You can always tell when I've gotten a new batch of essays from my students. Things around the blog get real quiet. It's just that when I have one hundred papers sitting on my kitchen table, there are very few things that can make me want to write, to turn a phrase, to be coy and witty and charming. Student prose is lethal. It grabs at your throat, it seeps into your brain, it sucks at your very will to live. The way some students treat the English language--so carelessly! so recklessly!--can depress a person like nothing else.
So if I'm quiet right now, know that's the reason why. I'm whittling down the pile, and I have about twenty more essays to read before putting this group of papers to rest.
In the meantime, this is for Diana, who, when she heard that my father had unearthed some early photos of me, wanted to see what I looked like when I was a little girl:
3 comments:
You look like the Long Lost member of the Ingalls family, the littlest sister, the one they called Quarter Pint, the one they left behind to fend for herself in the Big City of Mankato.
What's really strange about that picture is that I can't make myself believe that's you. The only things you and that child have in common are that you are brunette caucasian females.
Nothing else tracks. It's like one of those weird magic hidden 3D pictures I can never get to work. I've heard of "switched at birth," but you may be a case of "switched after childhood."
Or something.
Really? See, I think I look like me. It's weird that other people think I look completely different.
What do you think of my dress? Isn't it awesome? My mom made that for me. My mom rocked.
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