Affirmation

As the semester ends, procrastinating students have been coming to me after school to ask for help on essays--college essays, final essays, writing tutorials, letters of recommendations, etc. I was feeling burnt out as students asked me to read their essays one more time.

Yesterday, while reading an essay, two students conversed about the difficulty of writing. They kept saying that my class was challenging and tiresome because I made them write too much. In a strange complementary way, they said that taking my class was like a "slap in the face" because they didn't learn much about writing essays in their previous English classes. My class was a "harsh reality," and that my Nazi-English teacher reputation was almost accurate--the fact that I'm not a Nazi makes the moniker partially true.

And here I thought I was losing my edge.