Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Grading Hawthorne essays...

28 October 2025: I have spent a lot of today grading papers about The Scarlet Letter. This is, to be clear, a very fun way to spend your day--if your students are as good as mine. 

They are wrestling with tough topics, ambiguous symbols, and everything that makes the book so good. They are also having fun with language. (More than a few of them are relishing using "ignominy," after they commented on how much Hawthorne loves that word.) 

And then there's just this phrase from one student's paper, which I noted should be the title of someone's memoir: "extreme expressions of mundane desires." 

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