“But Ed, nothing’s perfect in life.” Matthew’s response when I was fretting that we’d glued one leg shorter than the other three on a wooden wolf we’d added to our growing pack. Matthew’s ten; we’re reading buddies at the Boys and Girls Club. We meet for an hour each Thursday and spend about 40 minutes reading and 20 minutes doing something else. A couple of months ago he discovered that I do small wood projects and asked about our making “a bunch of animals, like wolves and bears and deer.” So we negotiated that into our reading incentive contract, and we’re now up to four wolves, one bear and one deer all of which I bring in parts ready to sand, glue, and paint. Along the way Matthew’s reading is improving, our menagerie is growing, we know each other better, and his world view continues to impress as wise beyond his years. I know it sounds like a cliché when it comes to mentoring, but I often leave our times together wondering which one of us gets more out of it. Nothing’s perfect, but our Thursday’s are pretty good.

Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break EdX, a nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will release automated software that uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers. By JOHN MARKOFF, Published: April 4, 2013, NYT OK, so some of my fondest memories of my early career are reading and responding to high school student’s essays. As a young English teacher in rural Vermont I was idealistic, eager to truly know the students, and optimistic that I could help develop solid thinkers, thoughtful debaters, and passionate poets all through writing and our conversations about it. Maybe that’s why I cringed at this new software application and its claims. Granted, my efforts at reflection, compassion, and constructive even friendly feedback would often take me as many as two days to provide a class of twenty-two 17 year olds, so the software is much faster. But still; it’s called humanities for a reason, right? More than a few of those young writers from the ‘70’s remain locked in my memory of what it meant for me to “teach,” and it was about connecting with lives, understanding their dreams and challenges, being part of showing them how language matters, how writing is thinking twice, and how the ways we communicate change lives, our own and others. Can software do that?