A tangled end-of-term rant.

There will be no paragraph divides in this post, because I feel like torturing you the way first year essays sometimes torture me. Not that I blame the students 100%, not even close. Right now, in a single class I've got several students that are writing pretty medium to well papers. They exist on a range of "pretty okay argument that you maybe should have thought about a bit longer so your ideas would be better organized" to "this is an excellent thesis, great work!" Their writing ranges from "I can understand what you are trying to say, and this excites me!" to "once you develop stylistically your writing will probably be pleasurable to read." It's great. Why, you ask, have I grouped this wide range of students together (I forgot to mention that I am only including a small portion of the class). Because they are all consistently telling me about "the kings hat" and how "three king's went to buy a hat." Do you see the problem? They all know that there is a rule here, and they are all messing it up consistently. This wouldn't be so bad, if the rule were not to end a sentence with a preposition. This rule sometimes makes writing more terrible. Yes. It can make writing terrible-r (my ipad actually won't let me do this without the dash). Example (courtesy of a lovely friend and lovelier conversation yesterday): "That is something up with which I will not put." Yeah. Because so many students are going to read something as convoluted as that and think "that's way easier and clearer than writing "that is something I will not put up with," thanks grammar handbook!" How will these students tell the difference between "students work" and "student's work?" Most important to this particular rant, how did a whole group of students coming into university at the same time learn this mistake so well? I am suspicious that they may have all had the same high school teacher, and this makes me sad. In other news, I am reaching the end of my term as well, and am hammering through seminars, papers, and research that I should not have put off so much earlier in the term. Lesson learned! I am also sliding into procrastination mode, but it is a very new kind of procrastination for me. Rather than cleaning the house instead of doing work, I have been rewarding myself for doing work by giving myself breaks with which to clean the house. Is this an effect of grad school, or simply a sign that I am getting old?