Sheesh.
You know, when you read other people’s writing for ten hours straight, some of it good, some of it bad, it just makes it hard to come up with anything interesting to say in your blog. Hopefully, people won’t think ill of me. I generate a lot of words, but I try to make them count.
Today flat out exhausted me, and I’ve learned my limit. I can’t read and comment intelligently on more than 25 essays a day. Most of them were really good, but a few pissed me off. Why in the hell would someone at a university choose to write a rambling mess about how they hate school? I’m easy, but that was just over the top. Thankfully, there were enough diamonds in the rough to keep me amused.
A bunch of new books were delivered today, but I didn’t even get to open them. This teaching nonsense is a lot of work. However, I did find the perfect essay to use for teaching the basic form and citation style for an essay, How to make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich (Courtesy of the Journal of Mundane Behaviour). Though it’s not written in conventional narrative form, it easily could be. The outline style shows a good organizational strategy laid bare, at the very least. I think I’ll compare and contrast this with a good bibliographic essay, The Relationship between Schizophrenia and Mysticism. There’s quite a range here, and I suspect I’ll tell them to aim somewhere in the center.
