At the Mountains of Marking
A Tiny Satire of Lovecraft
Dean Cthulu of the Miskatonic University's English Department had directed me to assign ever more essay work to my students in order to better test their writing competencies. I have to say that I had my doubts, no less the concern that this should increase my already heavy workload. What Dean Cthulu did not warn me about was the size of the class I was appointed to teach, and thus also commit to grading.
The course, "Antarctic Literature," was scheduled to be delivered at our far-flung satellite campus, a place so bitterly cold and bolted through by icy winds. Upon arrival, myself and my trusty teaching assistant came upon a decrepit student lounge, entirely devoid of the usual bustle and laptop-burdened students. But there they were, beyond the lounge, gathered round the entrance of the lecture theatre where I was to deliver my course: all six hundred of them, milling about like six-foot tall penguins.
The first few weeks were tolerable, even with the sharp chill of the lecture theatre and its broken thermostat. The blackish ululating masses of students checking their Facebook rather than directing their attention to the front was to be expected, their cyclopean eyes fixated on their laptop screens.
But then came the day when they were to hand in their 15 page essay assignments. As the students filed out of class on that day, there grew mound-like at first their attempts at writing until a sizeable mountain of them remained as the last student vanished. We were left with a daunting peak of essays, rivalling the very peaks of the Himalayas themselves!
What eldritch forces conspired, I cannot say, for my teaching assistant had been taken by illness and so could not assist me in the grading of this mountain. I would be left to scale this mountain - alone.
Resigned to my pitiful state, I took the first essay from the peak and attempted to decipher the strange and disturbing mental scrawl of young minds mumbling in incomprehensible language; their sentences primitive, their parsing unholy, and their spelling seemingly derived from a much darker time without dictionaries.
I braved these papery elements stacked so ludicrously high. The terrifying sights I beheld as I worked my way deeper into this pile of prose, the inhuman tortures committed upon the English language, the sordid witchcraft of stitched incantations copied and pasted from non-credible websites, and no less ghastly being the abuse of the apostrophe a sight so horrifying that if I were to describe it to you, your hair would turn immediately white and your eyes would fall right out!
I braved these dementing experiences, quietly cursing Dean Cthulu under my breath for what he had condemned me to. By the following week, I had barely scraped the peak of this mountain before another essay assignment had come due, and so stacked upon an already dauntingly formidable mountain was to be more material replete with slithering similes, malignant metaphors, pestilential paragraphs, querulous quotations, blasphemous bibliographies, onerous openers, pilloried punctuation, cacodaemoniacal content, and all that can be considered sluggish, baleful, and jabbering in the foetid minds of the undergraduate!
If I was to have any luck in navigating this churning, demoniac zenith of student endevaour, I needed to task my trusted teaching assistant Danforth to take on his share, for I needed to prepare my lecture materials to appease this unblinking mass of uninterested students whose fiendish writing had caused me so much torment. And just how many of these works of inspired terror maliciously mistook the proper form of "to lose" and "loose"? Of heart-stopping homonym errors and improvised semicolon explosives laying erroneous waste across these papered expanses I must spare you any fuller description. Perhaps the most venal and improvident of writing and reasoning sins committed in these ominous pages was the invocation of the word "society," applied so generally with no clarification, and with such abominable frequency.
"Society has always..." "In our society..." O how these phrases, forged in depths of irrational hell, caused such horripilation!
Danforth was, as youth tend to be, overly confident that he would manage this maddening mountain of mush so that I may focus on course preparations. He tunnelled ever so vigilantly into the bowels of these multiplying essays, and for two weeks I could not locate him.
I am to blame for consigning Danforth to the infernal cold wastes of marking his way deeper into this mountain. In my report to Dean Cthulu, what may I say that would in any fashion bring sense to the insane horror of what befell my reliable and now luckless Danforth.
Danforth did not hint any of these specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance. The fool! I had warned him to avert his studious gaze from this frothy gibberish of student words!
At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single, mad word of all too obvious source: "Society! Society!"
