‘Tis the season for legal writing professors to start waxing poetic about grading papers, resurrecting our bi-annual tradition of writing haiku about grading. Recall that haiku is a form of traditional Japanese poetry. It must be 3 lines long, with 17 syllables. There must be 5 syllables in the first line, 7 syllables in the second line, and 5 syllables in the third line. A haiku usually includes some sort of reference to nature. And ideally it includes a little something surprising.
John Mollencamp, at the University of Missouri-Columbia, offers the first grading haiku of the season:
So much to do now
Where did the semester go?
Grades are due soon
Only a few weeks
to grade so many memos
Eleven a day?
Icy winds outside
Tall stack of memos inside
Maybe I’ll rake leaves
Forida in-laws
welcoming with warm weather
must grade papers first
Quiet library
students are all studying
my grading begins
(spl)