Tuesday Hatred of anti-hoodism

My week didn’t suck but my day sure does. Still, I am not an average youth who by the mere fact of wearing standard youth clothing is classified as a hooded criminal. The fear of the strange has always extended to the young. It’s no coincidence that this particular xenophobia coincides with classical racism. Nevertheless, the mere term ‘hooded criminal’ is so strikingly at odds with the near impossibility of buying a non-hooded sweater that it is clear that the dark force is particularly strong in the grey-haired.

It would seem that the older the average age becomes the more a majority of people is convinced that, given their desire to live endlessly, there is no place for anybody below their own age.

I am taken back to the almost forgotten episode of the London riots (I’m sure Cameron, David conversed in a thoroughly educated fashion with Murdoch, Rupert or associates  to convince the latter that the former would ensure the status quo if one would endeavor to forget said episode at least until such time as the Olympics would have successfully concluded). Oh, shock and horror, these young criminals were hooded! Oh, terror and surprise, the hooded young are criminals! One would almost be nostalgic for the times where their hair was long and stood upright as if their noses were just pierced.

I hate forgotten episodes. Not because we forgot them but because many of them didn’t deserve to have become episodes in the first place. There is something entirely despicable about getting all excited about events before applying a one year grace period.

Documentation Style

Sometimes when grading papers, I marvel that students seem to lack knowledge of the basic mechanics of citation — for instance, that parenthetical references do not belong within the quotation marks, or that no documentation style calls for things such as “Inc.” or copyright dates (labeled as such). Problems with punctuation are also troublesome, such as some students’ apparent belief that literally every quotation, even one that comes mid-sentence and is thoroughly integrated into the sentence grammatically, must be introduced by a comma (as in “Kant argues that there is a, ‘transcendental unity of apperception’….”). To me, these types of things are second nature, and my first impulse is that they should be second nature to anyone with a college degree.

Then I reflect that not everyone spent three years in college as a TA in the English department with the primary duty of correcting documentation style and punctuation, as I in fact did. Through that process, I thoroughly internalized all the rules and witnessed every possible deviation from them. What’s more, I was actually paid to attain such fine-tuned knowledge. So perhaps I’m being too demanding when I want all students to be at a similar level.