It's starting to look like something. Instead of working on it for thirty minutes and getting pissed off and quitting I worked on it for six times as long, but eventually gave up and went to bed to think about it there or at least find success in doing other things. Maybe it's just the brush selection. Or maybe it's that I just hate drawing flowers and have always struggled with drawing them up close. Or maybe it's that I haven't spent enough time looking at flowers before. Really committing them to memory. I've certainly spent, when I think about it, at least 1000 times more minutes looking at schematics, machines, and geometric constructions in general. Perhaps there is porting that can be done. Reduce the organic to the geometric, fix the perspective there and then port it back to the organic. It's bothering me, in case I haven't made that clear. An unscratchable itch that I have to prove to myself is not unscratchable, but merely located in a place that's hard to reach, but reachable. I hate flowers.
So while I was asleep I had the pleasure of grading papers. At the end. Well, not the end. But in the second dream. The first dream was pretty awesome. I went to the pacific rim and started a new life as a bounty hunter in Oceania. It was all well and good. Then things got bloody and did not end well at all, but that's a story for another time. I'm going to talk about the boring epiphany. So I'm sitting there grading these papers and the papers are both written by potheads, except that I already know what happens to them in the future because I've gone back in time to grade their work as college freshman. I already know one of them is going to run off and work for big name companies out of the gate and I already know the other one is going to end up dropping out and moving in with his mother and working for Borders until they go bankrupt.
I'm reading the writing notes and they're both there in the classroom after school waiting to see what their grades are because the papers will make or break both of their years in my class and as I finish up and go back to reread the stories along with my first impression notes I start ticking things off in columns labeled B, S, and N. I have no idea what the labels mean or their relevance to a fiction class so I pull my perspective back out of my head and I ask the me/not me doing the grading what the columns and labels are for and he tells me "B stands for believable, S stands for continuity, and N stands for noticeable." I ask the grader a follow up question: what do you mean by noticeable? He answers, "noticeable means a moment in the story where the reader notices something and commits the action, event, item, whatever the subject or object being read about is, to their active memory reserved for things they would normally encounter, care about, or keep track of in their own lives and for their own sake." Aha, says I and then I climbed back into my head and went back to reading and grading.
I can't remember exactly what the successful pothead's story was about, but it was pretty boring to grade. All of the things that were supposed to be there were there, but it was obvious that he had no interest in writing and was taking the course for required credit so I found myself loosening my standards mainly to avoid having to deal with arguing about it when I handed him his paper, but also because I couldn't bring myself to nail him on finer points when the subject he chose to write about was thin, safe, and bland to begin with. I didn't think about it at the time as rewarding mediocrity or the ultra conservative, "cover your bases", approach that tends to net good grades in Universities, but thinking about it now it was a pretty slanted thing to do.
The second paper was much more interesting. It was a story about a boy who promises to help his mother kill herself before winter after being disgraced by her husband's lascivious activities in the new year that came to light just as the summer began. The husband leaves her in the same week school ends and the boy is home with his mother throughout the summer months and into fall when he finally begins to realize what he's agreed to help her do and it's impact on his life as school begins again. That's when I got to see the new grading system in action. The columns were divided into rows labeled A, B, C, D, and F. For the continuity category an X in a row meant that was the grade earned. For every other category you started the strikes at the bottom of the column and moved upward to an A. So five noticeable moments meant a technical A. Five continuity issues meant a technical F. Five moments of the suspension of disbelief meant a technical A. There was also built in consideration for length. For short stories, one strike was all that was allowed per letter grade. Middle and longer lengths and word counts meant more ground for the student to cover so additional strikes were made available, two then three per letter grade etc. For particularly short papers letters could be knocked off of the scale so that a person couldn't score an F for not packing enough junk into a paper to satisfy the system and help prevent people from playing to the syllabus or the requirements. And of course more columns could be added or eliminated as subject matter, literary devices, and exercises demanded. Though that did not stop me from allowing it to happen despite the mechanisms in place to alert me to it.
There were continuity issues. Lots of continuity issues. Not impressionistic issues, but just hard de facto mistakes of alignment for a five page story. There were also many, many, many believable moments and moments where I was committing pieces of the story to my memory as though I were reading about neighbors or friends that I thought I knew. The first paper did the same thing, albeit with far less subtlety. So I ended up in a situation where the second paper scored two As and an F. Averaged out to a C. From the stand point of "as hard a science as something subjective as grading papers can be." In the end I tuned the C up to a B for the other points of craftsmanship that can't really be covered and agreed upon in the realm of the lowest common denominator of general and identifiable human experience. I probably should have tuned the other paper from an A to a B as well for rote underachievement.
As a grading system it struck me as fairly useful as a starting point for getting a sense of issues, strengths, and weaknesses. But also as a starting point for conversation, discussion, and argument about grades being given out. Using it, I could explain to student A why their paper of X length graded out better than student B's paper of Y length without having to think back to what I was thinking about when I scribbled the notes I scribbled and then have to hunt through the nebulous territory of assigning those thoughts to grades. Now I had a way of saying "everything else aside, this is why you got this score" and "all things considered in concert, this is how my personal opinion and subjectivity changed that score." It was a pretty detailed dream for half an hour of sleeping. Not as ridiculous or action packed as the other dream, but just as good.
I made that this afternoon. Just trying to get away from failure and into a little success. Turned out exactly how I wanted it too. I wish there was a way to make it rain in the summer time. Anything to peel back the heat. Summer really is the most miserable set of months known to man. Gotta move farther north. Since there is no cloud generator available. I'll tell you about the other dream later. I'll try and draw it up a little more. Get back to doing what I love to do when I'm not writing or out getting dirty playing in the sun or at home moping and cringing against the ticks of time. I wanted to do some paper crafts today, but I'm out of time - because I went out to play for three hours instead of working, but I still think I managed to better myself either way. Oh well. Sorry to bore you. I guess not every day is a hustle. Some days are a shuffle. Or maybe just a think. And now I'm tired and I still have to go to work so, let's get it on. And by get it on I mean dive into sleep. Might try to cross the bridge for a little while and see what's going on in Universe B. Or not. Those trips can be just as tiring as walking these planes some days.
See ya later.
///Boards of Canada - "Seeya Later" I have to leave, but wait up for me. I'll be back soon.
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