Gia Zynda Is Happy

Being a Teacher is HARD

kelliente:

For the final week of the semester, the professors here in the English Department engage in a mad dash to get final exams and final papers graded so they can report student grades by the deadline— which is sometimes only a day after a course’s scheduled final exam.

During this paper grading marathon, the teachers often email back and forth on the faculty list-serv, sharing some of their favorite typos, nonsensical arguments, and grammatical flubs from student papers in an effort to keep each other sane while wading through a morass of poorly-worded, mispelled mishigas.

In an essay this term, a student attempting to explain why the ‘Grecians’ did not ‘get’ Lysistrata informed me that “Sarcasm did not exist in Ancient Greece.”

My favorite piece of writing in this semester comes from an essay on Antigone: “After reading Antigone, one might feel that there is a lacking of communication between the two lovers, Antigone and Haemon, throughout the play….The absence of communication between the two lovers alone adds significantly to the atmosphere and does inject the play with a strong sense of romantic love.

“I am going to compare today’s world with all this new technology with the Mina Nights who don’t even use electricity.”

My favorite typo so far this semester: “She will be put out of her missouri.”

I always tell my students that since the beginning of time, teachers everywhere have been supremely annoyed by essays that use the phrase “since the beginning of time.”