Dave is having their students write about their families. Their first assignment was to write about their parents. This makes it hard for them to plagiarize from the internet. Their writing is very course and rough, but sometimes they are quite poetic. In one girl’s paper about her parents, she said: “We often say that fathers are like mountains, and mothers are like rivers. A father’s love is silent, but has great strength. A mother’s love is as soft as water in a river.” He’s finding that correcting a hundred writing assignments is a great, and time-consuming task. Another girl (named See-Saw) wrote about the struggles her parents had in raising three children during tough economic conditions. Having overcome most of their difficult conditions, she now says, “Our family is very happy now, my parents are like most ordinary parents. They love each other, and love their children.”
In my MBA class, I had used “No success can compensate for failure in the home,” as the “Quote of the Day.” We were talking about the word, compensate, and I asked Jessie, a rather large, and slightly unattractive girl, to use it in a sentence. She said, “He can give me many gifts, but it will not compensate for the pain in my heart.” I was so impressed with her understanding of the word. And it made me wonder if she just pulled the sentence out of the air, or if it had personal meaning. She is one of my better students.
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