emotional depth

Slept in two hours this morning, lovely. It stopped raining as the weather report said it would.

Dreamed I was having a conference with a student who had turned in a horrible paper. Whole sections were just copied from the internet, and he didn't even bother to fix the font. I was trying to explain to him why this wasn't okay. I said he could rewrite it and I would average the grade he got (an F) with the new grade. But I hate letting kids rewrite things, when really if you're going to allow it, you should allow it for the whole class, and that would be so much extra grading. Reason number 42323 I'm no longer a teacher.

It's very quiet today. The kids must be back to school while the construction crew's still on holiday.

Toast was overall the best memoir I've read perhaps ever, but the last 20 pages were just not of the same quality as the rest of it, and I wish they'd been cut. However, this is not the first time I've said such a thing, and I'm thinking lots of people have this problem of where to end a story. I think he in particular wanted to show his start as a chef, some kind of career continuity thing, which wasn't necessary, because it's a book about childhood, and once his dad was no longer in the picture, the emotional depth was lost.