wall, brick, head-beating, for the use of, one
Monday, 5 November 2007 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtSo, I finally kill the Honours dissertations this afternoon, and am just congratulating myself on not having hunted down and killed any of the actual students, when my e-mail goes "Beep" in that cheery way it has, and there's a mail from an Honours student who has dropped off the planet for eight months1, causing me to believe she'd swopped supervisors without telling me. Contrariwise! Yes, her cheery mail says, yes, she has not spoken to me all year, yes, her dissertation has not been submitted and is now ten days late, but! Here it is! Attached, as a Word doc.
I don't mark computer versions. The Honours board meeting is tomorrow. What the hell is she thinking?
While in the Department Of Head-Bashing, I need to rant for a moment on quite the most prevalent and recurrent error made by errant students in their errant essays. Titles. How difficult is this? If it's a short piece of work, an article or story or poem, the title goes in inverted commas. If it's a book-length work, i.e. a book or journal (or film), the title goes in italics or is underlined. This is, to me, childishly simple. These are intelligent kids. Some of them even write something not entirely unrelated to English. Why, then, do I get an average of six or eight incredible variations on incorrect versions of this rule in the same essay? From Honours students? Some of whom I have taught in undergrad more than once, and who have thus been subjected to my Famous Correct Title Formatting Rant at least twice during the course of any one seminar?
Civilisation is doomed.
On the other hand, today's Worthless Word For The Day was "Thagomizer", which is a term used to refer to the spikes on the end of a stegosaurus's tail. The word was coined by Larson, and subsequently adopted more or less jocularly by actual palaeontologists. The Wikipedia article also points you to "Horrendous Space Kablooie." It all, for some reason, makes me very happy.
Last Night I Dreamed: A strange conglomeration of our old house and my gran's house, in which arguing with the gardener about planting cacti and making him really odd lunch in the bookcase segued into stalking some hapless and rather testy celebrity through a mall and into a hairdresser's.
I don't mark computer versions. The Honours board meeting is tomorrow. What the hell is she thinking?
While in the Department Of Head-Bashing, I need to rant for a moment on quite the most prevalent and recurrent error made by errant students in their errant essays. Titles. How difficult is this? If it's a short piece of work, an article or story or poem, the title goes in inverted commas. If it's a book-length work, i.e. a book or journal (or film), the title goes in italics or is underlined. This is, to me, childishly simple. These are intelligent kids. Some of them even write something not entirely unrelated to English. Why, then, do I get an average of six or eight incredible variations on incorrect versions of this rule in the same essay? From Honours students? Some of whom I have taught in undergrad more than once, and who have thus been subjected to my Famous Correct Title Formatting Rant at least twice during the course of any one seminar?
Civilisation is doomed.
On the other hand, today's Worthless Word For The Day was "Thagomizer", which is a term used to refer to the spikes on the end of a stegosaurus's tail. The word was coined by Larson, and subsequently adopted more or less jocularly by actual palaeontologists. The Wikipedia article also points you to "Horrendous Space Kablooie." It all, for some reason, makes me very happy.
Last Night I Dreamed: A strange conglomeration of our old house and my gran's house, in which arguing with the gardener about planting cacti and making him really odd lunch in the bookcase segued into stalking some hapless and rather testy celebrity through a mall and into a hairdresser's.
1 She is a Pratchett fan, but it's no excuse.
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Date: Tuesday, 6 November 2007 02:02 pm (UTC)Fortunately for the student, the Honours board were all "Meh, shrug" about late dissertations, so she gets away with it. Sigh.
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Date: Wednesday, 7 November 2007 09:01 am (UTC)& if people don't learn that when those in authority say something they mean it by the time they're at College - when will they?