Tessering to Christmas

By Beth Gulley

With only a few weeks to go in the semester, we are entering the time of year when I wish Madeline L’Engle’s idea of the tesseract would apply to time in our space.

For those of you who have not read A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle uses the idea of the tesseract as a way to travel from one point to another point without going through all the points in between. A quick visit to Wikipedia showed me that the tesseract is actually a four dimensional analog of the cube, but for the purposes of this column I want to think of it like L’Engle does, as a way to travel by skipping from one spot to another. So, I wish I were able to move from today to Dec. 22 without having to live through all the time in between.

I feel this way because I am about to collect approximately 50 Composition I portfolios that should each contain at least four drafts of at least four papers. I will then need to read, evaluate and justify my evaluation of all 200 final drafts. Remember there will be 800 papers for me to sift through before I make the final judgment. In addition to the portfolios, I will also collect another round of final drafts plus final exams from all 50 of my developmental writing students. Then I will watch four hours worth of final exam presentations from my Composition I students. I have to grade everything by Dec. 17, so you can see why I might feel a little bit stressed out this time of year. When I was a full-time graduate student I felt double stress because I had to write my own papers, too. My students often come to class in sweat pants and with bed head, red bull in hand, sighing and gnashing their teeth this time of year because they have so many important projects due at once.

I have noticed end of the year stress is not unique to academics. I watch other people scramble around doing holiday cleaning, party planning, present buying, pageant practice, organizing angel trees, ringing Salvation Army bells, preparing for lighting ceremonies and holiday fairs, and putting up the right decorations to make the house look festive while making sure they spend enough time with friends and family. For those of you who are already starting to pull your hair out, I offer you my fantasy tesseract as a coping strategy. Imagine the day after all the stress is scheduled to be over. Then imagine yourself waking up relaxed and refreshed on that day. Even though you can’t really bend time, you will eventually wake up on that magical day, and all of your present stress will be a fading memory.

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Posted by admin on Dec 1 2010. Filed under Beth Gulley, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry