this post brought to you by the "snowpocalypse"

Ahh, snow in the south: cause for mass panic, and the absolute shutting down of the state for several days. Since it's been about 6 months since I posted, I figure it's time for me to write something again. Ahh, a posting schedule I can stick to: once in a very great while.

So, after spending the past couple of days doing a whole lot of nothing because I'm actually caught up on grading, I bring to you some choice excerpts from my most recent batch of really shitty papers. Mind you, in my students' defense this time, several of them have no right to be in a Junior English class. But as someone did them the "favor" of passing them along, I have a Junior class that is collectively lower than any other class I've taught before. Arguably even the freshman class I had when I was student teaching...

Our first excerpt comes from a student that shouldn't be required to have a literature class to begin with. This child has no aspirations beyond the farming and tree care that his family has done for generations, but thanks to NCLB, we inflict literature he will never use on him. Now, to explain how truly un-gifted this child is in the mental department, I will tell you that, when we were talking about the phrase "carpe diem" in relation to the American Romantics, he asked why they didn't just all use English, instead of using those other languages that don't make sense. So, anyway...his paper is about trees and their care. Here is a single...sentence, which I use only for lack of a better term.

Pruning techniques is a big part to know when you are pruning a evergreen tree you should know how much to take off an how much not to take off if you take off too much off a evergreen tree it will start to change coilers as well as getting riley dry it will go from being dark green an flimsy to dark brown an dry and it will not be a party site that you were looking forward to seeing and in about two to three weeks it will be dead so becarefull pruning them.

Like so many students before him, not only did he blissfully ignore the rules of spelling and punctuation, he also apparently missed the whole "don't use second person (you) anywhere in your paper, or it will become a how to paper" thing.

One of my other kids informed me in a research paper on recycling that, "If the planet recycled enough glass bottles and jars the planet can stack them the people should be able to reach the moon and half way back to earth." There's some physics in there that my poor English teacher brain can't handle, and some improbable actions such as planets stacking things. Of course, earlier in the paper, he mentioned that, "If the planet recycled paper the people can do different things." Maybe one of those different things would be a mastery of subject-verb agreement, which at the moment seems to escape at least this student, if not more than half of this class.

Another student has an apparent flair for sweeping over-generalizations coupled with unintentional puns. His paper is on obesity. "Did you know obesity is growing bigger in bigger in America than anywhere else. The reason obesity is so big in America is because everyone has lack of exercise and diet." Not sure how obesity happens with a lack of diet, but I can certainly see the problem with everyone lacking exercise. Later in the paper he goes on to mention that people have a "more greater" risk with multiple risk factors...

The student writing about "the Horror/Thriller genre" apparently felt it necessary to provide definitions of every form of the words horror and thriller, with an individual citation after every portion of the definition. I'll give her props for actually citing her work, but I really didn't need to read a full page and a half of definitions of words that most people know the definition of. The worst part is, she had done that one the first draft she turned in, and I had marked on there for her to stick to one definition of one form of the word, if she really felt the need to, and still I ended up with dictionary vomit in her paper.

I really think I should invest in stock in red pens. This batch of papers looks like I had a fight with a razor blade in close proximity to them. It definitely looks like I lost.

On the plus side...I have a solid 2 weeks in which I won't have to look at research papers, unless one of the 8 kids from this class that didn't turn in a paper decides to do so tomorrow, on the last day of class. But why would they do that? They only had an extra 3 days to write it, on top of the 2 extra weeks they had when they failed to turn it in when it was due, before Christmas...

Oh yeah, I get new kids on January 26th. Three days after that, I'll get to collect papers from my seniors that are supposed to be revised versions of their junior paper. Guess it'll be time to break out the razor blade, er, red pen then...