What the hell happened here?

I couldn't decide whether to come to the Phillies game tonight. They're playing San Diego, a team that probably has fewer players I've heard of than any team in baseball. Their cleanup hitter is named Jesus Guzman. No, I don't know who he is either, but he has 60 hits so far this year, which is only 60 more than me. And the Phillies are playing a team primarily made up of minor leaguers getting a tryouts, purportedly against major league competition. I have my doubts about that tonight. The guy currently batting is playing his first ever major league game.

Also arguing against attendance is the fact that it's 90 degrees out and muggy, and I'm tired from my first two days of work. But there are two things pulling me here. 

The first is why the hell would anyone come to this game? Really. Why? So that's intriguing. But I'd have to say that the biggest motivator for me to come is summer assignments. Not my summer assignments, mind you. I did everything I was supposed to this summer. No, it's students' summer assignments. I'm supposed to grade them, apparently. Summer assignments are packets of practice math problems we give the kids to remind them of what they were supposed to have learned the previous year.

In the abstract, I like summer assignments. The only problem with them is that now that the students finished them, I'm supposed to grade them. To be clear, I have no objection to grading papers. It's pretty easy to grade math papers, compared to English or History essays. The problem is that they're (relatively) long and they come in right at the beginning of the year, before I've gotten into any kind of school rhythm. To put it more succinctly, it messes with my mojo. So I come to the game as a particularly effective way of procrastinating grading.

In the past, to be perfectly honest, I've not taken the grading of summer assignments to be a sacred duty, and I'll even admit to not grading some of them. Okay, most of them. The kids don't mind, because as long as they did the papers, their ungradedness is not their fault and so I give them full credit. This year, however, I'm really grading them. 

I'm not sure why this is. I can blame my new office mate, a teacher in her first year at the school and understandably anxious to impress. She started grading hers as soon as she'd finished her first class. I'll have more to say about her later, but I can't really blame her. I don't need to look good compared to her, which is a good thing. But her industriousness inspires me to some extent, plus I've come off two horrendous school years and am trying to make a sort of fresh start. I've tried to organize my stuff, with a small, but noticeable degree of success, and I'm trying to be more together.

But really, when it comes right down to it, I owe it to the students. The ones who worked hard deserve the credit more than the ones who blew it off, and I want to give them that. I'm always inclined to mistrust any signs of industriousness on my part. I am unabashedly lazy, but who knows maybe, as I approach my 58th birthday, I'm finally growing out of it. Man, I hope not.

On the hopeful side, note that I am blogging about grading summer assignments rather than actually grading them.