Thursday, December 01, 2011

When it finally clicks

The final weeks of the semester hold many horrors--too many drafts to read, too many students panicking over projects, too many urgent meetings and special events--but it also offers the occasional magic moment when I look at a student's draft or project or paper and realize he they got it--he finally got it.

Yesterday before class a student came up to me and said, "Thanks for talking to me about my paper the other day. It helped." (I looked at his draft. He was right.) At the end of class, after peer review, he brought me his draft and asked where the period goes in relation to a parenthetical citation, and after I showed him, he said, "I've been doing that wrong all semester." He has--and I've marked the error on every draft so it's high time to start doing it right--but something finally clicked.

In this situation it would be tempting to say, "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: the citation is part of the sentence!" Satisfying, but not productive. So I bite my tongue and rejoice in the fact that he's got it--he's finally got it.

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