Toilet Seat Cover: Take a Pause, then look back and reconsider your life

Teachey McTeacher just submitted her first set of Mid-Semester Grades! I have a green, old-fashioned-looking gradebook. Some people use the Excel, but NOT ME. I prefer to pen everything until I have to post it on the web.

My class is actually doing fairly well, particularly given the fact that I kind of suck at the teaching. Actually, I'm not that bad, but I'm thinking of torturing them with more in-class participation-ey crapola. This week, though, it's all review. These little ducklings will do well on their mid-term if I have anything to say about it!

I'm surprised at how much help people need constructing short essays, though. They have to write play reviews. You wouldn't think that would be too difficult... when I was a girl, you learned how to bullshit a halfway decent four-page paper, daggum! People now seem to just write lots of very enthusiastic-sounding but totally disconnected sentences. So we're going to work on structure. I'm stealing an idea from my research methodologies professor (I LOVE her class, she's just the greatest), and we're going to start having Grammar Moments at the top of every breakout session. This week I will cover the fact that titles of plays are to be italicized, not put in "quotation marks!" I'm sure it will be riveting.