Praying for a Christmas Miracle

Booked my flight home for Christmas two months ago - US Airways from Newark to Philly to Chicago. When I found the flight, after comparing costs and airlines endlessly, I looked up the direct flight from Philly to Chicago, figuring it'd be easier to cut out that first leg. But it was considerably more expensive, so I went for the connection. Should have paid the extra...

Yesterday, my first flight was delayed by 45 minutes. But the new departure time came and went with no plane or explanation. By the time we took off (2 hours late) chances of making my connection looked slim. I RAN when I got off that plane, but by the time I took the shuttle bus to the right terminal and ran to the farthest gate, my flight to Chicago was long gone. I actually landed one minute AFTER my next flight was scheduled to take off.

After standing in a customer service line for over an hour, they rebooked me for Wednesday night, 2 days after my original reservation. Everything out here is sold out, even after searching multiple airports and airlines. And now there is snow and ice expected in Chicago tomorrow afternoon, making my new flight look not-so-promising.

Going to the airport early tomorrow to stand by on every possible earlier flight, even though most of them are seriously overbooked according to the airline. There is one that the woman said looks possible.

Praying for a Christmas miracle... all I want is to get home in time for our family Christmas Eve celebration...

No More Research?

Why don't students know how to cite research anymore? I would estimate that 75% of my students each semester do not know how to put together a bibliography or provide proper in-text citations. I don't just mean that they make small errors, but that they don't even produce anything close!

I get lists of sources at the end in no order whatsoever. I get students who include the entire entry right after the quote and don't put any bibliography at the end at all. Students use Google and Yahoo for research and have no concept of what a scholarly source is.

I expect a certain amount of mistakes, but don't they teach you to alphabetize your list of sources? Don't students at least know to include the author, title, publisher, and date? I know other professors (in history, psych, etc) don't teach research. That's my job as the composition instructor. But freshman comp is about strengthening skills of grammar, essay structure, and thesis statements. Most composition courses include research, but don't focus on it wholly. And why not? I feel like freshman comp should spend about half the semester on research, citations, bibliographies, etc. How else will the students be prepared when other professors expect they know how to do this?

What really blows my mind is that my students who seems to be struggling are not in freshman comp - they're all in the second level of English composition! So I wonder not only what high schools are teaching these kids, but what did their freshman comp professors teach them? And maybe part of the problem is the curriculum, not the teachers or professors themselves.

This is a very scatterbrained dumping of frustration. I just had to pause in my afternoon of essay grading to express a little confusion and frustration over the mistakes I seem to correcting on paper after paper after paper...