Signs you may be ready for Spring Break

• When you know intellectually that the snow will stop some time, but in your heart, it's Groundhog Day forever: "It's going to be cold, it's going to be gray, and it'll last for the rest of your life." 
• When you feel that if you have to go warm a chair at one more event where there are speeches, you will lose your mind.
• When someone writes "I have been very busy, but someone ought to answer these 10 questions that I have" and your impulse to write back "Yes, you are busy and I have been sitting here eating bonbons with nothing to do, naturally" is growing strong enough to win, one of these times. I have to remember that, as Captain Awkward or someone said, they're not being busy *at* me, but by stating that, they kind of are being busy at me, aren't they?
  
• When someone always has, say, four tasks in a project that all of us in the group must do and only does two of them--the easy, fun ones, leaving the hard ones for someone else because they're "too busy"--well, I have to remind myself through gritted teeth that they're not being busy *at* me and also decline to add those two tasks to the tasks I've already been assigned.
  
• We've been through MOOCs, and now AI-assisted grading is rearing its Medusa-level ugly head again with this cheerleading piece from Axios:  https://www.axios.com/2024/03/06/ai-tools-teachers-chatgpt-writable . I say "again" because composition teachers have been fighting this auto-grading trend for at least 25 years (I even have some posts about it on here, though I'm too grumpy to find them right now). 
• AI plagiarism is feeling too personal right now, just like the regular old-school variety. You think I am stupid enough to be fooled by this? And you wasted my valuable time by turning it in and expecting me to read what you couldn't be bothered to write? And if I call you out on it I go into conduct proceedings and an administrative hell of documentation and meetings in which I can only hope that the powers that be have my back? 

Anyway--flowers, bunnies, birds building nests: spring break will come, and not a moment too soon.