It's tough getting back in gear for the regular term activities. Looking at the MY results, there's still a lot of work to be put in and everyone has to be involved in making the effort. Since the time we started in year 1, improvement has been steady but we've reached some kind of plateau at this point. If we can just push a little harder at this pain barrier, things should start becoming more pleasurable. OK, that sounds a bit vague.

What I mean, O virgins of writing, is that I believe everyone I teach is capable of writing because they enjoy writing. Else they won't have blogs and journals and stuff. The skills in blogging and in essaying are the same -- language, subject content, analysis, structure -- are the same because we are aware of our audience, and we write for them even as we unburden ourselves of whatever's inside us by writing about it. The only difference is that in essaying, the audience is slightly different and hence the product must adapt. Either form, the audience still hopes to be entertained and as a bonus, enlightened. It's this difference that seems to be causing the bottleneck of ideas flowing into the essays and I hope we learn to adapt to this difference quickly.

4 or so months to pass on my skill in bridging the gap between informal and formal writing, a skill I am particularly proud of and has served me very well since uni days (go check out the link in the sidebar for a glimpse at the campus). With the combination of abilities in discussion, research and essaying, I could afford to be the laziest student on campus, a major procrastinator of work ('rah, bow to my prowess... whenever you can get round to doing it), still have a good time doing whatever I wanted and still graduate with some decent credits. I may not be the best teacher (I know I'm not, seeing how lazy I am) but I have something you all will want, so come and get it. I'm not selfish about things like this.

When people see good results as a side-effect of the person they develop themselves to be, instead of the main target and focus of their lives, then education actually starts making sense.