An open letter to English 110 students #2

Hi everyone, I know I've been kind of spacey lately, and I'm really sorry about that. I haven't been sleeping much, and this whole exam thing is really demanding, I've not been eating well, and the cat has started climbing into bed with us early in the morning, and well, I'm about two cat scratches away from pulling a Margery Kempe.* This is affecting my performance in class, and I can tell that you guys are getting a little antsy and impatient with me. I can only promise you that once the exam is over and I start getting more than three hours of sleep a night, things will improve. Oh, and I'm really sorry about all the bad jokes I've told in class. No one else thinks my puns are funny. On some level, I do accept this.** But until my sleeping patterns return to normal, I have a few suggestions to help us both get through the next two weeks. 1) Read your papers before you turn them in. I know that you know the difference between "women" and "woman," and the importance of using apostrophes with your possessive nouns; but if you can enact this knowledge in your papers it would really help me out. The same goes for spelling authors' names and story titles correctly. 2) Please do not email me at 11 pm the night before a draft is due, attach pages of your writing, and ask me if I can "look at it." Or, worse yet, inform me that I need to "tell you if it's ok." It is not ok. Writing is an ongoing process that is artificially truncated by the demands and deadlines of the academic calendar. Now go check your possessive nouns one more time. 3) When I ask a question in class, it would really help me out if you could answer it. I want you to try especially hard to come up with a response if I say helpful things like: "This is in your books on page 17." Or even: "This is a yes or no question, guys." I'll take anything at this point, even grunts, clicks, and whistles. But I have fallen in love with the whir of the overhead projector, so if you find it hard to respond right away, I can go into a trance-like state for a while. 4) Please, please, please understand that I want you to do well. I want you to learn something, and I would be especially happy if you ended up liking writing just a tiny bit. That said, it takes me 30-45 minutes to read and respond to one paper. Despite my desire to see each and every one of you succeed and find personal fulfillment in my class, I can't read multiple drafts. Stop emailing me second and third drafts. Please. I was raised Catholic and the guilt from not reading them may very well kill me. There. Please read these suggestions and take them to heart. There will be a quiz tomorrow. Warmest regards, Your Teacher *Running around Europe and crying hysterically. **But I stand by my assertion that Alice Uberdeutschland is a hysterically funny name.