Where do they get their English?

How can a native speaker of English come up with a sentence like: "Christianity was next to always preached in French"?

There is so much weirdness there that I don't even know where to begin.

(Yes, I'm still marking essays.)

I feel like the world's meanest teacher

I think I kind of screwed up. I didn't do anything technically wrong, but maybe I should have considered the consequences a bit more carefully.

I had my students hand in an assignment one week before the end of the teaching period. I pulled out all the stops to get it marked in time to return it on the last day of class, so that the students can use the feedback in revising for the final exam. Except... I also have a policy that I don't accept late work after it has been discussed in class—even if said student was not IN class that day—because they might have heard the solutions from someone else, or seen them on WebCT in some cases. Bear in mind that these are problem sets we are talking about, not essays. There are right and wrong answers. This no-late-work-after-discussion-in-class policy is clearly stated on the syllabus and on WebCT. It is also a policy that is generally shared by most courses in my department.

I warned students in class the week before last that I would be returning the assignments this week, although I forgot to explicitly remind them this mean they couldn't hand them in after Monday.

Approximately a third of the class was more than one week late in handing in the assignment. I didn't realise how prevalent the problem was until I had already returned the first class's sets, and already told some students that no, I would not accept any more late work. Now my inbox is full of 20 or so begging emails explaining that they are so incredibly sorry, they had no idea they couldn't be late, since when does a lecturer return stuff with a week's turnaround anyway? and now they aren't going to graduate and it's all! my! fault! Except that it's all! their! fault! and they won't do it again, promise, just please please bend the rules this one time or my mother is going to kill me.

I really really don't think I can change my policy now, because some of the students affected dropped the course, and if I bend the rules for others then they dropped for no good reason and would have every reason to be pissed off with me and maybe lay a complaint. As it stands, I don't think anyone has grounds to officially complain, but I am possibly going to have the highest fail rate of any course in my department, and a lot of miserable students.

I have offered alternative assessment to anyone who, after the final, sits on a mark between 40 and 50% and was affected by the late assignment problem. This isn't much different from official university policy anyway, which requires me to offer make-up work to students sitting on a mark between 45 and 50%. But I don't know how many of them will take me up on it. Mostly I think they'll just sulk and fail.

And it's all! my! fault!

I thought we were past this stage

A student today brought a note from her mother to excuse her from the homework because she was too busy babysitting.

Children of the digital age

In an essay on why written and spoken English have become so different from each other throughout the past 1000 years, one of my students wrote:

Written English can be amended over time, deleting superfluous sentences, compacting complex concepts, and inserting new ideas, eventuating in a full and complete final document.

I guess she has never known a world without word processors!

(She also, weirdly, gave URLs for all her sources, even those that are published books and papers. I guess she was concerned that I might not be able to find them if I don't know to look online.)

Some questions (and OOPS)

Is it really unprofessional for a student to catch you in your office playing Facebook Scrabble?

What if you had told them earlier that they would need to see you later in the week because you were really busy today?

And what do you do when they then challenge you to a game?

I see through your cunning ploy

Question number 12 in the assignment my students are currently writing (with the terminology changed so that my students won't find this in their googling):

12. Explain in your own words what is meant by the term 'subjunctive'.

Email I got from a student yesterday:

"Hi! I'm having some trouble with the assignment. Hope you can help. Specifically, I don't get question 12. I think the problem is that there is some terminology there that I don't understand. Can you explain to me what the term subjunctive means?"

Did you hear me go, "ARGH!" from there?

From student essay read today, "Throughout Australia's history, the primary language of this country has been English."

The propaganda is working.

Not that I'm really complaining about the prospect of freedom

Why is it that I finally start to get the hang of juggling teaching with everything else, classes start going really well and being fun to teach, and the students finally warm up to my teaching style (and I to their learning styles)... just when the semester is about to end?

Why, oh why, do students not print out JSTOR readings when they are required for class discussion? I would rather they not read the journal article, but print it out and bring it with them. Then at least we can refer to it during our discussion. I have to totally rearrange my discussion to avoid questions like: What does Smith argue on p. 142? I like to be textually grounded, and its nearly impossible to do that when no one has the readings.