QoS Index

Now that i'm studying economics i've learned that economists are fond of acronyms and graphs correlating lots of things together. Sometimes just one graph isn't enough, so they line up four or even six graphs side by side and draw lines from one graph to another to show how stuff like fiscal policy will affect interest rates or inflation or price level or employment (unless you're a neoclassical economist and believe we're always at full employment) or any other number of things. It makes my head hurt because i'm not used to seeing the world in graphs like this, but in an attempt to become better at it i have developed my own way of indexing the correlation in my life between quality of sleep and number of papers to grade. I call it the Quality of Sleep index, or QoS for short. It's really very simple. The higher the stack of papers, the lower the quality of sleep.

For example, this is the stack of papers that was recently on my kitchen table. As you can imagine from the height of the stack, i have not enjoyed real quality sleep for the last few days (nor have i had time to post on my blog). My students are fond of blaming me for having too much to grade. They say if i didn't assign as much, i wouldn't have to grade as much. True, but you wouldn't learn as much either. I think i'm going to have to create another graph or means to measure this and correlate it to the Q0S and try to establish where the point of equilibrium lies. Economists are also very fond of finding the point of equilibrium.

At any rate, the stack is much smaller tonight, so i'm looking forward to a good night's rest. Unfortunately my writing students have two more papers due in the next week, so the reprieve is short lived and as the stack of papers grows higher again, my quality of sleep will once again decline.