School:
There comes a time, every term, when I have this sense of waiting anxiously for the final papers to arrive while simultaneously dreading the many P’s I have to assign for plagiarized papers, the many redundancies I read, and the pure loss of focus that is common in most papers. However, almost every term, there are a few papers that make the time spent on the other 30-40 papers worth my while. This year was no exception. Some students still surprise me by their ability to interrogate theoretical articles and work them within the folds of their literary analyses. So gratitude goes here to those few students who have made the long task of correcting papers quite enjoyable. The highlights this year were those papers on J.K. Rowling, Paulo Coelho, and Tsitsi Dangarembga.
Mysteries:
“All doubts about the identity of the Mona Lisa have been eliminated by a discovery by Dr. Armin Schlechter.” And once its mystery has been solved, its greatness is no wonder lessened. Why is it that we always need to find answers to problems only to discover that answering them takes all the magic out of life? Mysteries should remain mysteries. Otherwise, life would just be too dull.
And more mysteries:
Newspapers announced that Saturday exams are postponed till Tuesday. Since faculty members haven’t received any official word, I called to inquire, only to be informed that the director is in a meeting with the deans now (11 am today) to decide on it. We must be really technologically advanced when the newspaper, printed the night before, can predict the outcome of a meeting that was still ongoing during the day :)
