Shout outs to profgrrl and bridgett

I just stole two comments from other internet denziens in class.

Profgrrl used a cooking metaphor to describe good writing: you don't just throw ingredients in because you have them around, they have to go with the meal. In my case, I had to pry a student away from a discussion that was important to him, but not relevant to his paper. "You may like garlic a whole awful lot," I said, "but would you use it in an ice cream sunday?"

(Sadly, although I recognize this as good writing advice, I still don't really follow it in my cooking. Whenever I cook, I put in every kind of food I like. And I fry it. As a result, I really only make one dish: things in the fridge stir fry. It's not that bad really.)

Bridgett, in the comments on my complaints about economics, quoted DeNiro in the movie Ronin "The map is not the terrain." Today I told my scientific methods class that this is one of the lessons they should take away from the course.