Doronicum

Thank you for all your comments and helpful suggestions re access to Garrison Keillor. All much appreciated.

I'm currently going down for the third time under a tide of marking so don’t have time to follow up any of these suggestions (but I will). Nor do I have time to read any of your fine blogs or to blog myself. I’m not really blogging even now, despite appearances. I’m just off to mark essays any second now.

I’ve been looking out for some little infelicities in these essays, with which to amuse you before I return to my toil. Unfortunately, after a year of my brilliant teaching (ahem) my students are currently not producing anything very terrible. However, I did find a couple of rather sweet things that I jotted down from my last year’s marking of national exams (which are about to impinge again, alas). I didn’t blog them at the time since the students hadn’t had their marks back and I imagine that the exam board would disapprove extremely. However, after a year I feel the extreme secrecy of the marking process must be a bit diluted.

One of the expressions I noted was just for the spelling: one candidate wrote that a character was suffering from “worrie and panick”, which I felt was splendidly Shakespearian.

The other was from a close reading passage – sort of practical criticism – when candidates were asked to pick out a metaphor from the text and comment on its effectiveness. There were various obvious possibilities, but one candidate ignored all these. For some perverse reason of her own, she picked out “human offspring” and said that she imagined lots of little frogs bouncing about.

Yes, yes, I’m going. See me springing off.