Monday, November 13, 2023

Three conferences

13 November 2023: I had three very different paper conferences with three students today, each of them worth remembering. 

The first student has been ill, but is resilient. He asked for (and immediately got!) and extension for the paper that was due today. We read through the draft together and I was impressed by the depth of his engagement with the material (Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil"). His paper is personal in that who he is is shaping his approach, but also academic, and it's cool to see that kind of connection. 

The second student has really low self-confidence, but has come a long way. Her draft still needs a lot of work, but it was a delight to stop at times, point to a sentence, and say, "You see what you did here? How you couldn't do that a year ago?" as she nodded her head in agreement. 

The third is a student came in with a draft longer than she anticipated. Her suitemates, she explained, were all gone for a stretch of time this weekend, and she just started writing. "Isn't that exactly what we need sometimes--quiet and time and space to write?" I said to her, thinking about my own writing. Especially lovely about this student and this draft? How much fun she's having writing about this topic--a topic she really cares about (Peter in the New Testament). 

Just the best job, still... 

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