I’m far from perfect, and injustice and suffering and tragedy in the world won’t be much affected by the story I’m about to narrate, but as I was walking in the mall with my son, I dictated a 500-word email response to a student whose paper topic didn’t work out and who asked for my feedback on a new topic — Nick as an unreliable narrator in The Great Gatsby.

The response I gave was not terribly original or insightful, but I did caution against presenting the paper as a yes/no question because in Chapter 2 Nick comes right out and tells us he got drunk and his memory of that night is spotty, and when the narrative actually includes “…” transitions, so of course he’s unreliable, but then again he does come right out and warn us that his memory is fuzzy, so in that way he’s actually reliable because he tells us when not to rely on him, but…

I edited my response very lightly as I finished my last lap and in the parking garage just before I got in the car I pushed “send.”

It’s a three-week intensive course, so if I waited until tomorrow to respond, that would have been like sitting on the email for a whole week during a full-term course. I had spent the day giving feedback on assignments the students had submitted at midnight yesterday, and this student was responding to feedback I had just given, asking for help on the assignment due at midnight tonight.

My response wasn’t terribly insightful or original, but it was timely and it will help the student. My main goal was to remind the student that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” meaning that whether the argument will work for the paper I’ve assigned depends entirely on how successfully the student engages with the arguments made by scholars who have already written about similar issues. I want my students to know that finding those scholarly articles would be far more valuable to their work than any random thoughts I might dictate into my phone or voice in a lecture.

I am of course just doing my job, but I was pleased that I could do this while power-walking at the mall.