One Day We Will Be Retired and These Students Will Be Running the World

The following is the last line in an essay written by a high school junior:

"It was, clear, that, in writing 'On the Laps of Gods,', author Robert Whittaker did his research, so to speak."

Read that over a few times. Let it sink in. Say it out loud. Say it to a friend.

It's author isn't one of my students (thank God), but I am still haunted by this sentence. Where to begin? Should we talk about the enthusiastic use of commas? What it means to close an essay by mentioning the author did his research? Or to end with "so to speak," as in "I just said he did his research but I am now casting doubt upon that fact, which means my astonishingly banal comment about what any author does by definition has just been undermined for some undetermined reason"?

So yes, this quote is from an American student. Yes, this is the state of affairs. And this is an honor's student, so ostensibly it gets worse from there.

But not all hope is lost. A few weeks ago I had my class read "Politics of the English Language" by Orwell, and we discussed the crimes regularly committed against good rhetoric. When I asked the students to be aware of the state of our discourse, Conor, one of my best students, brought this sentence (so to speak) to my attention.

Conor is to academics what a five tool-player is to baseball. For the those who don't know, a five-tool player is the rare baseballer who excels at hitting for average, hitting for power, speed on the base paths, throwing, and fielding. Conor is the once-every-10-years kind of student who works hard, is extraordinarily intelligent, creative, hilarious, and empathetic. If Conor is running the world when we're all retired, we'll be in much better shape than we are now.