Whee! I just had an Excellent Teaching Moment! Portfolios are due tomorrow; I just had a visit from a student who had appeared visibly shaken in class yesterday, and who was clearly over-the-top nervous about her work. This is a person about whom I've thought, all semester, that her thinking and her writing just didn't match up. Her thoughts were far more sophisticated than the jumble I kept seeing in her papers. There was a connection missing somewhere . . .

Well, apparently she went home last night and found it. She came in today with papers that had rhetorical oomph from beginning to end; her well-turned phrases were turned into well-phrased paragraphs, all of which actually supported her well-considered main idea. The difference was stunning. I was so happy, I told her that reading those papers made my day.

And it did. Made me remember why I'm here . . .

Sometimes, life works out!

:)