Like this:

I’m supposed to be grading. Well, I don’t know if I have to be. I have four more papers to get through, but I think two of them are way under the page limit which makes things easier. I’ve been having such a hard time concentrating, though. As I was just telling Tuggy, at the end of the semester I always feel the need to do something creative. I feel like lately I’ve just been creating some kind of vast mental collage from the things I’ve been looking at online. Looking at things, getting ideas, I’m hoping to write more over Christmas (on here, in my journal, whatever) than I have for awhile. I feel like my brain has been kind of soaking things in and processing for a long time and I’m starting to get that “it’s all coming together and making sense” feeling I get when I need to start writing things down before I forget them.

I’ve been reading policy papers. So many. And I’ve really been thinking about them. I wish I read everything like I read these papers–reading, thinking, making notes. The whole policy structure is really interesting and far more complicated than these kids realize. I was telling my kids on Friday, the last day of class, about how I feel when I read their papers. Even when I agree with them I feel like I disagree. It’s just that any policy you make has vast repercussions. And so even with something like stricter penalties for steroids in baseball, I’m like ‘eeeeehhh, do you really want to do that? What are the implications of this policy?’ Every policy makes a statement, and the kids acknowledge that, but they don’t take it far enough. They say legalizing euthanasia makes the statement that you should be able to determine when you should die. But . . . man, I don’t even need to say anything to show how that could be a problem. Every policy I read about makes me concerned about the implications it would have if it was enacted.

On this topic–Yesterday I listened to this and this (two episodes from This American Life detailing how we got ourselves into this healthcare crisis. This is just what my mom has been saying my whole life! You have to listen to these!) and then read a student’s paper about how we should have a law to make sure doctors recommend the more expensive and better(?) kind of artery stent to their patients. In other words, don’t let those doctors take cost into consideration, they have to recommend the better procedure because that’s the only ethical thing to do. I almost wrote “I am completely opposed to everything you’re saying here” but I decided it would be better to express that opposition in actually critiquing his argument, instead of in railing against it (“Ira Glass told me about people like you . . .”).

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