felis_ultharus

Spent half my workday trying to unearth the attendance for a course where a teacher had made pretty much every mistake it is possible to make. It was more like forensics than administration.

I won't bore you with the specifics, except to say that part of the task involved reconstructing the hours during a pay period from secondary sources, to see if a particular page had ever actually existed or not.

The experience probably rendered me very slightly hysterical, because when I finally sat down to write the report card, and saw the teacher's notes, I couldn't stop laughing for five minutes.

See, under "Course Content," we usually get a list of grammatical structures studied or activities done. More verbose teachers will list every single verb tense, while the terser ones just mention things like "simple past and present, all forms."

This teacher felt only two items were relevant for a 70-hour, 6-unit course:

1. "discussed the difficulties of getting used to a new pet."
   
2. "talked about the relative merits of nigh owls and early birds."

"Nigh owls," by the way, was her mistake, not mine. Yes, it was a spelling mistake on an English report card.

And I know what she meant, of course, but I couldn't help but wonder what a "nigh owl" would be. All I could think of was "Repent sinners, for the owl is nigh!"