The quarter ended yesterday. It was pretty anti-climactic. It usually is. I work the last Friday shift. Believe me, the last two hours of the last day of of the academic year are the two longest hours known to man. And what was the one damn thing students wanted? A working stapler.
We have two or three staplers on the reference desk. We have one or two on a tools table (along with a paper cutter, a hole punch, and a few other things), and one next to one of our printers. We go through staplers like no one's business. Students beat the crap out of our staplers. I mean they destroy them by just slamming them down on their papers.
One guy was pretty upset that none of the staplers on the desk were working. I wasn't going to put a whole lot of effort into fixing them. C'mon, there was 90 minutes left to the school year. I kept directing him to the brand spanking new electric stapler next to the printer. But he really wanted the manual staplers to work. Finally, he moved over to the electric stapler. Success! But as he was walking past the desk he told me how he needed to push down on the top of the electric stapler to make it work.
Um. No. No, you don't. Great. They are going to beat the hell out of our electric staplers, too.
Seriously, though. Staplers. Staplers are one of the hottest commodities on campus. while meeting with a group of students in my office, one of them said she bought a little plastic stapler in the bookstore for $2.50. Without hesitation, I said, "Every single one of you needs to walk across the street to the bookstore and buy one of those right now. That $2.50 will be the best $2.50 you will ever spend." Then they went on to tell me how their professors will doc them points if they don't staple their papers.
I sighed, shook me head, and said, "And they should." I wanted to point them all to Sweet Pickles Stapler Lecture. Hell, every professor on the face of the earth should repeat this verbatim to his or her class.
Anyway, as I was closing down the library, I was cleaning off the references desk. The end with all the staplers? There were so many staples on the counter and floor it looked like there had been some sort of stapler massacre.
Some friends and I vented about the staplers (and other things) over some red drinks in fancy glasses and hummus. Now begins the summer of clean up, preparation, travel, and conferences.
3 comments:
This cracked me up.
I've turned into the Stapler Nazi at work. I don't know what my coworkers do, but much like the college students you interact with, these people can render a brand-new stapler inoperable in less than a week. Not even the Swinglines survive. haha
Yes, the papers must be stapled. But, I have to point out, there is an easy solution in this modern age. PDF. Hell, a Word 97 .doc paper, submitted by email would work.
I argue this because you can immediately see if the paper was formatted properly or if the little bastards are trying to squeege in that little bit extra on page count by using 1.18" margins, you know exactly what time the paper was submitted (no more "oh I turned it in at the box next to your office door, it's there, I swear."), and you can also quickly check it for plagiarism.
But that's just me.
I made students submit their papers through Blackboard. I didn't use the anti-plagiarism program, but I wanted to see the electronic file. I know all the tricks to make a paper longer... If I had an electronic file, I could see it.
I would usually print the papers out and them grade them by hand. I know some profs who use track changes in Word to grade papers.
I had one class of 15 students, though. It wasn't a whole lot of extra work for me. Most faculty have multiple classes that are twice as large. At that point, it becomes a pain in the ass.
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