I will only say this about the grading of things: it takes time.
But you get a lot of pleasant surprises in final papers. Some of them are of the “Nice job!” variety. Others are a pleasure derived from seeing a student’s hard work, or how far they’ve come. Others are purely unintentional.
For example, somewhere early in the school year we made a joke about the word plethora in a news story. It was funny, we had a good laugh and one of the editors of the Crimson tried to sneak it into copy whenever he could, as a way to amuse us.
I ran across that word in a final paper today and now I no longer think of it as simply a Three Amigos bit:
Now it is a teaching moment. The word, not the scene from the movie.
This could be used in a classroom. Ken Burns’ enthusiasm is still contagious:
And, finally, this. This was on television late tonight. I wish it wasn’t. I watched an hour, mortified, before I could finally stop:
I saw Pauly Shore years ago. (Don’t judge me. I took a date who I knew loved his gimmick.) He does a decent standup routine. His father opened for him. Dad killed.
