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Pay attention not only to the cultivation of knowledge but to the cultivation of qualities of the heart, so that at the end of education, not only will you be knowledgeable, but also you will be a warm-hearted and compassionate person.


~ HH the 14th Dalai Lama

5/13/2008

My eyes, they are strained

I've been going through my students' online discussion posts this semester, looking at the statistics, and I think I'm about ready to collapse.

So far this semester, I've written 276 discussion posts. Many of them are short replies to questions or comments on other posts, but several have been lengthy essays. But that's not the part that hurts my brain.

I have also read 1,218 posts this semester.

Of those, a full 999 were formal response essays, and while the average of all my classes was well below the required 600 words per essay, the posts did average around 400 words a pop, which is roughly a single typed page, double-spaced. That means, had I been reading these on paper, as if my students had turned them in during class, I'd have read almost 1,000 pages this semester.

And that's only counting response essays. It doesn't count the slew of questions, workshop group discussions, and pop-culture commentary my students also posted. It also doesn't count their formal research papers.

If I count only the papers I received and read, and I assume an average of 3 pages per short paper and 8 pages per long paper (which is about what the averages were), I also read 1,124 pages of research.

And then there were my students' research portfolios, full of abstracts and outlines and bibliographies and notes.

And their e-mails, sometimes as many as a dozen a day.

On top of all that, I also judged our campus Creative Writing contest, which added another 400 pages or so of reading, and I've been working with a student creative writing group (though I admit, I don't always find time to read all their work), which has added another few dozen pages.

With all this, somehow I've managed to also stay on top of my New Yorkers, half my Shambhala Suns, and a few of my issues of One Story; squeeze in three books this semester; and regularly read several blogs and news articles, as well as every word of every issue of our student newspaper.

No wonder I've finally had to start wearing reading glasses once in a while.

5/04/2008

Typos

I ought to put this on a stamp and keep it on my desk, so I can just slap it on a paper whenever I find cause:

"Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing."
~ Randy K. Milholland, Something Positive Comic, 7-3-05

(This, courtesy of my dad. Was he trying to tell me something?)