Here is my secret: I am a hypocrite.

Things have been bad in Academic Ella land, to the extent that I almost dropped out this semester. And I mean seriously. But I didn't, and the end result is that the stress of my particular situation caused me to lose 15 pounds in a month (and I'm not a large person to begin with, by any standard), stop menstruating, and develop an ovarian cyst that may require surgical removal of my ovary in my reproductive prime.

That's just great.

But yet, here I am, still.

So whilst suffering through the turmoil of this semester, I had to seek counsel from another faculty member. I really didn't want to, because I hate to come across as gossipy, but things were Bad, with a capital B. (I saw aforementioned faculty member a few weeks after our initial meeting and he asked me if things were going better. I replied, 'Do I look like things are going better?!' He said, 'Well, you don't look like you're packing, so that's better.' The scary thing is that he was only half kidding, I think.)

Packing aside, obviously one of his major suggestions to me was to find a new advisor. Which isn't as easy as it sounds, for reasons that I'm sure I don't have to explain to people here, but that other people outside of Academic Ella land (including my husband, to a certain extent) just don't seem to understand.

The obvious choice for a new advisor is a new faculty member with whom I've been working this past year and who I absolutely adore. And while working with her is a fully pleasant experience (she seems to approach life in a different manner than my advisor), I just don't think she would cut it for me as an advisor. I mean, like me, she has a young daughter, which means she isn't around very much, or at least not as much as some. Which means that when I'm in the middle of doing something and realize I don't know what I'm doing (which is always), she isn't there to help. Which means my experiments are often screwed and I end up wasting the afternoon away. The plus side is that she's always nice about it in the end, and she never goes off on tirades about how lazy and undisciplined I am. But the bottom line is that she doesn't work 24/7 and she's not a psychotic workaholic like my current advisor, which in this sick sort of way is what I seem to need.

Add to this the fact that there's this new graduate student wanting to start in my advisor's lab. All I can figure is that she wants to be with me, because her undergraduate degree is in a completely different subfield than my advisor's, and I really can't imagine that she was so charmed by my advisor that she just had to work with him. My advisor suggested that new student and I figure out a day when we can be in the lab at the same time this summer, which I would love, because aforementioned student seems very cool, much cooler than my advisor. At the same time, trying to work out a schedule with this new student has been ridiculously frustrating, because she has an infant son and she just isn't ready to leave him yet and blah blah blah.

Don't get me wrong, I understand, but I am also... annoyed. I understand that I am viewed as one of the Star Graduate Students, and therefore the poster child for 'You CAN have it all!' Thus my advisor's lab is view as The Kid Friendly Lab, which makes it a magnet for new graduate students with young children, or just children, or with just any semblance of a life whatsoever. And while I do want to be a mentor to anyone that I can be a mentor to (because mentors in our field are pathetically lacking), I don't have time to be a mentor because, hello, I'm also a mom. I don't really have the time to work around your pathetically limited schedule. And also, if you aren't ready to leave your kid yet, why in the F are you thinking about starting grad school?!

I guess life is all about balance. Maybe as a struggling graduate student with a young child, I need the rigor of a hellish advisor to keep me on track. I hate it, but I also realize that if I had a nicer advisor, it's quite possible that I would never finish, which I would also hate.

I've had the same sort of dilemma when it comes to religion. I am personally not religious, and neither is my spouse. Yet, we sort of want to rear our daughter religiously. We were both reared with religion--not really strict religion, but religion nonetheless. And while neither one of us has ever really believed in God, we do think that the fear of God has some redeeming qualities in a young child's mind.

To this day, I still fear the wrath of a God I don't believe in. And I fear that I'm going to burn in Hell for my hypocrisy. I don't want to teach my child about a God I don't belive in, but I want her to fear going to Hell to keep her from being bad. I don't want school to be my life and yet I want an advisor who is at school whenever I am, who answers my e-mails within five minutes, and who obsesses about my data as much as I do. I don't want an advisor who takes the afternoon off to be with her daughter, or a fellow graduate student who is never in the lab because her kid won't take a bottle and she can't leave him for more than a few hours at a time.

I understand these things more than anyone, and yet I can't tolerate them.

My only solace is that if I burn in Hell for all eternity for being a hypocrite, at least I have experience. Because my academic life right now is Hell, and there is absolutely no end in sight.

It's not really a secret at all, I assume, that most instructors hate grading. For me, it's not the commenting on papers that bothers me, because I actually very much enjoy doing that, and my students appreciate it. It's the deciding, especially at the end of the semester, what letter grade a student has earned, as if the whole 14 or so weeks -- all our conversations, their progress, their pitfalls, etc -- just boils down to this one thing. I always wonder what the student will think when s/he gets the grade, and whether or not that will affect how s/he feels about the class and the way it ended. Some people improve but still don't get the grade they probably hope for, especially in this age of grade inflation. I feel very strongly that I'm a fair-to-easy grader, and yet I still get occasional complaints that I'm a "hard" grader, even though it's extremely rare to get a "C" from me, and almost impossible to get below that.

Sigh. I just wanted to share. This time of year always makes me sad. I get so excited when I get a batch of new papers, so intrigued by what I'm about to read, but then at the end when I have to put a letter grade to it, I just feel a bit defeated. And no, I don't particularly think that doing away with grades altogether will help at the moment, since most students are motivated by their grades to do things like attend class and do at least some of the reading.

For the record, I also think grading grad students is a joke. Is there really a need to assign a letter grade to some of the most feedback-obsessed, masochistic people in the world? I've never heard a grad student say anything like, "I just want my A in this class, and then I'm outta here."

It seems like my school is teeming with student-athletes and just about anything is considered a sport in this joint. I've become accustomed to notification from the athletics department about who's going to be absent and requests to be as accomodating as I can, and I've heard from students that I'm more sympathetic to the plights of student athletes than most.

That was then, and this is now.

A couple weeks back that all went to crap when one of my student-athletes lied to me about missing class for a badminton tournament. He asked to make up the in-class assignment, and I told him I'd check with the athletics office because I hadn't heard about the badminton tournament. Well, when I checked, the coordinator told me that there weren't any excused absences for the badminton team that day. I emailed the student her reply, and suggested he have his coach talk to me if there was some sort of error. I heard nothing, until today.

Today, when he emailed me about his grade that's stuck somewhere between a B+ and an A-. Today, when he who lied to me and I probably could have pursued it as academic dihonesty, told me that it wasn't fair because I hadn't offered enough opportunities for him to make up the work he missed (I dropped the three scores, but he wanted more). Today, when he played the poor-pitiful-student-athlete card. Today, when the semester is already over and all that remains is his final exam.

I am afraid that my view of student athletes is eternally tarnished - all because of the one bad-minton player.