Sleepwalking -- that's what I've been doing today through both my classes. The morning class moved into the computer lab so that the students could finish their annotated bibliographies. So many of them still need a hand held through the entire exercise. Too many of them are unable to classify the type of site they have visited. In the worst cases, the student is unable to distinguish a personal web page from an institutional site; in others, the student might be unable to determine authorship (although this is sometimes tricky given the institutional authorship or lack of attribution so prevalent on professional web pages); in still other cases not otherwise classified, the students are unsure of how to arrange the data that they find -- questions like "should this be a period or a comma?" are the most disheartening, I think. Let's see...there's a book, there's a handout, there's the MLA website -- so what's the question?

Anyway, for about two hours I spent a life that was much like that of a chess master, competing on a dozen different boards and trying to make the right move every time. That's a really dreadful sentence, but I'll be damned if I'm going to try to repair it.

Two more weeks until Christmas break, and I am ready for the break, if not for Christmas.

Whoop-de-doo!