A student wrote about an author who provides "a perfect Segway" into a new topic, and suddenly I found myself imagining Henry James zipping around Rye on a two-wheeled personal transport device, if James could be said to do anything zippily. Would he hop curbs and go airborne? I'd pay money to see that. Someday when someone finally has the foresight to open up a Henry James theme park, we'll all zip around on Segways along paths as complex as James's labyrinthine sentences, paths that keep promising to lead to a satisfactory destination--Gilbert Osmond's Passive-Aggressive Gift Shop, say, or Fanny Assingham's Mad Teacups--but somehow fail to finally arrive.
How long before Segway overtakes segue as an alternate spelling? Maybe the student never saw the word segue in print or saw it without knowing its pronunciation. Another student wrote that he had never seen the word countenance before, which made me sad. How can anyone be expected to understand Theodore Roethke's great poem "My Papa's Waltz" without understanding the meaning of countenance in the line "My mother's countenance / could not unfrown itself"? (And where is the not-unfrowny-face emoji?)
My countenance fell when I saw that another student had formatted the date incorrectly in the heading of his paper, using one of those little nd, rd, or st dealies that make MLA tsk. Surely I marked that on his draft, I told myself, but then I checked the draft to be sure, and no, I did not mark the error on the draft because it wasn't there. That's right: he formatted the date correctly on the draft but then changed it to make it wrong on the final paper. Why?
And before you ask why I get all picky about formatting the date correctly in the heading, here's my thinking: if it's wrong in the draft, I mark it and insert a comment; if it's still wrong in the revised essay, that immediately lets me know that the student either hasn't read my comments on the draft or doesn't care. Either way, helpful to know.
But then here's a student who didn't need to change the format of the date but did it anyway and thus introduced error into his paper. Who told him to change the format? I didn't do it, and he didn't see it on the sample papers I provided. Is someone giving bad advice during peer review? If so, how shall I address the problem?
That's too much for my tired brain right now. I need to grade the rest of these papers, but first I need to find a way to smoothly shift from one topic to another. Where's that Segway when I need it?
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