Dean Cthulu of the Miskatonic University's English Department had directed me to assign ever more essay work to my students in order to better test their writing competencies. I have to say that I had my doubts, no less the concern that this should increase my already heavy workload. What Dean Cthulu did not warn me about was the size of the class I was appointed to teach, and thus also commit to grading.
The course, "Antarctic Literature," was scheduled to be delivered at our far-flung satellite campus, a place so bitterly cold and bolted through by icy winds. Upon arrival, myself and my trusty teaching assistant came upon a decrepit student lounge, entirely devoid of the usual bustle and laptop-burdened students. But there they were, beyond the lounge, gathered round the entrance of the lecture theatre where I was to deliver my course: all six hundred of them, milling about like six-foot tall penguins.
The first few weeks were tolerable, even with the sharp chill of the lecture theatre and its broken thermostat. The blackish ululating masses of students checking their Facebook rather than directing their attention to the front was to be expected, their cyclopean eyes fixated on their laptop screens.
But then came the day when they were to hand in their 15 page essay assignments. As the students filed out of class on that day, there grew mound-like at first their attempts at writing until a sizeable mountain of them remained as the last student vanished. We were left with a daunting peak of essays, rivalling the very peaks of the Himalayas themselves!
What eldritch forces conspired, I cannot say, for my teaching assistant had been taken by illness and so could not assist me in the grading of this mountain. I would be left to scale this mountain - alone.
Resigned to my pitiful state, I took the first essay from the peak and attempted to decipher the strange and disturbing mental scrawl of young minds mumbling in incomprehensible language; their sentences primitive, their parsing unholy, and their spelling seemingly derived from a much darker time without dictionaries.
I braved these papery elements stacked so ludicrously high. The terrifying sights I beheld as I worked my way deeper into this pile of prose, the inhuman tortures committed upon the English language, the sordid witchcraft of stitched incantations copied and pasted from non-credible websites, and no less ghastly being the abuse of the apostrophe a sight so horrifying that if I were to describe it to you, your hair would turn immediately white and your eyes would fall right out!
I braved these dementing experiences, quietly cursing Dean Cthulu under my breath for what he had condemned me to. By the following week, I had barely scraped the peak of this mountain before another essay assignment had come due, and so stacked upon an already dauntingly formidable mountain was to be more material replete with slithering similes, malignant metaphors, pestilential paragraphs, querulous quotations, blasphemous bibliographies, onerous openers, pilloried punctuation, cacodaemoniacal content, and all that can be considered sluggish, baleful, and jabbering in the foetid minds of the undergraduate!
If I was to have any luck in navigating this churning, demoniac zenith of student endevaour, I needed to task my trusted teaching assistant Danforth to take on his share, for I needed to prepare my lecture materials to appease this unblinking mass of uninterested students whose fiendish writing had caused me so much torment. And just how many of these works of inspired terror maliciously mistook the proper form of "to lose" and "loose"? Of heart-stopping homonym errors and improvised semicolon explosives laying erroneous waste across these papered expanses I must spare you any fuller description. Perhaps the most venal and improvident of writing and reasoning sins committed in these ominous pages was the invocation of the word "society," applied so generally with no clarification, and with such abominable frequency.
"Society has always..." "In our society..." O how these phrases, forged in depths of irrational hell, caused such horripilation!
Danforth was, as youth tend to be, overly confident that he would manage this maddening mountain of mush so that I may focus on course preparations. He tunnelled ever so vigilantly into the bowels of these multiplying essays, and for two weeks I could not locate him.
I am to blame for consigning Danforth to the infernal cold wastes of marking his way deeper into this mountain. In my report to Dean Cthulu, what may I say that would in any fashion bring sense to the insane horror of what befell my reliable and now luckless Danforth.
Danforth did not hint any of these specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance. The fool! I had warned him to avert his studious gaze from this frothy gibberish of student words!
At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single, mad word of all too obvious source: "Society! Society!"
No comments have been added yet.
