I'm on a low-fat ranch dressing diet.

This summer, I've been teaching two sections of a first-year college composition course, and currently I'm reading through a stack of rough drafts for the last paper of the semester. My progress has been slow. No, it's not because of the heat; I wisely placed my desk next to the AC and have been quite comfortable--strategic fan placement has also helped. It wasn't until just a few minutes ago that it dawned on me what the problem could be.

I'm trying to help them while fighting the urge to make them write like me in the process.

Without realizing it, I've been struggling within to keep from marking up drafts with an overabundance of specifics. I sit down to read each paper and am seeing exactly what I think is wrong and implicitly what I would do to fix it--if it was mine. As an instructor, I should have a pretty good grasp on what makes a scholarly, professional-grade paper, but polishing up these drafts to get to that level is not my job; my job is to guide by suggestion so they do the work, so they learn from the experience.

I guess I'm learning something as well, because it's much more of a challenge than I thought to find that fine line between telling them what to do as opposed to pointing out what they've done and nudging them in the right direction. Off the top of my head, there are a couple issues I can see with this.

First, if I give them a diagrammed walk-through on their edits, the papers come back with minimal errors (assuming they followed directions), and everyone passes with flying colors. Great and good, but I question how much would be learned by just following the recipe in order to get done. I can't help but think that the writing in subsequent classes may suffer as a result. Call me a pessimist, but I doubt it would be long before administration starts to investigate why the average grade in my class is so high and then crashes right afterward.

On the other hand, if my comments are too general, then revisions will most likely be minimal due to confusion and/or frustration, and worse yet, no one has learned anything except that writing sucks because it's so hard. And possibly that the instructor is a jerk because he gives bad grades for no seemingly no reason.

I hear seasoned veterans, those teachers who've been in the trenches for a while, say that it takes time to find a routine. They say it gets faster with experience. I'm not saying I don't believe them; I'm just hoping I don't get to the point where I sway too far one way or the other for the sake of speed.

I'll bite you harder than Marv Albert!

It's getting to the point that I have all sorts of things going on in my head all day long, chomping at the bit to get to the end of the day and type it all feverishly down here for all to see, and then my mind draws a complete blank. I've been reading literally almost the entire day, and the process is drawn out by a few minor distractions along the way. Sure, email cries to be checked every once in a while, and I have a bit of data transfer going on right now as I reshuffle things a bit with my digital fortress. I recently bought a Western Digital 1TB external hard drive, and I don't need to tell you that it's damn sexy.

It's true, I'm a storage slut. I live for excess gigabytes, and this baby scratches my itch. The best thing about it is the ethernet hookup, so basically I have it connected to my switching router rather than directly to a computer, and that way each of them can share in the magic! What's better is that I got it at a relatively good deal, so I can fool myself into not feeling guilty about buying it.

Let's see... Oh! I almost forgot to mention that the local movie theater here is having a two night showing of Army of Darkness this weekend. I guarantee, I'm ready to kill some brains cells and then go manually turn the survivors off as I sit and watch that this weekend. I've seen it so many times, brain cells are no longer required - not that they probably were at the first viewing. My friend, Pete, is having "one of those weeks" at work, so it sounds as if he'll be tagging along. I doubt we could drag his brother there on this short notice, which is kinda sad because this used to be one of his all time favorites. Still might be, for all I know. Anyway, it's gonna be a hoot, and a much needed one at that. Hmm, maybe we should take his five year old son with us and introduce him to the legend that is Bruce Campbell.



I suppose I should've had a notion that something wasn't right this week when I looked at my weather program on my linux box. As anyone who either lives in the Midwest or watches news reports has seen, there's been a tad bit of snow coming down these past few days. As opposed to the snowfall we had a couple weeks ago, this one was accompanied by much warmer temps. I don't think it was quite as bad here as we were told to expect, but my linux box seemed to think otherwise, because this is what it had to show me. First off, it was snow on the forecast, but it was warm enough that the little rain image didn't seem that strange. I don't think I've ever seen this program show me a dark gray cloud like this one though. Ominous, isn't it? Well, I've made it over the halfway point this week; just a few more days and I should be free of its shadow. Ah, I get it, it's in homage to Army of Darkness this weekend.

"Okay. The words. Say the words.
KLATOO!... VERATA... uh... Uh...
Necta... uh... Nectar...
Necktie... uh...

KLATOO... VERATA...
NECTtphhhhhhhhhh...

Okay then."