My professor, on how he'll grade:

"Hold a mirror up to your mouth and wait. If the mirror fogs over, you get an A."

Me: For your next mini-paper, I want you to tell me about your usual research process. So, here's the prompt- "If you were assigned to write a research paper that answered the question, 'How did the Y2K panic get blown so out of proportion?' where would you look for information?

My 18-year-old student: The what panic?

Use the word "ass-bandit" in an academic paper.

Check.

And extra points for it being a paper about Canada.

But every English major bone in my body (to say nothing of every geek bone) is telling me that if you change the ending to Watchmen, you change everything ( Read more... )

I was looking all over late last night for a sweater that I couldn't find. At three in the morning, I have to admit that my first, gut-instinct, completely sincere impulse at that moment was to check Google to see if I could download another copy. Of my white sweater.

I'm losing it.

Until you've had a Canadian professor, you don't realize how many times the word "about" comes up over the course of an ordinary lecture.

In other news, Montana high schools suck. They really, really suck.

The Martin Luther King Jr. quote, directly, is as follows ( Read more... )

One of my students just blamed Yellow Journalism for the sinking of the USS Maine.

Today is only an hour and forty-five minutes old and it already rocks.

 Awesome Montana moment of the day:  Strapping blond cowboy type on the bus mouthing silently along to "One Week," which was playing on the stereo, very solemnly and with a bowed head, as if he was praying.

In other news, I used the word "awesomesauce" today, and meant it.  Things are looking up.

 It's funny how awful it feels when you find out a student copied a paper in its entirety out of a Google-accessible newspaper.  It's weird, isn't it?  You'd think it wouldn't be that big a deal.  And yet for some reason, you take it personally, in a "how dumb do you think I am?" kind of way.  Worse- you feel guilty.  That's the thing I really can' ( Read more... )