LOVES the stage, she was born performin’ right on outta my womb!” )…. but yeah. This show is effing ridic. And I love it.

I had a long day, and when I got home I basically plunked my ass down (well, I ate and THEN plunked said ass) and watched tv. That’s it. Answered my phone when people called, watched shit-all tv. Hotness.

Got to Hburg at 7:15 to pick up my teaching friend, head over for coffee and then head over to the conference room so we can fill out paper work an hour before we’re supposed to start our assessment work. Thumbs up.

I got to see all my adjunct buddies, and it was wonderful. We were silly, we were exasperated with our crap summers, we were ready to make some money.

We spent the morning listening to coworkers bicker and bitch at each other about how to score essays. One man in particular, we shall call him DoucheNozzle, thought himself so important, so enlightened, that he had to speak up at EVERY GODDAMNED TURN we took during our “norming” process. At one point he was so far off the mark that the petulant little teacher’s pet in me couldn’t resist; I burst forth with a politely phrased yet strongly clear “YOU ARE WRONG DOUCHENOZZLE” argument that made everyone else glad I had said something. Because then they all took up pitchforks and rallied behind me. DoucheNozzle did not appreciate this, and argued maniacally with all of us until it was lunch time.

After a lunch that was more or less what you expect from the catering of a school that spends more on watering its lawn than in paying its part time faculty members, we hit the real work. The pay dirt. The essays.

I had to go through 20 essays, 10 portfolios with 2 essays each, and grade them according to the rubric of scores 1-4 that we had bickered about earlier.

This was MIND-RIPPING for me. Seriously. I get way too over-analytical when I do these kinds of things, and most of my analyses were stuck in between numbers. A 2.5 or 3.5 would have saved me a headache today, but nooooo. Must follow the whole number scale.

I got my 10 done, and tomorrow morning I get to speak with my small group (we’re TEAM C. We’ve already decided that TEAM C will be the party team. What happens on TEAM C will stay in TEAM C. The first rule about TEAM C is that you do not talk about TEAM C) and compare scores. We can’t change our scores, but we get to hit the next 20 portfolios (joy! 40 papers more to go!) with a better sense of how we’re all scoring things, what we see as deserving whatever number scores, blah blah fucking blah.

DoucheNozzle is not in TEAM C. Thank baby Jeebus.

I had a lot of shitty papers today. My portfolio grades went as follows:

1 “4″, which is the equivalent of an A rating.
2 “3″s, which is the next step down but is basically a “passing and doing well” score.
6 “2″s, not a good score but better than outright flunking.
1 “1″, which just… sucked a lot.

Sooo… yes. A lot of suck.

The weirdest paper set award goes to the nutjob who turned in two very abstract, very… um… experimental? pieces which had no possible way of being graded according to our rubric.

The first was a 6 page pseudo-scifi technophobic pretentious rant that probably started with the concept of commenting on our society’s dependence on digital doo-daddery and ended up sounding like the kid got high, read some shitty indie modern anti-socialite blog and spewed this crap onto the page. It was roughly reminiscent of everything stereotypical from 1984, Brave New World, the Matrix. A little to late there, killer. Better luck next time.

His second paper was a “proposal paper” that tried to obtain and bottle the meaning of life. I just scrawled “PRETENTIOUS LITTLE SHIT” all over my note sheet and gave him a 2. I’m interested to see what the others had to say.

(I assumed it was a male writer. Something about this just screamed UNHAPPY ANTI-SOCIAL MALE OSTRACIZED BY MANY AND TRYING SO HARD TO MAKE NOT FITTING IN COOL THAT IT HURTS A LITTLE. Maybe because I was usually friends with those dudes in high school. Who knows.)

The worst textual line I found all day has stuck with me even to this point. Word for word. This was just so… horribly stupid and wrong, I can’t even explain. It was from a paper about rape victims and how they’re taken advantage of and put on trial when attempting to report a rape. So this person started with a valid claim about our justice system, but it devolved into this wandering, incoherent rant about “the man” and how EVERYONE ALWAYS mistreats the victim (broad sweeping claims that, without accurate supporting evidence, have no place in an argumentative essay) and this person decided to use the stripper from Duke as an example. The line that blew my mind was this:

“Some people would say that stripper asked for trouble since she went there, but she was there to dance, not to get raped.”

O.o

I cannot explain to you how loud my snort was in a conference room full of professors working silently to finish their quota. It was far, far far too loud.

Add to all of this the painfully long time allotted to doling out directions to us, people with Master’s degrees, pHD’s, etc…. telling us how to pick up folders from a table 3 FUCKING TIMES. And then demonstrating it. I mean…. wow.

So tomorrow is a brand new day. Another chance to get paid for such shenanigans. And I’m feeling just fine with it, yessiree.