Grading Western Civ Papers

There are some pretty good papers, and some not so good papers.  There is even one paper that I learned something from--the Euclid proved that there was an infinite number of prime numbers, and that Archimedes apparently was the first to determine the formulae for area and volume of cylinders and spheres.  (The student had not paraphrased these two particular sentences terribly clearly, so I had to do some digging to see what she meant--and I learned these facts as I researched what Euclid and Archimedes did in these areas.)

Also, I had an "Aha!" moment.  I was explaining on another paper that "things" is an awfully general word: "things were very different from city to city" does not tell us much, and a more descriptive noun might be appropriate.  It suddenly occurred to me that "things" in English is rather like the Class Object in Java--it is the base class of all objects and ideas.  Using "things" in English is rather like writing a method that accepts parameters of type Object, and hoping that no one asks you for any specifics!