This weekend I’m grading exams. Far, far too many exams. It’s a difficult enough exercise to begin with, especially because I’d much rather be working on my latest novel (I’m 24,000 words in). But then I get unintelligible handwriting, inability to follow simple directions, atrocious mangling of the English language, and flagrant disregard for reality. For example, I have learned this weekend that Christopher Columbus founded the United States, that the Nazis tried to kill all the Jews in Germy, that a person might be concerned about the possibility that events will sparrow out of control, and that there exists something (I’m not sure what it is) called a futurity.