A stop-gap entry

If I'm not being especially garrulous this month, it's because I'm running short on energy for human communication. Not only a large pile of term papers to grade, but also two new cases of plagiarism amongst them. The situation is now resolved with these students, but the need to meet and make the accusation, and work through the reasons for it, and find a viable solution, and agree upon it, and give advice for the future, and be at once authoritative and understanding takes more out of me every time than I can spare. It is also something that happens in my classes with alarming regularity. Which is not to say that people plagiarize more in my classes than in other courses, presumably, but that an alarming number of faculty members here and elsewhere must be either missing it entirely or choosing not to pursue it. And in the internet age it is SO easy to locate their sources, unless they've actually paid money to have a paper sent to them.

So today I went skiing, and spent a lot of time in the trees just for the pleasure of there being no-one but me around - a kind of walk in the woods but with planks tied to my feet. The therapeutic effect was somewhat counteracted, though, by the family sitting around me on the train on the way home - people whose brains seemed to have shrivelled to the size and consistency of dried peas which rattled loudly in their skulls all the way back. I might sound like I'm being intolerant because I'm tired and crabby - but I think if you'd heard them you'd feel the same...