The first batch of essays is always an experience. Would one of you please tell me what kind of experience I’m having? This is one of the papers, and the others are similar in structure. It’s supposed to be a comparison/contrast paper.

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Two Diffident Jobs

____ and _______ both deal with people but in very diffident way. ____ deal with intertainment and _____ with health care taking of the elderly. _____ make television, VCR, stereo and many more things with plugs. Dealing mostly television, they range from 19 inches up to 80 inches, the bigger not sticking out as much. There the Television were put together then sent through a testesing process. When something found wrong than set to repair person to fix the set by vamping the bad part. When check out okay then sent to a touch person to touch for bad places on set. If bad places touch fine then sent to be packed tightly in a big box and shipped to diffident store to be sold.

_____ deal with the care a mostly the elderly people called residents. These residents need a lot of care. Families cannot take care of residents at home for diffident reasons. Resident at this time in their lives need a lot of help that they are able to do for their self. Bathing, dressing, some need to be fed and watered, played with. They are nurses to give medicinals or what every need to be done.

_____ and ______ wages are both very good, but health, dentist, vision and also paid for our vacation up to five week. Retirement played for also. They match are four-one K by two percent. ______ we have to pay for all of our insurance but our life. They also match four-one K by one percentage. Vacation we are given so many hours a week.

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I honestly do not know what to do with this essay. I don’t even know where to start. I’m not sure there is enough red ink in the world.

More importantly, I don’t think red ink is what this sweet lady needs on her paper. It’s the first piece of writing she’s done since her high school days some forty years ago, and she was SO PROUD when she turned it in. . . quadruple-spaced, and with a font you could read from across the room. She needs, and deserves, encouragement and helpful suggestions, and could someone please tell me how to do it?

It’s a college course, people. Remedial College Prep, but still, it’s a college course. I have to uphold standards, and when the students go to the next level, they’ll be expected to know how to put a paper together. (unlike the public schools, where the students are passed from level to level whether they can prove themselves worthy or not. . . .)

I simply will not wipe that smile off her face with red ink and horrified remarks, but sacre MERDE, what can I do with this thing?

I guess the first thing would be to address the spacing and the font. That would be safe and somewhat neutral.

But what would the next step be? If this lady, and her classmates, were fresh out of high school I would know better how to deal with this kind of writing, but how can I deal with this lady, and all these other students, who are in their forties, fifties, and sixties, who haven’t written anything since their sophomore year, right before they dropped out and went to work? Making references to basic grammar and spelling wouldn’t work here, because it’s been so long since they’re studied grammar, writing things such as “adverbial misuse” or “comma splice” just wouldn’t make any sense to her.

Rewriting her paper for her wouldn’t help her, either.

Advice needed.

Please?

Update: she’s posted. Now I can tell you who she is. Please click. . . .HERE. I hope you all take a moment to tell her she’s a hero.

I am feeling very humbled and grateful and happy and relieved and sad today. Not because of a missed luncheon date, or a furnace, but because of something infinitely more important.

I feel this way because I have a friend who is a hero, an actual, real-life hero. I have a friend who did an incredibly brave thing, at no small personal risk. I have a friend who refused to look the other way, and who stepped in, and interfered, and got called names for it, and stayed anyway. I have a friend who did the right thing. I have a friend who saved a little piece of the world last night.

Many of you know my friend. I won’t put a link here until she blogs about it herself, but once she does, I will link to it and you will ALL know what a fantastic, courageous, unselfish person she is.

I am so proud. I have a friend who is a hero.

I was on my way to my regular Thursday after-class luncheon date with Mom and Cousin C when my cell rang. Message: I had to go home immediately and let the furnace guy into the house.

This is how cold my house has been these past two days: I’d been looking forward to this date for a week, but for Randy of Randy’s Heating and Cooling, I dropped Mom off at the K-Mart Chinese (it’s got a cool name but I don’t remember what it is) and drove home. An hour later, the furnace is humming away, and it sounds so wonderful, I don’t even care that it doesn’t know the words.

It’s actually humming to the tune of almost three hundred dollars, but it’s better than the price of a whole new furnace. The furnace guy had taken the motor and fan home with him and fixed them himself, because apparently, my furnace is a dinosaur and no longer exists.

How odd. My parents’ old house had a furnace that was made of cast iron, and was over fifty years old, and it still worked perfectly, and if it did have a problem, parts could be gotten at any hardware store for it. My furnace is 17 years old, and has broken down several times, although none as completely as this, and now it’s a dinosaur with no parts to be had for it.

Thank you, Randy’s Heating and Cooling, for coming within the hour of being called, and for taking the time and trouble to pretty much invent and carve the part for me at your home, and for coming in today and installing the home-made part, which, so far at least, is working beautifully.

Built-in, pre-planned, selective obsolescence sucks.

I really wanted to meet Mom and C at the K-Mart Chinese today. Don’t confuse this restaurant with the Shoney’s Chinese, or the WalMart Chinese. We used to have a Hardee’s Chinese, but it’s now a Merle Norman shop. (I refuse to go there because I loved the Hardee’s Chinese the best.) Sometimes, I meet a friend for lunch at the Big Lots Chinese. All of these restaurants have lovely Asian names but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you which was which. I have my own system, and while people tend to give me funny looks when we talk about Chinese restaurants in this town, they all know exactly which one I mean, whereas when they talk about meeting at the Asian Pearl, I might very well end up at Big Lots.

Also, Barney not only is NOT a dinosaur, he sucks, too. In real life, he’d be devouring those little children, not singing stupid songs to them and prancing around like the hippo ballerinas in “Fantasia.”

I used to forbid my middle school students to say “sucks” and now look at me. It’s become kind of like “screwed:” the connotative meaning has evolved and the shock value is gone.

Too bad. We need words with shock value in order to properly describe shocking things.