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April 28, 2006
Live Blogging My Final SIP Reading and Subequent Eye Gouging
I am pre-reading a SIP before meeting with the student this afternoon, my final SIP to read as the Writing Center Assistant. I am admittedly punchy. The SIP is admittedly rough. Oh boy.
* Disclaimer: this recounting of events is not a slight to the student-author's content or intelligence. It's actually a really interesting paper. The usage of the English language, however, has emerged as a completely autonomous beast, a monster which must be tamed for the sake humanity.
9:15 a.m. Hope springs eternal. Whenever someone says, "I think it's just some small proofreading stuff that needs to be fixed," I believe them. Every time. Foolish.
9:47 a.m.
The older generation's wellbeing could be at stake if there since of community is taken away from them and modern virtual community takes over.
Read quoted sentence five times in an attempt to understand what it meant. Finally realized that "there since" was supposed to be "their sense." Tricky.
10:03 a.m.
In the interpersonal realm technologies have moved interpersonal relationships from face to face relationship with the people who lived or worked close to us, to new electronically mediated relationship were you might never meet or talk face to face and these relationships are with people that could be any were in the world.
I am saving the world one disorientingly clausal sentence at a time.
10:11 a.m.
If you spell "onslaught" as "on slot" there should surely be a Vegas-derived pun floating around as well.
10:37 a.m.
I have jumped to the last ten pages with wild hopes.
10:41 a.m.
I wrote the student a helpful list of words to check for usage. If he were to do a simple "find and replace" for each of these, things might actually be okay.
effecting --> affecting
there --> their
since --> sense
were --> where
use to --> used to
peaces --> pieces
11:00 am.
Inconsistent pronouns are a cruel, cruel trick to play on your reader.
11:06 a.m.
It would be nice if you could just hand a student a jar full of commas and say, "Sprinkle liberally throughout."
11:16 a.m.
It's a little sad when you start reading a sentence and you think you know where it's going and then right when you hit the halfway point some clause gets thrown in there and suddenly it's like you're out in Iowa on Aunt Bessie's pig farm and all the stuff you thought were trees were actually corn or something.
11:20 a.m.
Malapropisms are an error easily forgiven: "We have gone from communities where everyone knew everyone's caricature..."
11:32 a.m.
One of my English Comp students just came by to drop of his portfolio. He was wearing seersucker pants and a t-shirt. This made me happy.
11:39 a.m.
Modernism fell because the Enlightenment started questioning it or modernism fell when the Enlightenment began being questioned? Semantics can make for such fascinating historiographic ambiguity.
11:48 a.m.
My appointment is in 10 minutes. I shall ignore pages 13-19 and instead regroup mentally. Also, I think the Writing Center should have a punctuation spice rack. A bottle of commas, a bottle of colons, a bottle of semi-colons, and a bottle to collect all the extra exclamation points people toss about.
11:53 a.m.
Oh, okay, just one more quote:
Individual freedomand choices are something that emerges as there is no final authority. These changes to postmodernism have effected the character of space globally, publically, and interpersonally. If a country does not believe in objective truth them you get countries were people are willing to kill other and die for causes that are selfish. We are dealing with that today with the terrorist countries.
1:38 p.m.
Reasonably successful conference. Student is under strict orders to lock himself in the bathroom and read pages 13-19 aloud. Grading of 22 freshmen composition portfolios may now commence. Adieu.
Professorial Masquerade | By elissa | 01:47 PM
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Comments
This is hilarious. All of it.
Posted by: funke at April 28, 2006 11:37 AM
I hate the terrorist countries.
Posted by: mesh at April 28, 2006 12:38 PM
I do too, Mesh, I do too.
One more for the road:
"Also I develop some of the major technologies and what they are doing to change the public aspects of our lives today."
Posted by: elissa at April 28, 2006 01:54 PM
On a related note, I wonder why no one has ever hosted an art show entitled "Red Ink."
Exhibits would include fully reviewed essays. A special highlight would be the section featuring papers returned from any sort of Davis class. Ah, the swirling color, so passionate in expression! The beauty of well-chosen words salvaged, preserved, and championed on canvas!
Maybe you do something about exploring the untapped resource of editorial art.
Posted by: funke at April 28, 2006 01:55 PM
*could
Posted by: funke at April 28, 2006 06:54 PM
