Some of my students are so determined not to say anything that it far overpowers my will, directed at them, to open their hands, find their voice, and let us know something of their true selves. I feel like the grumpy old guy with a sharp nose and sharp intolerance for leftovers...when, to them, if it's been used before, and it works, it surely must be acceptable again? Anything to duck, so to speak.

I actually have been building up a vent against all kinds of activity that can best be described as lazy, but lazy doesn't always describe it fairly in the end. Sometimes they have to go pretty far afield to find someone else's notes, someone else's ideas on the same subjects, that they can then transfer over to what I've been doing and try to make it look like two-terms-ago's work is actually fresh. It's easy for me, who actually likes making hypotheses, writing, coming up with new ideas, to sneer at that as leftovers, and I sure don't want to read the same ones twice. But something more is going on here, because they've worked so hard to keep and organize, on that end, and then on this end to regenerate, to transplant, to try to claim as their own...

The week is over; I'm tired, and I feel like these various piles of rehashed-whatever have me as tired as I used to feel shoveling out old barns with still-active horses in them. At some point I should just let go of it, I'm sure. But I'm more mad about the total lack of originality, the utter falseness of it....it's an elaborate game to make me believe they actually wrote something...and as I write the word elaborate, I remind myself again that it took a lot of work, on their part. It was in fact much harder for them to copy, and actually get away with it, than it would have, for them to simply write it...