Anyone who has done any teaching lately will have discovered that students’ (even grad students’) highest encomium is that they “enjoyed” something: your class, this book, that discussion. If you’re lucky, this verb and its variations are a fixture on your course evaluations and your page on RMP. Sometimes they’ll even make your day by [...]
Archive for January, 2008
28 Jan
Sisterhood is powerful
The add/drop period has ended, and nominally, at least, class rolls have now stabilized at JPU. If I were a gambling woman, I would wager that I will receive my highest course evaluations in my intro-to-the-major class, not so much because I’m so great at teaching intro, but rather because its enrollment is only 37.5% [...]
26 Jan
If I keep doing this, I’ll go blind, right?
Another chilly Saturday night alone. My laundry is churning and spinning itself to unscented, “ultra-clean” glory. A pot of groundnut stew, as interpreted by Moosewood, simmers on the stove. Strewn about me on the couch are notes for next week’s classes and proofs for an essay in a non-refereed collection that won’t count for tenure.
However, [...]
22 Jan
To Whoever Recalled Mary Poovey’s Making a Social Body on Christmas Eve:
You make me sad.
(At JPU, our “library” gives us a week to return recalled books, including days when it isn’t even open, so this book—which I’ve heard is quite good, though I wouldn’t know since it was in my office over the break, and I’m not one of those people who check out books for [...]
20 Jan
My ill-fated, never-to-be alternate career
It’s been a gloriously sunny, chilly day in Funky City. Yet what have I done but spend it in bed, swaddled in flannel, down, and alpaca in shades of lemon and celadon (such a cheery, if unfashionable, color scheme for the dead of winter) while swilling a mug of gunpowder green tea that I’ve topped [...]
17 Jan
Welcome to the working week
Well, my first teaching week ended this afternoon, so I’m bidding not so much a welcome as a farewell. Both of my classes today were fun, at times exhilarating. They took their quizzes, wrote insightful reading responses, and said, “Thank you ma’am; may I have another?” Yes, I make them do both in the first [...]
15 Jan
Twelve more hours
. . . until the place I’ve entrusted to fix my cherished antique of an iBook opens for business. My cherished antique of an iBook is back. Almost. The Mac is back! And I’m not talking about the Michigan primary, which I don’t care about, so if I do go out to buy celebratory champagne [...]
9 Jan
Live from the syllabus factory
. . . I present some of my stunning realizations:
Each of my syllabi includes at least one work in which sodomy figures pretty prominently. It would be kind of cool to put them all in one handy course called “Reading as a Somdomite,” but I’m pretty certain it would never be approved. Even if it [...]
8 Jan
Only resolutions
Alas, my title may allude to Mark Z. Danielewski’s dazzlingly pretentious, yet (mildly) bibliographically interesting 2006 novel that I didn’t get around to—OK, didn’t bother—finishing in 2007. (To my dismay, I’ve acquired a habit of not finishing books that by their midpoints have failed to interest me.) I can almost guarantee that this post will [...]
