Detachable feet?

And a detachable brain.

Term resumes. I wish it could’ve waited another week while I recover from a fairly noxious dose of the flu which has me coughing, aching, and wilting, but has – small mercy – not inflicted copious streams of green snot squirting out of my nose. Mind you, there’s been digestive squirting as the virus attacked other parts of me. I spent almost all of Sunday in bed and disinclined to eat, and went to the doctor yesterday, who prescribed some penicillin.

I’m mostly feeling better, but it hurts to cough and my voice makes me sound like I’ve been trying to eat ground-up concrete.

Anyway, I’m not just here to talk about my health, but also about the student whose response to the topic “What three things would you take with you to a desert island?” included “my feet”. The little darling in question does a good rabbit-in-the-headlights impression in class. She got a good C overall in the end-of-term exam, but that’s like an E in real terms (where native speakers are As and A*s).

Oh dear, it just got worse. I’m now looking at the compositions of another student and find that my dim bulb copied her answers from one of her more capable classmates. Now make that a second dim bulb copying. Add a third. Should I stoke up the hot coals? I ought to because we do have some official policy about plagiarism.

“Describe Gulliver’s arrival in Lilliput from the Lilliputians’ perspective,” it says. How does one student respond? She talks about a dove. I can’t see the connection myself.

“Recommend the book of the excerpt to your library,” it says. One student simply copies a chunk from the introductory biography, but I only find that out after a Google search. Doh!

I should be frightfully cross that most of the compositions from the holiday homework haven’t been done, but I don’t care; and most of those students who’ve bothered to do the compositions don’t seem to have reached the word count yet.