From the annals of sophomore social science

I'm not teaching at the moment, but CM seems a bit slow, so I went through some of my old emails from and to students looking for something fun. I particularly liked the email below (lightly edited), written to students who had turned in their preliminary source list for a project:

Dear Halfway Clueless Group.

I just looked over your sources. The ones by Onyx, Diamond, and Ruby look good, but I have some concerns about the others. The article by Rhinestone is not about your project topic. Also, rather than using Acrylic's article about a scientist's research, it would better to read the research yourself. If you do a simple search in the database we discussed in class, you should be able to find the original article. My final concern is about the post from the New Age woo site. The "law of attraction" is not a scientific law and is not related your project topic. I highly recommend not using it in your presentation or paper.

Yours,
Arrogant

I hope that this exercise was in the end somewhat helpful in teaching the students about identifying scholarly resources, but, even if it wasn't, it certainly saved me from some awful presentations.