"..them seemed to make no sense..."

I am finishing my various class grades for Fall semester. The grades are due by tomorrow at 10. I had about 300 students enrolled in 6 different classes to finish grades for. Some of those classes were entirely mine, others were in classes that I taught half of, or a third of. Nonetheless, there were a lot of items to grade, and numbers to enter. I am not a very good bureaucrat. I long for the days when professors had secretaries, or the systems in which professors do little grading.

One of the classes I teach is a modular “Explorations in the Sciences” class that is required for non-majors. The class has no pre-requisite, is taken mainly by freshmen, and we are an open admission University. One quarter of the student’s five week module grade is based on a written report. I have slogged through about 60 of the 70 I need to evaluate. This is the one I am stuck on at the moment:

“The Experiment was all about cats. There color and their types. There was a wide variety of colors that involved the cats. Some of the colors were black, blue, white, lilac, cream, and red. My Group, liking the colors black and blue, chose them to analyze. At first these colors did not make much sense. There was so much data to take in it was hard. There was a lot of different factors them seemed to make no sense at all. The whites and the color lilac were really throwing me off. Them seemed to pop up all over the place.”

This is not an English class. There are no prerequisites.

This is not an English class. There are no prerequisites.

This is not an English class. There are no prerequisites.