Woad Rage.

I think I may have chosen the wrong profession. Why, you ask?

Because students make me want to beat them, viciously, over the head with something large and heavy. And this is not just the occasional, "had-a-bad-day" occurrence. I tutor composition three days a week, and the feeling is pretty much constant.

Take today, for example. I had a student bring in a history paper about the Woads in ancient Britain. This student's primary source was not her history textbook, nor the book of primary sources. Oh, no. She had rented "King Arthur" with Clive Owen, and had written as her "history paper" a summary of the movie. She had also, consistently, spelled it "Whods." How that even vaguely resembles the sound of "woad" I don't know. Maybe she'd also just seen "Horton Hears a Who" and gotten confused. I certainly was. I really was at a loss to help her.

And the thing that bothers me the most is that this is not the only student I have who is completely clueless. One instructor here apparently believes I'm there to teach her students for her, and sends them en masse to me for instruction. Frankly, I don't know why they pay her. I saw fourteen of her students today in two and a half hours. Of these fourteen freshmen, a grand total of two hadn't plagiarized or written a summary of something rather than a discussion. Two thirds of them ignored The Article entirely; one asked, "What's a article?" and I felt like screaming at her, "It's that word you just misused, you illiterate wretch!" Miraculously, I didn't. Another had blatantly plagiarized, which I could tell because her opening paragraph included the words "anthropomorphize" and "bombastic." I barely use that kind of language in my papers.

My great fear is that the vast majority of students are like this, and I have let myself in for a lifetime of frustration over the fact that these people don't care about grammar, punctuation, or the five-paragraph structure. I'm all about creative breaking of the rules, but shouldn't you know them first? How do you teach someone who doesn't care if she gets caught ripping her entire paper off the first page of Google search results?

The Ph.D. students I know say you become accustomed to it, and stop caring, but I'm not sure that's any better. In fact, it might be worse. I love the Oxford comma, the semi-colon, the thesis statement, and the day their abuse becomes something acceptable to me will be the day something precious dies. That's scary.