It's never too late...

for new rules and consequences.

Yes, it's mid-march. Yes, we just got back from spring break. But that doesn't mean that it is too late to introduce a little more order into the classroom, which was getting quite ragged there before break. I have to admit that I was hanging on for dear life at the end there and the way I limped towards spring break was reminiscent of a stock car as it pulls into the pit stop after a wreck, sheet metal flapping loose, tailpipe sparking as it drags along the ground and something unkown just starting to catch fire under the hood.

But I made it to spring break, which was in fact terribly depressing, for two reasons. The first was that I realized how much I hate my job, and spent at least 5 of my nine days off in deadly terror of returning. The second was that I realized that without my job, I have absolutely no life or prospects of a life down here. That first Saturday, when return was sufficiently distant, was the best day of the break. I woke up early, got a hair cut, planted a garden (one thing you can't quite do up north yet), cooked a good dinner and watched a movie with my roomie. Even despite the fact that Babel was a big dissapointment, it was a wonderful day, and I felt very accomplished. But aside from that - nada. So I have a job I hate and fear, but if I don't fill my time with the job, I have even less purpose and feel worse.

That said, today was surprisingly un-bad. They listened, they accepted, grudgingly, the new rules and consequences, and tomorrow I'm set to start handing out writing assignments. Yet here I am, it's Monday night, still with a huge stack of grading and some planning left to do, and I have hardly done anything since I got home. It's just such an intimidating amount of work to get started on. I wanted to have a rule of no work after 9 PM, but that is looking less and less likely. Less blogging, more grading. That's what I need.