Becca! Man, I miss you so much. I got your message, and I was going to call you back, but this week is...ugh, crazy! I'll probably call you on Saturday. Wait, that's tomorrow. So I'll call you then.

I'm getting sick, but I'm doing everything I can to stave it off at least until I get home. I'm drinking lots of water, eating lots of vitamin C, and I'm about to take one of those multivitamins that resemble horse pills and make me shudder for the next ten minutes at the taste left in my mouth. It's bad enough to take them when you're healthy, but when you're sick and your sore throat feels everything going down it...it's bad.

And I'm so tired! Last night, I went to bed at 1, and this morning I woke up at 6 (it's 6:43 right now! Yay!). The last few days I've been doing the same thing. I wouldn't have been up so late last night, except as I was working on my paper, there was another girl writing a paper for a different class and she kept asking for my help. Then she kept reading her own paper out loud to me, even as I tried to write my own paper! I was glad to help her, but I was also really tired. I hate being such a grammar freak. I mean, I'm glad that grammatical ability comes naturally to me, but I get frustrated when someone says "read what I have of my paper so far and tell me what you think of it." I cannot look beyond grammar at ideas. My comments to them end up being "Well, you need a few commas, and you misspelled a lot of words, and you have some wordy sentences and some fragments. You didn't cite this source correctly."

I don't just leave it at that; obviously, if they want help, I'll help them with it. But I won't lie and say "it's great" either.

Last night was just...I don't know! She'd write a sentence and ask me what I thought. I'd help her to reword it and insert punctuation. She'd say, "now what do I do next?" I'd say something like, "do some more research" or "go to your next point" or "expand on what you just said" and she'd say "yeah, but I don't know how. Help me!" She asked me to help her think of arguments for her paper. I was very happy to help her, but it was a stupid English comp paper!

I've decided I hate paper guidelines that:

1) decide on a topic for you. Why would you write unless it was on a topic you wanted to write about? How can you just decide that the entire class is going to be "interested" in embryonic stem cell research and make everyone write a paper on the same thing?

2) give you a number of words or pages that you have to write. If a teacher does this, I might write an incomplete paper because of the guidline. Or, I might have to go through and add "fluff" in order to expand the paper to meet the guideline. Either way, I'm purposely limiting myself and knowingly turning in a paper that could have been better written. That kills me.

3) give you a format you have to use. I saw the handout with the format she was supposed to use. Here were the five sections of the paper: "Introduction. Argument 1. Argument 2. Argument 3. Conclusion." That's all very nice and organized, and it does appeal to me because I like things to be laid out like that. I might even write my own papers that way! But aren't papers hard enough to write without putting so many limitations on the student?

4) use all three of these methods. UGH!

I know the teacher she has for English Comp; it's my old Spanish teacher. Sigh.

3) employ both of these methods. It's bad enough that you tell the class what topic to write about