Remember that student who argued with me over the difference between “two paragraphs” and “three sentences?”

He turned his paper in, today.

As he handed it to me, he said “Here’s my three sentences. I made the margins real wide, and triple-spaced it, so it would look longer.”

Oh well HEY.

That’ll fool the old gal, all right. No problemo, dude.

Does it make me madder that he turned it in like that, or that he thinks I’d fall for it?

His paper looked like a piece of concrete poetry.

It was also full of spelling mistakes that even a spellchecker would have caught.

It annoyed me so much, I put it on the bottom of the stack.

In some ways, teaching students who are older than I am isn’t all that different. . . . .

But wouldn’t you think that someone who has been “working on a degree” since 1984 would know better than to do that?

You wouldn’t?

Neither do I.