The weirdest part, though, is that the papers I got from the fall term students were pretty great, actually. They wrote papers that were artful, peculiar, expressive, informative, rhetorically sophisticated... They just seemed to hate every minute of it. I had to beg some of them to spend more than 5 minutes on reading each other's work. They made excuses not to be in class all the time. It was pretty grim.
This term, it's the highlight of everyone's day. They show up early and stay late.