First time for everything

This morning a student brought his banjo to class and played some mountain music to enrich the class's understanding of Cold Mountain, and I feared that my face would break from smiling. The notes lingered in the air through our discussion of Stobrod's redemption, his discovery that his music could bring healing and meat to suffering people.

Another student showed me some notes a previous reader had scribbled at the end of one of the chapters: a rectangle with half-erased scribbles, the words "vellum" and "palimpsest" and some arrows pointing to traces of lost text. That very same diagram appeared on the whiteboard today in reference to our reading, and the student finally understood what some previous student had scribbled in his book. Did he add to the scribbles? If so, he may be creating his own palimpsest.

Another kind of text showing traces of previous texts appeared in my inbox in another class, where a student submitted a paper consisting of three short paragraphs that didn't respond to the prompt followed by three pages of Google Doc templates showing how to format graphs and charts, including a Works Cited in which the citations began "Last name, first name." Oh, and the title of the paper was, and I quote, "Title: Subtitle." I've never before received a template masquerading as a paper, but at least it will be easy to grade.

I suppose there's a first time for everything, but some firsts are significantly more satisfying than others.