Emotional Investment

I received my students' final papers yesterday and, for the most part, I'm awfully pleased. A few students appear to have fallen through the cracks and I have to try not to let that bother me too much. It's so tempting to bend over backwards to accommodate them and help them pass the course. On the other hand, there have to be rules and repercussions. Sigh. There's nothing I hate more than seeing a student do good work throughout the semester and then choose not to finish the final paper, or worse, and fail the course as a result. Sigh. What a shame. I'm just not very good at keeping myself sufficiently distanced from their work. I get excited when they submit good work, I"m disappointed when they don't, and I'm sad when they're frustrated or disappointed. But in the end my job is to judge the quality of their writing, not their effort, personality, or enthusiasm. I'm going to sit on the papers for a day and then spend most of tomorrow plowing through them, with the hopes of submitting grades by tomorrow night. That will leave me with four more days to finish my own paper. That's the other problem with being so invested in my students' work--it totally eats into the time and energy I have left for my own writing.

Another completely different kind of emotional investment. About two weeks ago I was looking at my blog stats page and browsing through some of the links by which people ended up at my blog. In the process of that time-wasting activity, I stumbled upon a blog written by this Brooklyn family who are struggling with the birth of a very ill baby. The author is a pastor at a Brooklyn-area church. For some reason that had nothing to do with religion, I found myself becoming awfully interested in this little baby's struggle. Though the evangelical bent of the site made me feel like a total interloper, I've been checking their blog every few days to keep tabs on his progress. After several days of fairly steady progress, yesterday's entry made things sound less hopeful. Today, the blog seems to have disappeared and, inexplicably, I feel very sad. Perhaps it's just a blogger glitch.