The grading continues. And it will continue later tonight. It will also continue tomorrow.

If it goes any longer than that I will begin to evaluate my grading. My self-assessment might not be a positive one in that eventuality.

But I should give myself some grace. I started this round of grading with some 70-plus items to grade. About 34 of them require real feedback. The assignment includes an element where they have to ask a question of something they’re reading, and some of the questions are pretty easy to answer based terms or something else the class has addressed. Some I’m fielding are of that pleasantly squishy almost-formed social science question that an undergrad can ask, the sort that actually opens the door to something quite important. I try not to revert to the grad school ways of getting to an almost-answer. Some of the questions are purely philosophical and then I think, this should be asked in a proper classroom, on a day when the halls are quiet and the sky is gloomy and you can make the snap decision that, no, this question is much more interesting than what I’d planned to talk about today, so we’re doing 40 minutes on the politics of art in a society of mass culture.

While not padding my feedback, I am averaging … a lot of words per response. Probably too much, but you know how it is when you get on a role explaining early 20th century media philosophy, or seminal sociologists or artificial intelligence. The words just flow, and soon you’re wondering, Will this particular student appreciate a newspaper column’s worth of thoughts on their assignment? Then you have to trim it. Getting back down to that 200- or 300-word range is the time intensive part.

The students were reading a paper that crossed Erving Goffman and Walter Benjamin, and by the end of it all, I find myself hoping I don’t come off a bit like the random guy in Good Will Hunting.

I’ve now read, and re-read this piece that I might actually understand it. And then not. And then truly grasp it.

So I went to campus. One part of my job is teaching. Another part is grading. Still a third part of my job is to receive training in this or that. I’ve had three rounds of ethics training in a calendar year. I’ve watched webinars of the privacy of this and the security of that. I have two more in the queue, because someone decided there wasn’t enough to be done. And today I had an in-person session, QPR training.

That’s Question, Persuade and Refer to you. And it was 90 minutes of talking about interacting with someone in a mental health crisis. There was also role playing. We had three minutes of role playing, which is not enough time to work your way through the scenario that was presented. I turned to the guy sitting next to me and invited him to pair up. He was in psychology.

Great, I said, a ringer!

“Experimental psychology,” he said. “If I never saw anyone at work I’d be happy.”

Or something like that, I was too busy trying to figure out how I would navigate through very specific hypothetical to take notes. In the end, we felt we’d done our part to help the troubled young man in the imagined scenario. And then we talked some more as a group, because this was 90 minutes.

It wasn’t that bad, but you could see where it might be a charged or otherwise difficult sort of conversation. At the end, the woman running the thing did something fun. She made everyone in the room say something they were looking forward to doing in the next 24 hours. A palate cleanser.

The thing of it was that everyone there had these interesting plans. Except for the guy who had to teach that night and all day tomorrow, so he was looking forward to sleeping tonight. When it came to me, I lamented that everyone else had these interesting plans. I was going to grade. Maybe ride my bike. Definitely pet the cats.

The woman who went after me was looking forward to hanging out with her chicken.

I went back to the office and did some grading, did some reading, and worked on the desk. It was a productive afternoon.

We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, the feature which finds me riding my bike around the county, hunting for historical markers. This is the 50th installment, and the 82nd marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series.

Sadly, I’m not sure why this merited inclusion. No one really spells out the history for us. And what even is the historic part of a local courthouse, anyway? The signs give nothing away.

Just 702 feet away is the truly historic Old Salem County Courthouse (1735), ” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>which we saw previously. That is the nation’s second-oldest courthouse in continuous use.

And a block away is this building. A court which is still in its first century of existence, sitting in a dour building which looks like it is hoping will be its last century.

Municipal Court, what are you gonna do?

Next time, we’ll see a sturdy 19th century brick home. It, like all the previous installments, will be better than this one. If you have missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.