I have returned! Sacre bleu, mes amis du blog, eet az beeen a hwile, n'est-ce pas? Sorry about the conspicuous lack of posts, but I have been on an Elba of my own the past couple of months. My Elba isn't an island in the Mediterranean, however; no, my Elba is a great big, energy-sucking classroom full of freshmen dunces...er...writers.
We are nearing the mid-point of the semster now, and I still feel like I have done little to help them be all they could be, but I have resigned myself to the old adage about the "proof" being in the "pudding." There are some days, though, when the "proof" is actually in the bottle of Wild Turkey I'm compelled to swig after an evening of grading their inane papers. "In the vast majority of the large and differing society of the modern age..." one paper starts out. Z'wounds! How does one even begin?!
Anyway, at least next semester promises to be more about literature and less about grading, so I am consoling myself with thoughts of the future. As I stroll along the beaches of my own private Elba (figuratively, of course), I plot my triumphant return to the land of "Caring About What I'm Being Forced to Teach." Oh, won't that be a glorious day! Comment glorieux! Mais dommage, cet jour n'est pas tout pres. C'est la vie, mes amis du blog, c'est la vie.
On the bright side, that most decadent and macabre of holidays, Halloween, is just around the cobweb-draped, bone-strewn corner. Watching scores of blood-soaked films in which innocent people have their bodies maimed and mangled for no reason by some random monstrous beast or homicidal fiend always cheers me up. It really gets me into the spirit for Christmas.
4 comments:
Haha! You said macabre!
Well at least you don't have me for one of your dunces! When I took writing in college, I never had much to say, so I'd just start all my papers with some grandiloquent sentence, that had no point but ambiguousness. So that should cheer you up a bit!
- Tim
It's about time! A bit heavy on the Wild Turkey?
I can't remember if I've blogged this or not, but your post inspired me to share. My younger sister is getting her doctorate in English at Alma Mater U. She isn't teaching yet, but she is grading lots of bad freshman papers. She also has a campus job in the writing center helping to fix some of these monstrosities before they get turned in. She has some great stories.
The all-time winner has to be the freshman athlete who wrote a paper about the best day of his life--when his girlfriend gave birth to his child. The final sentence of the paper was, "It was the most beautiful thing that ever plunged out of my girlfriend."
She and the other writing center tutors decided not to correct that sentence. They thought the teachers deserved a little fun, too.
A-dub, you have just made my month. I may have to use that one in class, if I can find some way to work it into the lesson...
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