This was another
uneventful yet
productive couple of days. I helped Yoon
grade a fat pile of
finals and drank way too much
coffee. I am wondering what the hell qualifies as too much
coffee as I write this. I think it is actually
espresso that bothers my
stomach even when I drink it in the relatively
diluted Americano stylee. Maybe it's just the quad
shot formula I use for ordering drinks. Maybe I just need to
grow up.
The results of the finals were not good. If I was a hysterical reactionary I would bemoan the extinction of the English language. Luckily I'm more on the paranoid optimist side of the fence. The new language will be a mixture of slang, mixed tenses, run on sentences, and phonetic adaptations of scribbling. The sheer volume of grammatical mistakes commonly found in any of my writing should invalidate this conclusion.
The teacher evaluations were actually far more interesting. The most common complaint was Yoon's lack of strict discipline in the classroom. It seemed like an odd criticism but might be more telling of what students expect than I initially thought. The truly hilarious comments were directed at the requirement of studying English. The butchered grammar and spelling of one writer made me wonder if he was temporarily insane when he wrote: "I do't need to take English. I already was speaking English. We learned all of this things in six grade." I put my head in my hands and swore to never again give Yoon a hard time when she comes home from school in a bad mood. In her position I would break like cheap dishes in less than a week.
After reading a funny article about the AutoSummarize feature of Microsoft Word I decided to experiment on some of my own writing. Wow. I am an abstract surrealist genius. Check out this opus:
I remember thinking that his limp body reminded me of dead birds that I'd seen and having a weird vision of a group of children poke out his eyes like the dead bird. Eventually spring happened and the mud thawed out. I probably learned a lot about human nature that night. Later in the spring some poor bastard was decapitated by a piece of aluminum trailer skirting whipped up by the wind a few doors down. I think that my dad's short conversion to Mormonism started around this time.
Jesus, one menu selection changes a narrative of growing up in a trailer park into white trash gothic horror. In the future I think I'm just going to type and let Word do all the creative thinking. AutoSummarize makes all those computer generated poetry generators look pretty tame.