the joys (yes, you read that right) of grading

(No, this is not an April Fool's post, despite the title.)

I mentioned in an earlier post that this quarter my students in the grad class "Current Themes in Information Technology" are maintaining blogs, in which I've got them posting their responses to the readings, and answer to homework questions I pose each week.

Because reading and grading written work by IT students is not always the most enjoyable task, I've been putting that off this week. But today I'm holed up in Panera Bread, trying to get through the blog entries.

And it turns out, much to my delight, that some of my students are not only competent writers--they're downright thoughtful and even entertaining writers. Take, for example, Alexander Pita's response to one of last week's readings, a research paper from Bell Labs entitled "Architecture as Metaphor":

Whoa.

I like to think that I'm a pretty well rounded guy, which a decent appreciation of the arts, humanities, etc..., but I think the authors of "Architecture as Metaphor" need to take a deep breath and read "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything", by Chip Morningstar [1]. "Grounded theory is based on asking questions about the phenomenon in question." As opposed to what? Not asking questions about the phenomenon in question? Asking questions about some other totally unrelated phenomenon? "Each concept was captured on a card and thrown on the floor. In grounded theory, this is called open coding." In English, this is called "taking notes, messily". Talk about peacock feathers.

It made me literally laugh out loud (which required me then to remove my earbuds and explain to Weez, who's working across from me, why I was laughing when I was supposed to be suffering the miseries of grading).

And now, back to work...