Finally!

The one thing I forgot about teaching a composition class: don't schedule completed essays from two classes of college writers at the same time. Brutal...
It would have been more palatable had the weather been bad, but it was generally nice outside...though going to school and coming home in the dark three days left me to guess by the condition of my bike seat what the weather had been like!
Also on the not-so-hot side was the fact that the moment that changed their lives for the better (subject for a personal narrative assignment) mostly dealt with someone's cancer, or death or divorce. Really...of 50 essays, I think there were fewer than a handful of students whose significant moment in life to this point was a positive one: I thought for a while I had fallen into a country song, and Taylor Swift or George Jones was doing the background vocals.
This, of course, led me to think seriously about the "aha" moments in my life, and, for the most part, they were all inspirational people or last-minute reprieves, or just the realization that Someone was looking out for me when I wasn't (doing backflips into a quarry 20 feet below in the dark, for example...what the hell were we thinking?)
No personal or parental divorces, no beatings (that I didn't deserve!), and only one rather serious medical issue.
Maybe it's generational because young people who are in the millennial generation seem to have a well-noted background of misery. I'm glad reading those essays is almost finished. It depressed me to no end, and I wondered if I had experienced times like that as a young person.
Maybe I've just forgotten...since I have those lapses now.
Good thing!