The real reason I'm messing around with hard drives ...

[robinturner]

... is that I'm putting off correcting 28 definitions of "filial piety" which I collected about two weeks ago. While practice in writing definitions is useful for my students, correcting them is no fun. I did like the one that imaginatively spelt "filial", "philial". Presumably he was assuming it came from Greek "philia" rather than Latin "filius/filia". Definitely one of my brighter students - if this were a graded assignment, I'd give him an 'A' for such a creative error.

I also have 15 essays on Confucianism to correct, but they look more interesting at first glance. I actually enjoy reading students' work; it's correcting the grammar that takes it out of me.

Comments

[solri.livejournal.com]

Managed to finish the correction last night. Kept myself amused by grading the papers in Chinese. We've got this system now whereby we can't give definite grades for portfolio work until we do standardisation near the end of the semester, but I still want to give students an idea of the quality of their work, so I just write things like "hao" (good) "hen hao" (very good), "hao hao" (OK), "cha" (weak) and "cha cha" (popular Latin dance). Interesting linguistic point: in Chinese, repeating an adjective or verb weakens it; e.g., "kan" - "look"; "kankan" - "have a look / glance".

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

And in many pidgins and creoles, repeating a noun often makes it plural. Oooh!

I gotta go eat now. And then work some more on my wonderful essay. Will my work on the mind-body problem never end?