It all balances out...hopefully

Today was a great teaching day. Lots of participation, lots of interest in the topic, lots of energy. That's good because the papers I graded over the weekend made me cranky. I think they hit every one of my pet peeves:

1. Turning in an early draft for feedback, and then not changing any of the things that I pointed out in your final draft. Thanks for wasting my time.
2. Misuse of the word bias. After I gave them all a copy of New Kid's open letter on the topic and we went over it extensively in class.
3. Lack of evidence. That's nice that you think that, but why do you think that?
4. Lack of research, which lead the to the inability to make two and two add up to four. They had the first two, but they couldn't find the other two, which made their papers add up to around 3.2.

Oh well, extensive commenting and discussion of their papers in class will hopefully result in a better second set of papers.