Sometimes a "Thank you" means so much.

How one little word brings so much joy

P.S. (later that night after reading 2 papers)

I got a wrong use of "infamous"!

Time to break out The Three Amigos! Ole!

"Leonardo spent most of his time studying every part of life he encountered by taking notes and drawing sketches in his now infamous sketchbooks" (6).

That bad Leonardo... what was he drawing that was worthy of infamy?

It must just be that his sketchbooks are SO famous... they're IN-famous! Yeah, that's it.

Merry Christmas to me and to all English teachers goodnight.

Gems

A couple highlights from my grading today:

"My reader feels like they are hearing a story from a good friend, a real person rather than just a scholar."

"In order to show the characteristics of a defective government, the worst possible governing system would be the ideal system used to show the flaws of government."

"A dystopian government does not work."

"The Bible is a biblical text the religious follow."

"Zombies make us scared of dying because we don't want to also turn into flesh eating monsters and chase after loved ones."

"For one living in a zombie apocalypse, there is little hope for survival."

Labor Day

Gangs of roving cyclists descended upon the Loop.

It was the annual Labor Day U-City bicycle race that goes right down our street. So I had a picnic and graded papers while watching the races.

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Lately I also went to a lecture given by Alison Jagger on the "Feminization of Global Poverty." Her premise was that global economies depend on cheap labor by women and perpetuate a structure that only further disadvantages women. Her point was that the problem is systematic, predictable, and alterable. In addition, she discussed how biological difference and local politics cannot explain it. She had a statistic from a UN study in the 1980s:

Women are half the world's population.

Women do two-thirds of the world's work.

Women earn 10% of the world's income.

She didn't really address the dated nature of her statistics, other than saying that the issue has been largely ignored and data isn't really available.

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Now for something completely different ... and hilarious. Today my students turned in their research paper proposals. Some want to write about fine art or literature. Some want to write about pop culture, race, or social issues.

One wants to write about "Pirates vs. Ninjas."

I'm not kidding. Important questions to ask include "who would win in a fight." (And believe me there's no sense of irony or social commentary).

I've been laughing all day.

Welcome to college! Pirates vs. Ninjas.

Paper Topics

I thought it would be entertaining to note the different (student chosen) paper topics from this semester, which I will be slavishly reading this weekend:

1. Presentations of Al Gore in the media
2. Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald as "soul mates" (ralph! -- and I don't mean Waldo)
3. Picasso's Guernica symbolism and subject
4. Political and social satire by Gilbert and Sullivan
5. Rwandan genocide and U.N./U.S. apathy
6. The Daily Show as news
7. The "romance" of Starbucks
8. LSD as a miracle drug (sometimes you wonder about the personalized aspect of these topics)
9. Tiger Woods and mental athletic performance
10. Impressionists and the influence of Hokusai
11. Sinatra and sexism
12. Herbert's Dune and Taoism
13. Scratching and multiculturalism
14. Punk values -- alternative "values"