Days 288-289: Grading the American Literature Exams

So these two days have been quite busy: I've been grading the American Literature exams. I managed to finish them in two days. They went much more quickly than the Short Novel exams, partly because they are Honors students and can write better, and partly because there wasn't the same amount of plagiarism going on. The students did a better job of writing with evidence. The overall Final Exam average was an 88.79, which is far better than the average of the Short Novel class: 7 As, 6 Bs, and 1 D. Even the "cheating" girl I referred to in my earlier entry got a B.  I really don't have any way of proving she was cheating, and at this point it's hard for me to care.

Monday got off to an interesting start: we went and had breakfast with Richard at a Howard Johnson's, which was actually quite swank for a Howard Johnson's. However, their "breakfast buffet" was just mediocre: the usual Chinese crap, mostly, like fried eggs instead of scrambled, noodles, yogurt to drink not spoon, etc. There were a lot of fruit flies around the buffet which the manager kept trying to sap with a bug zapper. Charming. However, when I dropped a dessert on the floor, they all just stood around and no one bothered to clean it up. Sometimes I do get annoyed about the lack of cleanliness in China, as you can tell.

Once we got home, we took a bit of a nap, and then I was off on my grading--even though I didn't get started until around 2, I managed to grade questions 1-10.....thank God for having only 12 exams to grade!

Tuesday I woke up early, gave some things to Farris (Iraqi faculty who came over to pick up some stuff, after I advertised our "free giveaway" on WeChat to international faculty), did more grading, ate lunch, took a nap, did more grading, ate dinner (chicken breasts and raw veggies...super healthy!), and then finished the grading up. One student handed in his extra credit paper at the last minute, and it really didn't help him much: he still got the worst grade in the class overall, which is disappointing because he earned a 90 in my class last term.

That's really about it. Life has been dull lately. It was 100 degrees in Shanghai today; for that reason, I stayed in air-conditioned comfort. Tomrrow, I'm going to Songjiang, so I won't be so lucky.

A couple Monday breakfast pics:

Lobby of the Howard Johnson's. Looks swank, but appearances are deceiving.

A manager tries to motivate his staff in the morning, at a Chinese restaurant. Richard said it's not uncommon for them to be outside for this sort of thing.