One of the "kids" at work (an older twenty-something) asked me a couple of weeks ago if I would proofread his homework and papers for his college English Literature class he's taking this semester. I was only happy to help out. I'm always looking for a chance to help someone in school as a way of repaying the favors from friends that helped me during the years of my work for my Bachelor's and two Masters Degrees.
The first two assignments weren't too bad. But today when he emailed me a five page paper, I honestly had tears in my eyes when I read it. Picture a Word document where you have grammar and spell check enabled -- meaning, all grammar and spelling errors would have the dreaded red squiggly line underneath the words. This paper was pretty much full of the red squiggly lines. Like I said, I was ready to cry.
My first instinct was to just rewrite the paper for the kid and email it to him. But I had a change of heart; he's never going to learn how to write a paper if Puddin keeps on enabling him and rewriting it for him. So I did the next best thing - I made the changes in the paper, but I made the changes in bold font red type so he will clearly see what he had wrong. That's the only way he's going to learn. I hope he doesn't get pissed at me for doing that but it's a valuable lesson he needs to learn.
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