My job

I have a love/hate relationship with my job.

Love: Flexibility, money, being able to work from home, keeping my mind from going to mush...

Hate: No interaction with "real people", feeling like a grading robot, feeling like a copy machine in some classes

Most days, I don't think about it too much. It's a job and it helps me to stay at home with my family and do ministry with Steven and that's a blessing.

Lately, I've been kind of burnt out on it. I get emails from students complaining about grades and how I didn't grade this fast enough (even though they turned it in 4 days after the due date and I've already graded the rest of the classes work and moved on) and http://coleminer77.blogspot.com/2010/05/dog-ate-my-homework.html
Or recently, when a student complained that I gave her too high of a grade. really.

So, today, was a good day. I got my annual review. A group of instructors randomly pick one of the classes that I was teaching and reviewed it. They picked out several students and reviewed how I interacted with them. I did really well. I honestly didn't know that they would be reviewing this class or these students. There are things to improve on, but it was a good reminder that I am doing a fairly good job.

I also received an email from a student who apologized for his late work this week. Instead of giving me a lame excuse, he just said that he was having a hard time with the material from the class. It is difficult material this week and can bring up a lot of hard emotions. I was able to encourage him to seek help and to explore the issues that came up. It was a nice reminder that there are "real people" on the other side of the computer. And I feel better